From my WTF file….. A warning to the bulls, however: Don’t make the mistake of thinking that the absence of bubble-like conditions means that a bear market couldn’t begin. That mistake would be the functional equivalent of the one made by sloppy-thinking commentators who ascribe “bubble” to anything they think might decline. It’s entirely possible for a…
I was also reading a review of this bus in one of my car mags. In the review they have a small cut away box that lists the vital statistics of the car and the data box ends with a Pro’s and Con’s section and one of the drawbacks they listed was that it was…
Why is everyone surprised? When even Cargill Inc., the world’s largest grain trader, decides to liquidate its own hedge fund, that’s a sign that commodity speculators are in trouble. Hedge funds focused on raw materials lost money on average in the first half, the Newedge Commodity Trading Index shows. Diminishing investor demand spurred Cargill’s Black…
I very rarely write anything of a political or social nature simply because it is not really relevant to what the people who read this blog are interested in and to be honest I find such topics to be fairly lifeless and dry. However, one thing has been troubling me and it relates to perspective.…
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” ― Plato I have just retuned from the AIA Conference on the Gold Coast. Speaking as such events is always interesting since the audience represents a departure from the normal crowd I…
I am currently ensconced on the Gold Coast and I am just about to head off and talk to the folks at the AIA. However, I find myself fitting right in with the tourist lifestyle. As proof of this I have photographed my breakfast, which does seem to be the default activity for people here.…
If you have ever watched Game of thrones you will be familiar with the Mountain
From the you think trading is hard file…… Seventy years ago this week, on July 30, 1945, the heavy cruiser U.S.S.Indianapolis was sunk by two torpedoes fired by a Japanese submarine in the south Pacific. So began a five-day ordeal of thirst, hypothermia, salt-water poisoning, hallucination, drowning, and dismemberment in shark-infested waters. Out of a crew…
Next week I will be away at the AIA Conference on the Gold Coast – the bogan and inappropriate tattoo capital of Australia, so communication may be a bit spotty. I will be doing my best to offend people, something I seem to have a knack for.
A recent email exchange with someone who manages money professionally has lead to me to repost this piece I wrote some time ago. During the exchange I couldn’t convince them that not losing money was more important than trying to make it. It has always intrigued me how hard it is to get this point across to…
Science journalist Anil Ananthaswamy thinks a lot about “self” — not necessarily himself, but the role the brain plays in our notions of self and existence. In his new book, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Ananthaswamy examines the ways people think of themselves and how those perceptions can be distorted by brain conditions, such as…
Apparently, the long winded title above is from a study that says that when text and walk you have a tendency to bang into thing – no shit Sherlock. It should also mention that you give the rest of us the shits when you bang into us.
Investors trading stocks with assistance of financial advisers are more diversified and overcome some common pitfalls, a new working paper from European researchers found. But they are worse off overall than investors who trade independently, because their stock purchases underperform, the study says. The findings suggest advisers “do not help investors make superior stock purchases,”…
With all the chatter about ETF’s I thought I would generate a dodgy collection of ETF’s and then look at their current market capitalisation. When I started the exercise I was interested to see where the liquidity risk might lie within the spectrum of the ETF’s I was looking at. When looking at an instrument…
