VIX

I haven’t looked at the VIX in a little while. Below is a chart of the VIX with the Dow overlaid in red so you can see the relationship between extremes of fear and the market wetting itself. The only comment I can make about this is that “fear” seems still to be historically high.

Details

Why Do This?

In the past I have written about prediction and the fact that we are absolutely crap at predicting the future. Despite this and despite the ease with which people are held to account for their predictions we still get this sort of stuff. This graphic tracks the predictions about the price of oil made by…

Details

HFT

In recent years, advances in telecommunications, computing capacity and financial software platform capabilities have seen huge growth in the field of High Frequency and Algorithmic Trading (now accounting for over 70% of all equity trades placed on US exchanges and in excess of 77% in the UK).  HFT firms (which can often make more than 80…

Details

Soc Gen

On Monday, January 21, 2008, concerns about deteriorating economic conditions in the United States caused a precipitous fall in the Asian markets. Investors in Hong Kong and Tokyo besieged brokerage firms. Markets in the United States happened to be closed, for the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday, but U.S. stock-futures trading in foreign markets showed…

Details