Within trading there are a few implicitly stated rules – perhaps first and foremost of these is the acceptance of risk for the opportunity to profit. The balancing act between risk and reward has over the decades been fertile ground for academics to traders. Academics seek a mythical middle ground that defines an appropriate balance…
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With worries about a currency war growing and bond yields collapsing, investors have reached for their usual haven of gold. Only this time it has a friend (as my colleague Tim Culpan wrote this week): Bitcoin. Gold’s dollar price has risen 7% this month, Bitcoin’s by 18%. This apparent use of the two commodities as companion…
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Gold goes up a fraction and everyone loses their friggen mind. My LinkedIn feed is alight with gold bugs who have gone all a quiver in their nether regions because gold has had a modest move up. Now I will agree that Linkedin has become like Facebook but for people with either a real job…
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Sometimes when you look at a group of prices what you see is not necessarily what you get as I found out when I had a quick look at base metal prices. What triggered this little foray into a segment of the market I dont really deal in was the piece below that appeared on…
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I snipped the graphic below from Visual Capitalist who produce some interesting infographics. What has always intrigued me about the interpretation of these performance comparisons is that almost everyone gets them wrong. The financial media looks at the fact that commodities overall had negative performance for the year and then carry on about how bad…
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With equity markets performing reasonably poorly in the short term I thought it may be instructive to look at the YTD performance of a basket of markets. The snip below is from Finviz.com a handy little website that generates performance metrics over time. The unfortunate thing about being an equities only trader is that you are…
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One of the things that most surprised me when I moved into finance as a profession (I use the term loosely) was the stunning lack of evidence for most of the things that were spoken about. My observation was that this lack of substantiation seemed to be a vertically integrated industry. Nobel Prizes were handed…
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