I snipped the graphic below from Bespoke the folks who produce countless and mostly points charts on the market. It compares the percentage change in the S&P500 to date with the first six months of 2014. The chart above attempts to draw a comparison between the initial portion of this year and the same period last…
I am a history buff – the thing that fascinates me about history is that you can see the same patterns of behaviour repeated on a macro and micro scale over and over again. As an example I ran into a past member of our mentor program sometime ago at the opera and we had…
He never made real investments with funds, instead using the money for personal use, authorities said. To keep his companies going, he issued false earnings statements. “By pretending to be a successful hedge-fund manager, Malik conned investors into bankrolling his lavish lifestyle,” Andrew M. Calamari, director of the SEC’s New York Regional Office, said at…
As someone who comes from a data driven background one of the things that has always intrigued me about financial markets is that despite being a wellspring of raw data it is driven by narratives. Humans do seem to prefer stories over data – in effect we are a hairless ape that prefers stories to…
After a thirty-year study of time diaries, two sociologists found that Americans were actually working fewer hours than we did in the 1960s, but we feel as if we’re working more. We have the sense, too often, of running at top speed and never being able to catch up. […] We’ve lost our Sundays, our…
Forex Magnates have done an excellent job collating the losses incurred by various firms during the recent upheaval in the CHF
There is an excellent piece by Fairfax media doing the rounds this weekend that looks at the problems Macquarie Bank seems to have complying with the law and the difficulties its financial planning division has in acting honestly. The thrust of the story is that Macquarie has been the subject of an enforceable undertaking due to…
I came across this article and the end part which I have copied below caught me eye. Australian regulations under fire In the wake of the global financial crisis, the United States put a handbrake on the retail foreign exchange industry, limiting it to a maximum leverage ratio of 50:1. However, in Australia, foreign currency…
Tim Harford takes a look at one of my favourite topics – the perils of prediction and why experts suck at it.
All market participants have little myths that they cling to and it doesn’t matter whether your investing is based upon the narrative fallacies generated by fundamental investing/news or whether you take a more technical approach. All humans are subject to inaccuracies in thinking – making mental mistakes is universal. One that has always intrigued me…
The Large Hadron Collider is the largest machine ever built with a circumference of 27 kilometres and when operating at full power particles whiz around the circumference 11,000 times per second.
The athletes identified 12 key attributes as key to mental toughness in sport, ranked in order of importance: Unshakeable self-belief in your ability to achieve competition goals(“Mental toughness is about your self belief and not being shaken from your path. . . . It is producing the goods and having the self belief in your…
