Image by Jose Antonio Alba from Pixabay So far, my 2023 investing looks just like 2022: lots of waiting. I’m not waiting for a recession to pass or for GDP to improve. I’m not waiting for a certain employment report or for corporate earnings to change. I’m not waiting for the Consumer Price Index (CPI)..
Image by 14995841 from Pixabay Note from the author: I use the terms stability and instability throughout this article. However, resiliency and fragility, respectively, more accurately describe the phenomena that I’m describing. Centralization creates fragility and decentralization creates resiliency. Please note this as you read the article below which I left in its original form…
Image by linsenfutter2016 from Pixabay So much for returning to normal. I had hoped that easing COVID restrictions would supercharge economic growth this year. Many affected industries and markets were rebuilding and reopening to a backlog of robust demand. Sure, markets had issues to grapple with: inflation, changing central bank policies, and the return of..
Image by QuakerGirl22 from Pixabay Catching inflection points is the holy grail of trading. It’s what makes investing lore. From shorting the 2005 housing boom or skyrocketing technology stocks in 2000, to classic value investing, taking contrarian positions can create large profits and legendary reputations. While seductive, it’s a difficult way to trade over the..
Created by Wolfgang Beyer with the program Ultra Fractal 3. – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=321973 I’m currently reading Benoit Mandelbrot’s brilliant book The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence (TMM). In it, Mandelbrot makes a case for discarding the bell curve when modeling financial markets, the bedrock of modern financial..
Image by Luiz Jorge de Miranda Neto- Luiz Jorge Artista from Pixabay 2021 sure picked up from where 2020 left off. As if things couldn’t get any crazier than a global pandemic, a group of retail investors seemingly organized an epic short squeeze in GameStop Corp’s stock (GME) so violent that it bankrupted a $12.5..
Image by MustangJoe from Pixabay Investing is incredibly hard. Mapping observations to security price movements is complex to say the least. Often, the relationships governing these moves are unknown. Yet, this is the investor’s task. I’ve used this blog as a tool for exploring some of these connections. It’s been incredibly rewarding. Not only has..
Image by Peter Kaul from Pixabay There’s nothing like a crisis to bring foundational investing principles to the fore. They lay all my triumphs and tribulations bear for me to see. Evasion is no longer possible. Assumptions, rationalizations, and truths are crystallized as profits and losses. This turbulence, though, is a crucible for learning. For..
Image by David Mark from Pixabay The volatility in the investment markets over the past few months has been truly astonishing. Prices are violently fluctuating and the range of traditional volatility indicators like the VIX have exploded. Just look at the daily moves of the popular U.S. stock market indices for example. While it’s generally..
Image source: pixabay For this post, I’d like to offer a few “Disintegrated Thoughts” on some things I’ve been thinking about in the investment markets. These include: The ECB and volatility deleveraging Business building and ignoring valuations Sticking up for “speculation” Notes from the judo mat A spontaneously “live” ECB meeting and volatility deleveraging..
