Assumption is the mother of all fuck ups…. The recent fall out from the movement in the CHF has been interesting to watch. If ever you wanted to clear out the retail FX space I dont think anyone could have come up with a better plan than the actions of the SNB, it was a…
I like… fat… tails and I cannot lie You vol sellers can’t deny When a hot trend breaks with a well-timed stop and a great big black swan pop you get Paid… P&L year gets made ‘Cause you noticed that trade was packed Buncha mean reversion suckers got jacked Oh baby I wanna get lumpy…
Many ordinary investors who trade currencies are a bit like casino gamblers: they may think they’ll win, but the odds are they won’t. Aite Group LLC, a Boston-based consulting firm, surveyed retail foreign-exchange traders in 2011 and found only 11 percent expected to lose money. Forty-one percent expected to earn monthly returns of more than…
I snipped the graphic below from this article in The Wall Street Journal. The article makes the point that there seems to be a correlation between account size and profitability . It’s the smallest and the newest investors that are most likely to lose money. The firms with the highest percentage of profitable accounts, Interactive…
Apparently BP produce a yearly very data heavy review of the state of world energy. For those who want to wade through it I have produced it below and the original can be downloaded from here. The review contains the chart below which looks at the historical price of crude and drops in some…
Slideshare has been killing the quality of the files uploaded to it so until I find a better alternative I have gone back to a tried and true method.
With the repercussions of the wild swing in the CHF still to be felt there has been some attempt to quantify the losses being faced by various FX providers. The table below was generated by FOREX MAGNATES
The guy had played us every step of the way. First, there was his “poor” performance at guessing—hey, we concluded, this guy puts on his pants one leg at a time. Then he complimented my son with “Hmm, you’re hard to read.” Next, The Magician gave a plausible explanation for my son’s success: “The experience…
Its intriguing that they call trend followers robots – it is certainly robotic in execution but doesnt need a robot to execute. That’s a key lesson from 2014, when computer algorithm-led investing produced stellar returns, beating most gut-driven human managers and dramatically recovering most of their losses from 2011, 2012 and 2013. So-called managed futures…
This piece is about how to raise children to be more resilient in the face of both natural talent and adversity. However, the following caught my eye as being universal. People can learn to be helpless, too, but not everyone reacts to setbacks this way. I wondered: Why do some students give up when they…
For those who do not know who Werner Herzog is GIYF 1. Always take the initiative.2. There is nothing wrong with spending a night in jail if it means getting the shot you need.3. Send out all your dogs and one might return with prey.4. Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private…
I awoke this morning to catch the following market move being played out. These numbers were accompanied by the usual hand wringing and they did cause me to drop a long options position of mine since I was getting too close to the nasty part of the time decay curve. However, an options position is…
