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Excerpt: HT to my friend James, for bringing this to my attention today. In the last hour, the market ran up dramatically, then quickly dropped. This kind of price movements is hardly an unique occurrence in the world of stock charts, where institutional investors by and large dictate pricing with their gargantuan orders. The market has been relatively quiet for the whole day, with little data released, nor shocking announcements made. So either there’s a large investor (or several) out there running up prices, then quickly dumping them. Alternatively, there’s information or rumours swerving around, privy to a few. This happens, regularly. Plus,…
From the category archives:
Media & Investing
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Excerpt: The New York Times has gone Oprah! Remember last year when she fronted her magazine O with the big “How could I have let myself go” headline? The Times is attempting the same cheap populism with its personal finance focused magazine this past weekend. One article that stood out and subsequently got a lot of attention was a personal credit crisis “confessional” from one of its own economic reporters. He has a book to promote, so naturally, the paper is there to serve as the springboard. Many bloggers have applauded the “insight” and “braveness” of the writer, while heaping a string…
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Excerpt: Investing is hard for professionals, and even harder for amateur investors. Especially when success is not measured in a cumulative manner – a dozen years of good work can be undone by a bad quarter. I have written about the many difficulties of achieving consistent good performance: from minding the myriad of intersecting forces in order to stay above the water, the skills needed to balance long-term investment principles with technical knowledge, to blocking out noises that only confuse investors. On top of all that, it also serves to see the big picture, particularly forces related to social and demographic…
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Excerpt: The human mind cannot grasp the causes of phenomena in the aggregate. But the need to find these causes is inherent in man’s soul. And the human intellect, without investigating the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions of phenomena, any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, snatches at the first, the most intelligible approximation to a cause, and says: “This is the cause!” Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace [via The Big Picture] The populist pitch-forking movement has duly commenced, and fingers are pointed in all directions. In a classic case of pot calling the…
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Excerpt: Jon Stewart tore CNBC a new one this week, sending ripples throughout mainstream media and blogosphere. “CNBC hating is mainstream!” Screams one headline. Then came the slew of media pundits, rushing to defend CNBC and by proxy, itself. This one in particular is especially lengthy and defensive. Below are some of the author’s grievances in face of much critique of financial reporting, and my thoughts on them. We were ignored, then we were cut It’s been a lousy decade or so for print publishing, and it’s getting worse. Budgets have been cut, newsrooms slashed. Business reporting in most cities is pretty bad,…
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Excerpt: Does the name Abby Cohen ring a bell? It does for me, and it broils my blood. Chances are, if you were at all invested during the tech bubble in the early 2000s, you would recognize the name too. Dubbed “perpetual bull”, she championed the rise of tech and telecom stocks all the way to the stratosphere. At that time, she was the star analyst at Goldman Sachs. The companies she covered loved her (which should’ve been a warning sigh all by itself), the market loved her, as wave after wave of heart-stopping rises made her outrageous bullish…
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Excerpt: Modern finance has three perspectives on the workings of the stock market. Inefficient, semi-efficient, and perfectly efficient. For the most part, market observers nowadays believe in a semi to perfectly efficient market. That is to say, information regarding a company is priced into its stock almost instantaneously. Financial statisticians devote years churning out data to prove that the market, for the most part, is extremely efficient in factoring in new information. And stock prices: barring insider information and uncouth accounting manipulation, is an accurate barometer of the intrinsic value of the company. Except this is hardly the case. The assumption of market…
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Excerpt: Puzzling? Let me explain. I am a huge gossip hound, I don’t read People or US Weekly, but I do follow a number of gossip bloggers almost religiously. I love one in particular, not only because she’s highly entertaining AND introduced me to Fight Night Lights, but because her insights allowed an outsider like me glimpse into the cynical workings of the entertainment industry. How else could I have come to understand the dire consequences of plastic surgery addiction, passive-aggressive diatribes of an insecure diva, and the many layers of hidden media manipulation that’s unbeknownst to most of us? Time and time…
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Excerpt: Where I used to work, we rotated MSNBC, CNBC and CNN Business in the background non-stop. Every market movement relevant to the energy market was followed, analyzed, and regurgitated on those channels. For the oil trading desk I worked next to, every threat of Iranian oil embargo, every possible hijacking off the Somalian coast, every Nigerian riot, would send the trading guys off in a flurry of activities. Back in 2007, oil was trending up into infinity and beyond, and everyone was in a great mood. I don’t know about now. But my point here is, these…
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