RIP Doc Neeson

I first saw Doc Neeson and The Angels more years ago than I care to remember in a shitbox venue that has now been consigned to history. He remains the most dynamic front man I have seen. The 70’s had been a decade when I had to wander along courtesy of a succession of girlfriends…

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An astonishing record – of complete failure

In the 2001 issue of the International Journal of Forecasting, an economist from the International Monetary Fund, Prakash Loungani, published a survey of the accuracy of economic forecasts throughout the 1990s. He reached two conclusions. The first was that forecasts are all much the same. There was little to choose between those produced by the…

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Barclays Manipulated Gold as Soon as It Stopped Manipulating Libor

And still no one is in prison…. If you were writing a paranoidfantasyof gold price manipulation you’d be hard pressed to come up with something more on the nose than the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority’s order against Barclays. It has everything; it is the benchmark of manipulation by which all future manipulation will be measured. Well, this…

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Vix Again

I came across this chart over the weekend. It looks at the volatility of stock, bond and currencies markets. The article that accompanies it falls into a trap I have commented on before namely, that volatility and changes in volatility are predictive. My view is that they are post-dictive – that is they react after…

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