Following on from yesterdays piece on the remarkable underperformance of the hedge fund sector I thought it would be interesting to compare the compensation hedge fund managers pay themselves compared to a few other highly paid industries. To put my little league table into context I thought it would be nifty to graph them to…
In the United States we are raised to appreciate the accomplishments of inventors and thinkers—creative people whose ideas have transformed our world. We celebrate the famously imaginative, the greatest artists and innovators from Van Gogh to Steve Jobs. Viewing the world creatively is supposed to be an asset, even a virtue. Online job boards burst…
Weasel word excuse – “It has been difficult for hedge funds on the short side,” said Nick Markola, head of research at Fieldpoint Private, a $3.5 billion Greenwich, Connecticut-based private bank and wealth-advisory firm. “Funds were defensively positioned. Central bank action did bode well for equities and made for a more challenging environment for hedge funds.” Drunkenmiller…
Bitcoin’s sudden rise has people thinking about the ludicrous heights that tulips achieved in the Netherlands in the 1630s. At the peak of that bubble, a single tulip bulb could cost more than ten times a craftsman’s annual salary. While some of these prices were “justified” by market forces—the rarest breeds were enviable luxury goods—the…
This is a rather complicated piece but the abstract does a very good job of summarising the papers content. We present a simple model in which rational but uninformed traders occasionally chase noise as if it were information, thereby amplifying sentiment shocks and moving prices away from fundamental values The notion of chasing noise as…
Talking heads are losing traction – now if only the same thing would happen to Fox.
Traditionally westerners equate activity with productive effort, as such the more noise and the more fuss you make the more productive you are. The same philosophy drifts into trading, as such trading becomes an activity-based endevour, which then migrates into entertainment. Research by W.B. Canoles, S.R. Thompson, S.H. Irwin, and V.G. France in their paper…
When I was much younger I was introduced to the phrase that people fail because of the people they are and at the time I thought this was a bit harsh. My reasoning was that life does not deal everyone the same cards and in some ways I still hold that view. There is obvious…
The publishers claim that The Hobbit, though very unlike Alice, resembles it in being the work of a professor at play. A more important truth is that both belong to a very small class of books which have nothing in common save that each admits us to a world of its own—a world that seems to have…
