LATEST BLOGS

How To Win At Forecasting

I have done prediction to death (see here) The patron saint of pointing out that experts don’t have clue is Philip Tetlock. This is an extended piece and video with him. It takes a bit to get through but the central message is that models beat experts as evidenced in the recent US election. The…

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So You Think You Can Value A Company Do You?

I must admit having fun with value investors is a somewhat akin to shooting fish in a barrel The hubris required to believe that you and you alone actually know what something is worth and that the market will believe you is extraordinary. Consider the case of HP’s acquisition of software maker Autonomy, they thought…

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Gold

The graphic below is from Thomson Reuters – the original can be found here This is a weekly chart of gold – Take your pick as to which one makes sense to base a decision on…….

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Asian Markets

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I am planning on doing a longer piece on the heterogeneous nature of Asian markets as a function of their cultural and economic background. In the meantime I needed to generate a chart of the comparative performance of the Nikkei, the Hang Seng and the doggy Shanghai Composite over the past year.

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S&P500

I like everyone else has been ear bashed by the notion of the fiscal cliff – that is yet another seemingly childish staring contest by people who are supposedly adults. We have seen several of these this year particularly in Europe where the Greeks and the Germans tried to out dickhead each other before actually…

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Predictions

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My news reader picked up this little piece this morning – Trio of Strategists Agree S&P 500 to Reach Record in 2013 Bank of America Corp.’s Savita Subramanian yesterday joined Citigroup Inc.’s Tobias Levkovich and Bank of Montreal (BMO)’s Brian Belski in predicting the benchmark gauge for U.S. stocks will top the high of 1,565.15 set on…

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The Finland Phenomena

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It often surprises me that we dont seek to learn from the best in the world but rather that we slavishly copy the worst in the world. It is quite clear by many measures that Finland has one of the worlds best education systems. It produces outcomes well beyond our own which seems to be…

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