There has been much talk on the Googlebox about us being saved by a Christmas rally and I thought what an ideal topic for a chart. So I went and had a look at the average December gain for a variety of markets over the past 20 years and the results are below. As you…
A year ago I received an invitation from the head of Counselling Services at a major university to join faculty and administrators for discussions about how to deal with the decline in resilience among students. At the first meeting, we learned that emergency calls to Counseling had more than doubled over the past five years. Students are increasingly…
Reviewing a handful of studies on the subject, Harvard Health contends that “gratitude helps people feel more positive emotions, relish good experiences, improve their health, deal with adversity, and build strong relationships.” So it’s no wonder expressing gratitude is the first social habit most of us acquire. We’re taught to say thank you around the…
A brilliant American financier and his exotic wife build a lavish mansion in the jungles of Costa Rica, set up a wildlife preserve, and appear to slowly, steadily lose their minds. A spiral of handguns, angry locals, armed guards, uncut diamonds, abduction plots, and a bedroom blazing with 550 Tiffany lamps ends with a body…
I have lost count of the number of conversations I have had with aspiring traders over the past 30 odd years. These conversations tend to have a few common themes, they are undoubtedly aspirational, often exciting and sometimes lacking in reality. It is this lack of reality that is the saddest part for me because…
For a man who has built a $US30 billion hedge fund empire on the prowess of artificial intelligence, David Harding is as human as you can get. The 55-year-old founder of London-based Winton Capital Management’s personal fortune of $US1.5 billion is irrefutable proof that systematic trading can work, and works spectacularly well. But that does not make him…
When newbies first come to trading they have often have in the back of their mind that trading will save them from whatever fate life may have in store for them or that it will somehow compensate for past failures. Unfortunately, the traits that make people successful are universal. People who are successful in one…
The Land Rover Defender is boxy, beastly and beloved. Early next year, it’ll be history. For seven decades, the Defender off-road vehicle has barely changed from a design so simple it was originally sketched in beach sand. Slabs of aluminum. A windshield with virtually no tilt. A roof rack made to hold steamer trunks or lion…
I thought in light of the events in Paris that it would be instructive to see how markets behave after such event. I have grabbed four what I would consider headline terror events and marked them on the relevant index. The situation with the September 11 attacks is that they took place during the collapse…
