In Australia we have a number of traditions. The long weekend, a sausage sizzle at Bunnings and the latest – the whinging billionaire. The leaders of this pack of privileged complainers has to be Gerry Harvey who in the past two weeks has suggested that his stock in the grip of an evil an unidentified…
With a free afternoon I decided to look at the individual performance of stocks that make up the ASX 200 since the beginning of the year. What I did was assume that you invested $1.00 into each on the first trading day of the year and then see what their current valuation was. The table…
Look at a photo of yourself as a teenager and, mistaken fashion choices aside, it’s likely you see traces of the same person with the same personality quirks as you are today. But whether or not you truly are the same person over a lifetime—and what that notion of personhood even means—is the subject of…
I have been thinking about this table I put up the other day. It merely confirms my view that the mining industry is an historical economic distortion that is vastly overrated in its importance. Employing less that 2% of the Australian workforce (see below) and only contributing about 6% of GDP yet receiving about $10B…
I was reviewing the latest Investment Trends data which can be viewed here. There are a few things that jumped out at me but I want to discuss the chart I have posted below. This chart looks at the current fears investors/traders have about the market. What is interesting about these fears is that as…
Whilst looking for something completely different I came across this list of domestic CEO salaries. I thought it would be interesting to strip out some of the data and look at those CEO’s who are paid the most but whose companies lose the most money. Its remarkable how well you can do when your company…
The change in the relative size of world markets over the past century. You will note that the Australian market has shrink significantly. Source – Credit Suisse Global Investment Reurns Yearbook 2017
It is a strange time to be a behavioral scientist in business. When I left my PhD program almost ten years ago to focus on real-world applications, I spent the majority of my first few years explaining over and over what behavioral scientists actually did. Now, I regularly get inbound requests to speak at large…
This piece in the AFR is currently doing the rounds with various people trumpeting that this is what they do so they are a genius. To be fair without actually seeing the original Morgan Stanley report or understanding what they did any comparison between different methodologies is profoundly limited in its utility.
One of the frustrating things about being a trend follower is that it takes time to overcome the inertia of a new system, particularly if that system is based upon slightly longer time periods such as weekly data. Part of the frustration that traders encounter is based upon the simple mechanics of how systems work.…
On October 7th 2016 the GBP suffered a minor aneurysm and dropped like a stone for a short period of time as seen below. The Bank of International Settlements had just released a report into possible reasons for the crash. You can download the full report here. The executive summary outlines a constellation of reasons…
There’s an academic I know — very well respected — who especially values one of his collaborators. This particular colleague isn’t invaluable because of his creativity or intellect, says my professor friend, but because “he is willing to tell me when I’m wrong, and that’s rare”. It is indeed rare. Perhaps even rarer is the…
I am still intrigued by the US markets reaction to the results of the US election when viewed in tandem with an instrument such as gold which is generally seen as a hedge against uncertainty (in this instance read outright dickheadedry) As such I though I would look at the relative returns of both instruments…
