I saw this piece over someones shoulder whilst having lunch yesterday and I thought I must have misread it. You know those times when something flashes into your view and you make a snap judgement about what it was and your initial guess seems stupid and is proved to be so upon revision, It does…
Details
Unfortunately the archetypal image of a trader is of an individual who is constantly on the move. In the old days the appearance of a trader would include the endlessly repetitive scenes of someone yelling down the phone to their broker issuing a constant stream of instructions. Nowadays the image might be of someone using…
Details
What prompted me to revisit this topic this is that once again my inbox is being bombarded with stuff about the magic of ETFs – it seems the gloss has completely gone from cryptos so we are back to old standard. The problem with most of these genius ideas is that they lack depth –…
Details
I am in the process of finishing up my presentation of the IFTA conference in Kuala Lumpur in October. My topic is a bit of an exploration of volatility and how it is incredibly poorly understood by most. Whilst in the throws of banging together charts I generated the one below of the S&P/ASX 200…
Details
I have had a bit more fun playing with indices and the theoretical rate of returns they generate over the long term. This time I wanted to look at a different segmentation within the market – I split the All Ordinaries Total Return and the Small Ordinaries Total Return and looked at their relative return.…
Details
Following on from my last missive I have cobbled together a list of the additions and deletions since 2011. Additions Deletions Afterpay Touch Group (APT) Asaleo Care (AHY) Appen (APX) Iron Mountain Incorporated (INM) Inghams Group (ING) Retail Food Group (RFG) Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield CDIs (URW) Westfield Corporation (WFD) OneMarket Limited (OMN) Mantra Group (MTR) IDP Education…
Details
This is a question I have been pondering for the past few days and it has come about as a result of several conversations Scott L and I have had regrading some testing we are looking at. It seems that the extreme survivor bias of the index is causing all sorts of problems. When you…
Details
Its a shitty day in Melbourne, so with nothing better to do I decided to fire up excel, download a bit of data and see what I could learn. Anyone who has spent more than 10 minutes on this blog will realise that I am fascinated by mechanisms of generating excess return with minimal cost…
Details
Lately my junk mail inbox has been inundated with bits and pieces regarding ethical investment. Every now and again it seems if the investing community goes on a bit of a tear and everybody plays follow the leader. Much of what I have been receiving is based upon a paper from last year – Foundations…
Details