Open versus Closed

Interesting chat on the mentor forum this weekend regarding open equity, that is the value of your positions measured to the current close versus valuing positions to the level of their stops. This discussion was prompted by the following graphic I posted which looks at one of the advisory service portfolios. This portfolio trades a…

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Madoff Revisited

Excellent podcast on Bernie Madoff who has become something of a lightning rod for all of Wall Streets sins. It is interesting that all the red flags that were raised to Madoff including the excellent work by forensic accountant Harry Markopoulos were ignored.  

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Bodybuilding Mexican Academic

I was going to title this something about robot trading….blah, blah, blah but sticking the words bodybuilding Mexican and academic in the title seemed to be much more fun. This article does what it says o the can – it is a about a bodybuilding academic whose speciality is artificial intelligence and its application to…

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Banker Pay

Apparently $1.6 million is not a lot to get by on…….. WSJ …. The paymaster noted that median precrisis pay was about $2.2 million a year. On average, some $200,000 came in base pay, with the remaining $2 million coming in an annual bonus, about 60% of which was paid in cash. That is roughly…

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Best and Worst Days

Last year I wrote a chapter in a book called The Wiley Trading Guide In it I banged on about lies that brokers tell people and some of the profound misunderstandings that those involved in the supply side of trading have. In particular I took aim at the notion of buy and hold and its…

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FX Turnover

I have in the past been asked by new traders what is the most liquid market in the world. The reason they asked was they were generally concerned that the massive size of their account (always less than 100k) was too big for any market other than the most liquid. So to put them at…

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I Love a Good Chart

This is from Chart of the Day who occasionally produce some interesting charts – although most of the time they are obscure things such as measuring GDP in gherkins The chart below is the  long term inflation adjusted median price of US housing. Not only did housing prices increase at a rapid rate from 1991…

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