How Things Change
This is the UBS Stamford trading floor circa 2008 – apparently it covered an area of 23 basketball courts. And this is the same floor today.
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Why They Did It
“It’s like a comedy of errors,” Madoff told Soltes. “To cover the losses, I decided to take in money from hedge funds. And in order for me to do that, I had to commit to a long-term strategy that I wouldn’t send the money back [to investors]. I kept taking in more money, figuring that…
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Who Is the Tallest Dwarf?
I noticed during the Olympics that an industry superannuation fund known as REST were trying to convince me how good they are. The catch cry of the ad is that investing is a marathon and not a sprint – you wont get any argument here on that point. Too many people believe that investing irrespective of…
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S&P 500 Exceeds Forecasts – Punters Shit Themselves
The chart below has been doing the rounds today. It shows the S&P 500 versus analysts expectations for the index, as you can see analysts are a wildly optimistic bunch. Source – Bloomberg The reasons this has caused so much angst is that it now seems to portray Wall Street as being bearish because the…
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Gutnick Goes Bust
I read with interest last week that Joseph Gutnick had gone bust; apparently he owes some $275 million to various creditors and has about $15 to his name. I read this with a touch of nostalgia because it was Astro Mining that got me started in this business more than three decades ago. It also…
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EOFY Dodgy Excel Time
With the EOFY it was time to fire up excel and play with some stock returns. I took the S&P/ASX 50 and decided to see how each stock had fared during the year, this gave me the table below which I have sorted on the basis of highest to lowest. In terms of observations about…
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How Far Can Oil Rally….I have No Idea Nor Does Anyone Else
For reasons unknown this piece from the Sydney Morning Herald popped into my inbox the other day. I haven’t had much of a look at it but it looks like the usual journalistic misunderstanding of how the world works and there are only two points worth making. Firstly, for every option buyer in the world…
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ASX 200 Shares Distribution Of Returns
Recently I had a look at the distribution of returns for a system I run – the aim of this was to give a sense of how systems trading works. The rules of systems trading are very simple and are based around the concept of ride the losses, pump the winners and allow time to…
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