Whilst one shouldnt play favourites in trading it is hard to forget the commodities you encountered first. I have fond memories of things such as frozen pork bellies (now defunct) and lumber. To me these are old time commodities that were traded long before specialised financial products appeared. So I was a bit surprised when…

Is these idiots who keep using the phrase quantum leap as if you are trying to traverse some enormous intergalatic gulf. For those of a non scientific bent a quantum state is the smallest discrete quantity of a physical property that can be involved in an interaction. Its friggen small – so if you have…

One of the most misunderstood issues in trading is the notion of diversification. I can distil the standard mantra of how the sell side of the industry defines diversification into – so long as your stocks have different names you are diversified. So no need to worry. Unfortunately, this is not true. In small closed…

Markets are always interesting – even when they are not doing anything they are interesting. The thing that interests me most about this is that the Dow did not go down, although one possible interpretation of this could be that it is simply a relief rally. That is we are relieved that we didn’t wake…

As an unabashed fan of extreme weather I bring you Sandy-Cam courtesy of a camera on the 51st floor of the New York Times building.

I think a much better idea would be to allow disgruntled clients to pay to punch their hedge fund managers in the head.

Not mine….someone else’s. The chart below dropped into one of my junk email accounts. This is a chart of the S&P500 PE ratio – I can see what people are attempting to do when they construct such charts. My interpretation is that they are looking for signs of mania – that is a distortion in…