This is the VIX over the past few years – as you can see the market seems to have calmed right down to historically low levels.  

There appears to be a growing realisation that fund managers of all ilk are simply not delivering the returns they are being paid for. In fact the evidence seems to indicate that the majority of managers (>95%) are actually a drag on the performance of any given fund. Whilst, we tend to look as this…

This nifty little graphic shows the number of heavy metal bands per 100,000 people. As you can see Sub-Saharan Africa is a cultural desert for heavy metal (pardon the pun) Whereas, Scandinavia particularly Finland is bonkers for metal.

Just got bounced this little exchange

Large Hedge Funds Fared Well in 2011 Apparently they didn’t – their managers did. I have written about this disconnect before, here and here There is a remarkable and somewhat unsavoury difference between what the people who run hedge funds make and what the people who invest in hedge funds make. As an example consider…

At last some vague sign of life – the marked bars represent 52 day highs so at least the market has made a modestly pathetic attempt at making new highs. As opposed to other world markets that have been making successively new highs in the past few months.

A bit slow with updates this week since I have been baby sitting the new mentorees. For some reason I find this hilarious

I have been watching the latest US rally with some interest and each night when I review the markets I notice an interesting thing. The rally is extremely lumpy in its distribution. Have a look at the graph below which compares the rally in the major US indices to the FTSE100, ASX 200 and the…

With all the talk of astronomical prices predicted for Apple my attention was drawn to this comparison. At this stage my money would be on Priceline to hit the magic $1,000 mark.