With equity markets performing reasonably poorly in the short term I thought it may be instructive to look at the YTD performance of a basket of markets. The snip below is from Finviz.com a handy little website that generates performance metrics over time. The unfortunate thing about being an equities only trader is that you are…
Click here to get the full list. Australia comes in at 19 behind the powerhouses of Estonia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Georgia and Malaysia
‘I plan for the 6th order effect and I do it in about half a second.’ If I had heard that from anyone other than another fighter pilot, I would’ve laughed them out of the room but, from my buddy, Jim – I knew it was true. I flown with him many times before. He…
In particular lets talk fake equity curves and by fake I mean either made up (fictitious) or curve fitted ( made up by a machine to look really good) Unfortunately trading abounds with these curves and the internet and particular Facebook is littered with curves that purport to show how someone has managed to turn…
Awoke this morning to note that cryptos had once again fallen out of bed. Coincidentally the good Dr Joe sent me the following t-shirt which he aptly stated was a good t-shirt for people still clinging to the dream of Bitcoin going to $1M – which is a prediction I heard more than once last…
This is a topic that has been turning over in my head for a week now and the reason why it has stuck in my mind will become apparent. Every now and then I get a cluster of emails from people whinging about how hard trading is and I agree trading is a difficult profession.…
It is always interesting to look at how various subsections of a market perform over the long term and to try and ascertain what the implications of this might be. The charts below represent the relative performance of the ETF’s that represent the Dow (DIA) the S&P 500 (SPY) and the Russell 2000 (IWM) over…
When LB and I caught up with Chris Roberts a hedge fund manager based in Hong Kong he made an interesting point during our conversation – he said that trading is not a committee. The implication is clear, trading is a solo endeavour and should be treated and embraced as such. My observation has always…
I have thought and continued to think a great deal about the relationship between critical thinking and cynicism — what is the tipping point past which critical thinking, that centerpiece of reason so vital to human progress and intellectual life, stops mobilizing our constructive impulses and topples over into the destructiveness of impotent complaint and embittered resignation, begetting cynicism?…
The appalling performance of hedge funds continues. I have taken the yearly data for the HFR Equity Hedge Fund database converted it to the value of $1 invested and compared it to the S&P500 Total Return Index.
One of the things I have noticed about travel is that being human is largely universal – that would seem to be an odd statement that touches on the banal. But the natural human instinct is to think that people who are not like us are different. The tendency is to split the world into…
