Love Letters to Richard Dawkins
Bloody funny but definitely NSFW
The history of global economics… in football shirts
This is fascinating. From Japanese electronics to reckless banks and middle eastern airlines, the fate of Premier League shirt sponsors has been tied closely to that of the world economy. West Ham United was the latest club to be sideswiped by the financial markets this month when its main commercial backer, foreign exchange dealer Alpari, was…
Progress Not Perfection
I am coming back to an old theme – the notion of character in trading. Recently, I have heard several conservations about how to deal with a series of losses or an extended period of drawdown. The nature of these conversations all had something in common, whether there was a magic technique to help traders…
Assumptions
Assumption is the mother of all fuck ups…. The recent fall out from the movement in the CHF has been interesting to watch. If ever you wanted to clear out the retail FX space I dont think anyone could have come up with a better plan than the actions of the SNB, it was a…
“I like… fat… tails and I cannot lie, You vol sellers can’t deny…”
I like… fat… tails and I cannot lie You vol sellers can’t deny When a hot trend breaks with a well-timed stop and a great big black swan pop you get Paid… P&L year gets made ‘Cause you noticed that trade was packed Buncha mean reversion suckers got jacked Oh baby I wanna get lumpy…
Striking Stat of the Day
Many ordinary investors who trade currencies are a bit like casino gamblers: they may think they’ll win, but the odds are they won’t. Aite Group LLC, a Boston-based consulting firm, surveyed retail foreign-exchange traders in 2011 and found only 11 percent expected to lose money. Forty-one percent expected to earn monthly returns of more than…
Six in Ten Mom-and-Pop Currency Traders Lose Money Each Quarter
I snipped the graphic below from this article in The Wall Street Journal. The article makes the point that there seems to be a correlation between account size and profitability . It’s the smallest and the newest investors that are most likely to lose money. The firms with the highest percentage of profitable accounts, Interactive…
BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2014
Apparently BP produce a yearly very data heavy review of the state of world energy. For those who want to wade through it I have produced it below and the original can be downloaded from here. The review contains the chart below which looks at the historical price of crude and drops in some…
Charts Of interest 16/01/2015
Slideshare has been killing the quality of the files uploaded to it so until I find a better alternative I have gone back to a tried and true method.
That Has to Have Hurt
With the repercussions of the wild swing in the CHF still to be felt there has been some attempt to quantify the losses being faced by various FX providers. The table below was generated by FOREX MAGNATES
A Magician’s Best Trick: Revealing a Basic Human Bias
The guy had played us every step of the way. First, there was his “poor” performance at guessing—hey, we concluded, this guy puts on his pants one leg at a time. Then he complimented my son with “Hmm, you’re hard to read.” Next, The Magician gave a plausible explanation for my son’s success: “The experience…
