It is always interesting when your email is publicly available – this means that sometimes the public writes to you and today was no exception. My winner for email of the week is the chap who wrote to me today and see he was suspicious of financial markets because his broker was spying on him…
This is a question that tends to get posed at boardrooms and dinner parties any time the market has had an extended run. Whenever, someone poses this question to me, my immediate and somewhat flippant answer is don’t know and don’t care. My response is based upon the notion that I feel it is the…
I feel for this young bloke. He is obviously trying to get his life in order but like all of us he gets in his own way. It is a longer video than I would normally post and it took me a few goes to get through it but it is worth it. …
I went to test drive an R8 once but found my feet were too big for the footwell…go figure.
This table is a truncated list of answers to poll questions posed to Americans. If you have ever wondered whether we are screwed as a species, there’s your answer. The full list of questions and responses can be found here.
This goes some way to explaining why my domestic equities portfolio has been a little lacklustre. Could be worse I could be investing in UK stocks.
Excellent little piece on how our brain tricks us repeatedly. If you want to characterize how something is done, then one of the most powerful ways of characterizing how the mind does anything is by looking at the errors that the mind produces while it’s doing it because the errors tell you what it is…
During the course of his career, Mr. Needham said in a speech at the Academy Awards in 2012, he broke 56 bones, including his back twice. He punctured a lung, had a shoulder replaced and knocked out several teeth. He invented several new stunt methods and devices — among them the introduction of air bags…
Whilst travelling during the week I was asked by someone what is the single most practical thing a trader can do to give themselves an edge. The question has an easy answer – trade in the direction of the prevailing trend. As easy as it is most people ignore it completely and all fund managers…
We are rational, self-interested optimizers: Homo economicus. So the neoclassical model of economics has held for over a century. It has been a fruitful model, at the heart of the discipline’s most profound theories, predictions and policy prescriptions. According to Richard Thaler, it is also flawed. Humans in the real world, Thaler points out, behave…
There has been a bit of chatter on the Mentor forum about the philosophy of buying blue chip portfolios so I thought I would generate a simple table of the maximum drawdown experienced by each of the ASX 20 since 2000. As you can see the drawdowns are for the most part horrendous with…
This is the title of a CNN Money article. The issue is in many ways hidden by the title and the accepted belief that we live in an era where information overload is the default setting for any and all activities. Undoubtedly information overload is an issue for traders. This is a natural consequence of…
Ignore the airy fairy, crystal rubbing, tree hugging, knitted wool beanie feel of the site and concentrate on the message. In one study on gratitude, conducted by Robert A. Emmons, Ph.D., at the University of California at Davis and his colleague Mike McCullough at the University of Miami, randomly assigned participants were given one of…
