Apparently, this little piece of information is a complete and utter surprise to most Australians judging by the level of commentary attached to the current hot spell sweeping the country. The point that most intrigues me is that Australians are constantly surprised by the fact that their country gets friggen hot during summer and each…
Apparently hearts are a flutter in the investment world because it has supposedly been sometime since the US market had any form of meaningful decline. This has even prompted many to go around saying that the end of the world is inevitable and as usual this sort of thing piqued my curiosity. So, I thought…
Despite all claims to the contrary the life cycle of the boom/bust phenomena has remained unchanged for hundreds of years. Source – Bloomberg PS:I made an interesting observation last night whilst looking at my LinkedIn profile. I consider LinkedIn to be little more than Facebook for people with a job. However, it was interesting to…
Be more confident,” a friend once told me as we made the rounds at a swanky networking event where I felt terribly out of place. Faking confidence is easy: I pulled my shoulders back and spoke louder and with more assertiveness. Like many soft-spoken, mild-mannered people, I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to…
One of my mentors is an art dealer. He specializes in art from the middle ages. Last time we met, he showed me a part of his personal collection. Impressed by the size of the collection, I asked how long it took to accumulate everything. He said “45 years,” and then he laughed when I…
Abstract To its proponents, the cryptocurrency Bitcoin offers the potential to disrupt payment systems and traditional currencies. It has also been subject to security breaches and wild price fluctuations. This paper identifies and analyzes the impact of suspicious trading activity on the Mt. Gox Bitcoin currency exchange, in which approximately 600,000 bitcoins (BTC) valued at $188…
Money isn’t the only reason for investing. It’s important, of course, but there are other really important investments that make up a well-rounded life. Let’s call them life investments. These less-tangible investments may seem unrelated to money, but they’re all connected. There is no use investing solely for money if your other life investments are…
Following on from yesterdays discussion regarding the amount of wealth created by a select band of companies comes this excellent graphic looking at the most valuable companies of all time. Source – Visual Capitalist
The previous post about bear market funds and the difficulties they have faced during the current spectacular US bull market fascinated me. My central point of interest is based around the question – why would you bother? There are a few conflicting points that come to mind. Markets in general have strong upward bias. However,…
Imagine losing 80% or more while, all around you, investors are basking in the glory of one of the biggest bull markets in history. Imagine racking up year after year of losses while stocks are going up nearly 400%. That’s what it’s like to run a short-selling fund that hedges against the risk of a…
This is a little quiz prompted by a recent conversation with Matt F who brought these little metrics to my attention. Below is a chart of the Dow and on it I have plotted a simple 3 ATR stop which can serve as a trend indicator. The question is – given the information above would…
I came across this excellent chart the other day. It shows those times in history when the S&P 500 doubled over a ten year period and the trajectory that this doubling took. Source – @morganhousel Much commentary that followed on twitter related to the steady low volatility climb that characterised the latest run and how boring…
Thats right – the company that invented the digital camera and was then send belly up by it is becoming a crypto business. What could possibly go wrong……
Just as December is the month when financial experts…..sorry dickheads make total fools of themselves by making worthless predictions for the upcoming year so January is the month where everybody bangs on about how January predicts the year. Unfortunately, it doesn’t; it is yet another zombie idea that has taken root in the financial community…
