When reviewing the investment performance of any vehicle the picture you paint will depend upon the starting and finishing dates you select. This is an old trick of everyone from fund managers to financial planners to make something look really good. It is also sometimes used by journalists to make a rather tenuous point. This…
More from Todays Age – The cynic in me really wants to suggest that the price retail investors will pay is that they may run into a broker who is able to pass an ethics test. Accreditation is a function of every industry but the financial sector has fought it at every step. In part,…
From today’s Age. Brokers are apparently whinging about having to do a compliance (read competency) test to stay in the industry. Find me an industry that doesn’t require some form of test of competency to be in it. Some of the nation’s most prominent stockbroking firms are railing against a mandatory ethics test that has…
On the 22nd of August 1985 British AirTours flight, 28M was sitting on the runway at Manchester Airport. Loaded with British budget holiday makers who were no doubt looking forward to their holiday in Corfu wherein the tradition of English tourists they would get legless most nights, complain a Greek Island didn’t have food like…
On September 7th, 1968, Led Zeppelin played their first live show ever in, of all places, a converted gym in Gladsaxe, Denmark. They weren’t yet billed under their soon-to-be world-famous name but were instead performing under the guise of the New Yardbirds, a relaunch of the British Invasion blues rockers who’d imploded just months before. The only…
One of the mistakes that new traders make is they hold the belief that the market will give them a salary much the same as any other employer would. When in fact the reality is very different – returns from markets are very lumpy and in part, I think it is this staccato nature of…
This piece dropped into my Twitter feed courtesy of Steven Goldsmith who runs the AlphaMind podcast. You don’t need to be on Twitter to read the thread just hit the link and it should open. What interested me about this thread were the comments as they display the dichotomy that exists within Twitter and by…
The S&P 500 index soared 38% in 1995. This sharp increase, following four years of steady gains, made some of the smartest investors on Wall Street begin to grow wary of a bubble in the making. Over the past few months, we studied what today’s most famous investors were saying during the years leading up…
I have been following the action in GameStop this week with great interest because mania is a fascinating thing and watches a hedge fund who thought they were onto a sure thing getting their nuts squeezed is hilarious as is the bleating of Wall Street traditionalists to make the nasty young people stop. If you…
