Black Monday

Twenty four years ago in 1987 the Dow suffered its worst one day decline in history losing  508 points or 22% closing at 1738.. This was the final nail in the markets coffin as it had dropped 1010 points from its August peak. The bull market that followed was extraordinary in its gains. By the…

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Why?

Apropos of this article yesterday I found this  little piece – Episodes of extreme market volatility demonstrate the role of emotion-based trading in moving stock and commodity prices.  The internet stock bubble is an obvious example of emotions overtaking investors’ “common sense.”  More recently, the extreme moves of currency (e.g. USD) and commodity (e.g. gold and…

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Normal Markets

Whilst I was away at the weekend this bounced into my inbox for comment (I don’t know the original source) SPZ s rallied 13.75% from the pre-NYSE open low on October 4 to October 12 high. Normal markets do not rally almost 14% in 6 sessions. Normal buyers do not behave this way. Volume was lacking…

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Benfords Law

In chatting about Greece and its systematic dishonesty I made reference to this post by Tim Harford. It talks about the intriguing Benfords Law which according to wikipedia is …….also called the first-digit law, states that in lists of numbers from many (but not all) real-life sources of data, the leading digit is distributed in a specific,…

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