The Incredible True Story of the Real Life ‘Trading Places
Click the image below to be taken to the recording.
S&P/ASX 200 Volume
I was looking at the chart below of the ASX 200 and its volume. As you can see below the chart whilst looking reasonably standard has two points of interest for me. Firstly, the trace of volume by coincidence looks like a nice little bell curve, with the peak occurring as we initially bounced out…
The Misguided Beliefs of Financial Advisors
Below is the abstract from this paper – The Misguided Beliefs of Financial Advisors A common view of retail finance is that conflicts of interest contribute to the high cost of advice. Using detailed data on financial advisors and their clients, however, we show that most advisors invest their personal portfolios just like they advise…
The 100 Most Overpaid US CEOs
This piece by the Harvard Law Review is wonderfully comprehensive and can be downloaded from here. There is a summary posting here if you want the Readers Digest version. However, I would suggest downloading the entire thing. This charts stands out as highlighting the miserable performance of the most overpaid CEO’s . Once you read the…
British queuing and ‘the power of six’
According to academics if you want to truly master the art of the queue, you need to follow the rules. It’s all about the power of six, professors say. People will wait for six minutes in a queue before giving up and are unlikely to join a line of more than six people, researchers at…
They say runners need flexibility, but you may be surprised at the latest thinking
For years, runners have believed that their sport makes them too tight and that they should turn to yoga to lengthen their muscles, become more flexible and thereby develop into better runners. It turns out, though, that the opposite may be true: Coaches and physical therapists now say that bending like Gumby may, in fact,…
Another Great Australian Tradition
In Australia we have a number of traditions. The long weekend, a sausage sizzle at Bunnings and the latest – the whinging billionaire. The leaders of this pack of privileged complainers has to be Gerry Harvey who in the past two weeks has suggested that his stock in the grip of an evil an unidentified…
Nothing To See Here
With a free afternoon I decided to look at the individual performance of stocks that make up the ASX 200 since the beginning of the year. What I did was assume that you invested $1.00 into each on the first trading day of the year and then see what their current valuation was. The table…
You’re a completely different person at 14 and 77….No Shit Sherlock
Look at a photo of yourself as a teenager and, mistaken fashion choices aside, it’s likely you see traces of the same person with the same personality quirks as you are today. But whether or not you truly are the same person over a lifetime—and what that notion of personhood even means—is the subject of…
Mining Industry
I have been thinking about this table I put up the other day. It merely confirms my view that the mining industry is an historical economic distortion that is vastly overrated in its importance. Employing less that 2% of the Australian workforce (see below) and only contributing about 6% of GDP yet receiving about $10B…
