In a crumbling edifice, a farce plays out. The hapless central character fawns on an aristocrat who turns out to be a conman. He then fails to disguise his unease when confronted with his European neighbours, doesn’t bother to mask a thorough contempt for the Irish, and enters a love-hate relationship with ostentatiously wealthy Americans.…
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You’re a Russian criminal with millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains but one big problem: Transferring slugs of money or carrying suitcases of cash will raise eyebrows. You need to “launder” the dough — make the dirty money appear to be the proceeds of legitimate enterprise. Then it can be spent anywhere in the world…
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Yet there is never a shortage of them of offering their opinion. Surely at some stage you would just give up and admit you were crap. President Trump likes to brag about the supposedly booming economy. So do other Republican politicians. Some journalists have gotten into the habit too, exaggerating the strength of the economic…
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In his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a 15-hour workweek in the 21st century, creating the equivalent of a five-day weekend. “For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem,” Keynes wrote, “how to occupy the leisure.” This became…
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I came across this chart on LinkedIn – It is a comparison between the Baltic Dry Index and the S&P500. For those who dont know the Baltic Dry Index is a proxy for all dry shipping around the world. Fundamental analysts then somehow contort this is to meaning something about world trade and occasionally you…
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1 million seconds is abut 11 days. 1 billion seconds is about 31.5 years. I cannot remember where I heard the example above but it is a wonderful example of peoples inability to understand scale particularly when it involves orders of magnitude change. In part it relates to why people cannot understand why a loss…
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One of the key issues facing new traders is being under capitalised. A small trading portfolio can be detrimental for two reasons. One, brokerage fees will churn your account. Two, you are limited in the way you can position size. So in other words a small capital base puts you at a disadvantage when you…
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I came across this chart the other day and the message it was trying to convey intrigued me. The chart is from this Vanguard update. I am intrigued because the chart is saying that the market rewards those who hold for the long term – in essence it is talking about a buy and hold…
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