Ikea is a behemoth. The home furnishing company uses 1 percent of the planet’s lumber, it says, and the 530 million cubic feet of wood used to make Ikea furniture each year pulls with its own kind of twisted gravity. For many, a sojourn to the enormous blue-and-yellow store winds up defining the space in…
It does seem as if every time I open my junk mail folder I get another invocation to partake of yet another magic trading system. I should note that this sort of thing has been around forever, the only thing that changes is the vehicle which alters in order to capitalise on whatever topic is hot.…
In Guns, Germs, and Steel I asked why history has unfolded differently over the last 13,000 years in Eurasia, in the Americas, in sub-Saharan Africa, and in Aboriginal Australia, with the result that within the last 500 years Europeans were the ones who conquered Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians and sub-Saharan Africans, rather than vice…
I came across this piece this morning. It claims that traders are taking up huge short sale positions in Tesla and they are paying a hefty penny in fees for the privilege of doing so. There are a few points in this that interested me. Whenever a financial journalist claims something is happening it is…
LB bounced one this via one of the recent MP graduates. Source : Tradeciety
One of the joys about having been around since Adam was a pup is that you get to see lots of things come and go. On a regular basis you get to see what the new flavour of the month is and you quickly learn that there are no good or bad instruments just good…
I am doing a Market Wrap for Talking Trading which I will post a link to ASAP. In looking at the current state of markets I came across the following chart from the WSJ highlighting the long decline in the GBP. The sun has well and truly set on the Empire, it just seems as…
I was trolling through PubMed the other day searching for a particular paper when I got distracted as I am want to do. The internet is a wonderful thing for getting lost looking at various papers. Back in the day this sort of distracted quest was impossible simply because you would have to spend hours…
Like a gothic horror story, my tale begins on a dark and stormy December night in Manhattan. My friend “J” had graciously offered to drop me off after the dinner party we’d both attended. As his chauffeur took us across town via a circuitous route, our conversation drifted intermittently. During the lulls my thoughts turned…
OMAHA, Neb.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Answering a question last night about his $916 million income tax loss carryforward in 1995, Donald Trump stated that “Warren Buffett took a massive deduction.” Mr. Trump says he knows more about taxes than any other human. He has not seen my income tax returns. But I am happy to give him the…
I am never surprised when I read of the investment decisions made by various fund managers. However, I was a little agog at finding out that AustralianSuper the nations largest superannuation fund has a 3.2% stake in Tesla. It is the only one of AustralianSupers top 20 investments to have not shown a profit. This should…
Now that the Bogan 1000 has been run at Bathurst for another year I note that there was much weeping and wailing at the imminent demise of Ford which is soon to be followed by the end of locally produced Holden’s. This gnashing of teeth was echoed by the car magazines I subscribe to which…
There are many ways to rank universities, but one that’s rarely considered is how many of their graduates make extraordinary contributions to society. A new analysis does just that, ranking institutions by the proportion of their undergraduates that go on to win a Nobel prize. Two schools dominate the rankings: École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in…
ARE you intelligent — or rational? The question may sound redundant, but in recent years researchers have demonstrated just how distinct those two cognitive attributes actually are. It all started in the early 1970s, when the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky conducted an influential series of experiments showing that all of us, even highly…
The most interesting thing to happen in markets for sometime was the GBP flash crash that occurred last week. I only caught the tail end of the crash as I saw some of my GBP puts leap ten fold in value and then settle back down. Which was followed by me going WTF? was that…
