Dow

Well….I am still long the Dow, boring that it is. The interesting thing about markets at or around new highs is the emotional problems they seem to bring. Traders struggle with the notion of buying something that is higher than it has been in recent times simply because we have inbuilt cultural notions about what…

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Its Friday

Time to continue the World Cup theme – Some back-of-the-envelope maths regarding Luis Suarez: according to Wikipedia, he has played in 363 club league, cup and friendly matches since breaking through into the Nacional senior team in the 2005/06 season. He’s also played 78 times for the Uruguay national team. He has bitten three opposition…

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Flash Boys and Investors

Lengthy but interesting. I have thus far resisted writing anything about Michael Lewis’s book “Flash Boys”, in part because I typically don’t want to waste time on timely issues (instead focusing on topics that are of long-term interest), although it has been a real exercise in self-constraint because there have been few books published in…

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Behavioural economics and public policy

So popular is the field that behavioural economics is now often misapplied as a catch-all term to refer to almost anything that’s cool in popular social science, from the storycraft of Malcolm Gladwell, author ofThe Tipping Point (2000), to the empirical investigations of Steven Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics (2005). Yet, as with any success story, the backlash has…

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