I have a view that we never really had a true mining boom – we have a mining infrastructure boom which is a very different thing. This infrastructure boom was predicated on a small upswing in demand from China – it was not based upon an explosion in commodities prices which would have been symptomatic…
I caught a news snippet the other day that said that Rovio the makers of Angry Birds, the game that has kept teenagers and executives alike amused whilst sitting on the toilet had struck a little bit of a hiccup and I remembered that in 2011 they were offered $2.25 billion for the company. This…
Alibaba is a company that may dwarf everything that has come before it when it eventually lists. Click the image below to be taken to the podcast.
This short doco is part of an ongoing series that on the strength of the first episode appears to be well worth subscribing to. My favourite bit – Typical of the reports produced on this subject is this one by the Pensions Institute, based at Cass Business School in London. Researchers examined…
My wife does yoga, which if you met her family you would realise that is not the only form of mental illness her family. Some of the people she does yoga with are prone to what I would call demented magical thinking. You know the type, we never went to the moon, the contrails planes generate at…
Apparently, the world ends for stockmarkets in September a fact that will no doubt be picked up and repeated by our local finance news peanuts without giving any thought to what they are copying. So I thought I would fire up the old dodgy spreadsheet and see if there were any seasonal differences between the…
He highlighted an experiment he carried out some time ago at his university where half of the students were given a chit saying they were entitled to a pencil and half did not. The two groups could trade as buyers and sellers. While traditional economic theory said the market should clear with half the pencils…
I know I bang on about this constantly but WTF? The majority of hedge fund managers polled by Preqin saw their assets increase in H1 2014, thanks in part to allocations from high-net-worth individuals, as industry assets hit $2.9 trillion. A full 64% of the 100 hedge fund managers polled by the hedge fund…
Even though the Ferrari 250 GTO, recently auctioned by Bonhams during the week of the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance, didn’t reach the sums speculated but instead sold for ‘only’ 38 million dollars, the growth trend in the classic car market has certainly not lost momentum. On the contrary, more and more people are interested in…
Brookings Fellow Richard Reeves explores inequality and opportunity in America with Legos, using them to explain the chances for economic success of Americans born at the bottom of the economic ladder. Reeves shows the chances that the poorest fifth of Americans have to rise to the top, based on their race, the marital status of…
I was going though some old bits and pieces and came across some quotes I had collected from the Market Wizards books. “[Michael Marcus – another top trader] taught me one other thing that is absolutely critical: You have to be willing to make mistakes regularly; there is nothing wrong with it. Michael taught me…
