How Voltaire Made A Fortune Rigging The Lottery
One Le Pelletier-Desforts, Deputy Finance Minister for France, had a “brilliant” idea as to how to raise the value of existing bonds, encourage the sale of new bonds, and earn some money for the government- a trifecta. His idea was to allow bond owners to buy a lottery ticket linked to the value of their…
The Periodic Table Of Commodity Returns
You can spend hours on this site. More here – Visual Capitalist
The Things You Think Of
Whilst having one of my regular floats this morning I was pondering the surprise of people that prices after an extended run have a period of contraction, to me this has always been the natural order of things. I understand that various aspects of optimism and recency bias afflict people but it still intrigues me that…
Playing the Boys Game: Golf Buddies and Board Diversity
Piss poor reason for selecting people to serve on boards. Not entirely surprising when you consider the closed ecology of board memberships domestically Golf buddies aer_may_2016 2 from Trading Game Pty Ltd
Shipping Rates So Low That Renting a Ferrari Costs More
Odd thing of the day. More here – Bloomberg
S&P Index At Inflection Point – WTF Does That Mean
The chart below is from JP Morgans Guide To The Market and it says that the S&P500 is at an inflection point – this obviously means something to someone but I for the life of me cannot work out what. The current upswing as defined by the trend line that has been drawn could have been…
The League of Extraordinary Assholes
WHO AMONG US has not felt the affront? Macadamia nuts arrive in a bag, not on a dish, and something shrivels in the soul. Are we animals? Did we execute the challenging task of being born insanely wealthy only to eat in-flight snacks from a bag? We did not. And that is why, when Korean…
Champion Cyclist Who Never Grows Old
It’s two days after Ned Overend’s 60th birthday, his back hurts, and he’s staring into the weeds at Suicide Six—billed as one of the oldest ski areas in the East—puzzling out how to avoid a broken hip. He pushes his gray carbon cyclocross bike up a 30-degree slope, noting ruts, loose dirt, a toad, and…
Well At Least He Was Honest
But I’m not primarily interested in the main story. Instead, I’m struck by a line of testimony offered at trial by then-Bear CEO Jimmy Cayne that does not even show up in subsequent court opinions, despite extensive recitals of the facts of the case. The generally “cocksure” Cayne apparently thought that his firm could be in…
