RobinHood (HOOD) was supposed to redo the way people “did” trading by removing what was considered the old stuffy Wall Street way of doing things by effectively gamifying trading. Perhaps not today. What the likes of HOOD, PTON, and ZM demonstrate is that the one constant in markets is that history repeats. Irrational exuberance is…
Coincidence is a wonderfully odd thing. Whilst filling the truck at the local petrol station this morning a car pulled up at the bowser next to me – there is nothing earth-shatteringly exciting about this other than the interesting fact that it had three reasonably new parking tickets on under one of its windscreen wipers.…
If ever you find yourself in awe of hedge funds there are two things I recommend you do. Firstly read The Hedge Fund Mirage by Simon Lack Secondly, refer back to this chart.
From the moment we are born, our brains are bombarded by an immense amount of information about ourselves and the world around us. So, how do we hold on to everything we’ve learned and experienced? Memories. More here – National Geographic
Baring some other catastrophe the current uptick in interest rates in the US (and eventually here) will be the most important “economic “event” of the year with ramifications not so much for equities but definitely for real estate. Interest rates have been in a long-term drift downwards for three decades as shown in the chart…
It’s not just the more widely traded “food” related commodities that have been on a tear. I have always regarded milk as a legacy contract leftover from days gone by but it has done extremely well over the past year.
PS: I have a very vague recollection of a trader in the 1980’s being caught in a similar manner with copper.
One of the issues I have with technical analysis and its more die hard adherents is that they assume they are making a prediction when in fact they are making a bet. This might seem to be a mild quibble of a simple matter of definitions but the two words carry much different meanings both…
Social media….the gift that just keeps on giving in terms of the idiocy it offers up to traders. It is hard to decide whether it is a wonderful entertainment value or whether it is profoundly depressing in terms of the idiocy that it generates. The latest piece of inanity comes from the notion of how…
I am sure I have bored plenty of people in recent years by repeating the mantra ‘process over outcomes’. There is probably no more important frame or model to apply when considering how we make investment decisions. In an environment where skill is often overwhelmed by luck and randomness the more we focus on results…
Confession: I’ve spent most of my life as a chronic procrastinator. I’ve also spent most of my life justifying that chronic procrastination. “It’s just how I work,” I’d say to myself after yet another stress-inducing last-minute sprint to complete a project. The pressure of an imminent deadline was what I needed to thrive. Scientifically, I…
We conducted a survey to find out. In particular, we wanted to know about the relationship between the so-called “dark tetrad” personality traits and attitudes towards cryptocurrency. In psychology, the “dark tetrad” refers to a group of four personality traits. These are Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy (together known as the “dark triad”), plus sadism. They are…
After Russia rolled tanks and troops into Ukraine, markets sold off—for half a day. S&P 500 futures tumbled overnight, but by 2:30 p.m. in New York on Feb. 24, the S&P 500 was higher than before military action began. While there’s been volatility, U.S. equities as of March 1 were still up since before the…
