By all appearances, we’re in a golden age of innovation. Every month sees new advances in artificial intelligence, gene therapy, robotics and software apps. Research and development as a share of gross domestic product is near an all-time high. There are more scientists and engineers in the U.S. than ever before. None of this has…
One of the great things about investing is the many ways that people approach it. Throughout history it’s been shown that hundreds (if not more) ways have been used to turn a profit within the stock market…. Whether you use fundamentals, technicals, astrology, or hire a monkey to throw a dart. However, one commonality among…
Last week LB spoke at the Young AICC in what was a fairly polite look at shares versus property. You can tell by the fact that I used the world polite that I obviously wasn’t speaking. After the event there were a few things I pondered on the way home. The first was my observation…
I have been scanning the Financial Conduct Authority Report out of the UK which if you are in need of a good snooze you can read here. One thing did catch my eye and it was the chart below which looks at the profit margin of the funds management industry in the UK. Nice work…
A little while ago I was playing around looking at the returns on the components of the S&P/ASX 200 in order to get a sense of what the distribution of returns for the year to date were starting to looked like. One of the reasons for doing this is that markets seems to be in…
I should add that once a year Marc Faber who is cited often on this chart pops up and says the end of the world is coming. No doubt one year it will and he will bounce around in triumph and the dimwitted double digit IQ plonks in the media will laud him as a genius.…
About how good things have been consider this months top 10 performing global indices. The most impressive gain has been by the major Venezuelan index which is up an astonishing 99% – which is not bad for a country that is going down the gurgler.
It’s astonishing to me how some ideas endure even when it’s obvious that they are no longer relevant,” Dan Ariely writes in his latest book, Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations. A professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, Ariely relentlessly examines our assumptions about ourselves—and finds they’re often totally misconstrued.…
In 1979, psychologist Ellen Langer and her students carefully refurbished an old monastery in Peterborough, New Hampshire, to resemble a place that would have existed two decades earlier. They invited a group of elderly men in their late 70s and early 80s to spend a week with them and live as they did in 1959,…
A little bit of market history…. This week we’re thinking about what it means to be a trader in today’s electronified markets and contrast it with trading in the era of horse and buggies. That’s right, we’re going back in time to talk mule trading and the story of the legendary Ray Lum, who spent…
