On Jan 20, we commented on the graphical wonders of the stock market and posted two pictures for you to guess what they represent. Here is the solution. Continue reading
The Apple Is On A Roll
Anybody who doesn’t know about iPhone, iPad, or iPod? It seems the California-based company is enjoying the best time of its life, or maybe times are getting even better in the months and years to come. After good quarterly figures, the company looks as strong as never before. Where is the company today in the hit list of the most expensive enterprises in the world? Will its share price rise and reach out to the moon? Continue reading
About The Beauty Of Stock Markets
From time to time, stock markets reveal their real beauty. Not only when they are going straight up for investors being long the stock (as they do now in Jan 2012), or when they keep diving deeper and deeper for short sellers (as they may well do later in 2012 when the January euphoria will have evaporated), but also when investors take a moment of rest, and the markets are looked at from a distance, over a long time period. That’s the moment when they reveal their true inner beauty, pure elegance. Continue reading
Worried About Your Stock Portfolio? Go And Insure It
The economy is swinging back and forth; are we back in a recession, yes or no; will the weak governments now eventually default on their debt and when; will the Chinese soon pull out from funding US government debt and will they ever chip in money into the European Financial Stability Facility; will all this hurt share prices and my investment portfolio; how painful will it be; anything I can do about it? …. Such questions are floating around en masse in the big world of small investors. One answer is: Yes. Manage your risk and insure your investment portfolio. So then, how? Continue reading
Biases Part II: What Corporations Can Learn From Behavioural Finance
On Dec 19, 2011, I wrote about this topic. Here is a follow up on this matter. Our goal is to look into the toolbox of Behavioural Finance, understand the biases they talk about, carry the toolbox from its place in finance into the world of corporations and enterprises, and see what the key bits mean in that every-day context. Continue reading
Knocking at the door – The New Year
Dear Reader,
Here we go, with a transition from a pretty exciting (or freakish) 2011 into a possibly no less exciting year 2012. If you think about how much stuff happened in 2011, from earthquakes to tsunamis, from nuclear reactors blowing up to political springs showing their blossoms, from crises of banks and governments to the austerity spreading across countries, then, well then it’s difficult to imagine how 2012 will be able to top this. Never be shy of showing some optimism. Isn’t it a reason why we watch the fireworks around the globe? Right so. Hope and optimism is what we all need.
Thank you for having been our visitor and thanks for good comments and emails.
We wish you a happy New Year. Make sure you have dreams; otherwise there is no chance that any can come true. All the best in this endeavour.
Y.I Readings
What corporations can learn from behavioural finance
Behavioural finance, as a complement to traditional finance has long been trying to understand how people make decisions. This with the goal to eventually help investors improve their economic results, speak make their portfolios more efficient in the sense of modern portfolio theory (or put simply, make more money for given risk). The discipline, borrowing from psychology, has uncovered numerous biases that distort people’s decision making, typically to their detriment. Now then, there are lots of fruits to harvest from those studies, not only for professional investors and traders, but equally for the Sunday afternoon private want-to-be stock market player or the corporate citizen involved in day-to-day projects in their company. Continue reading
Making investments – what to look out for!
When investing in shares of publicly traded companies, investors (specifically private ones) can do at least the following: make a bet, ask for a hot tip of a friend, ask a financial adviser, pull a well-remembered company name out of their memory, consult an investment magazine, or do some homework and study the fundamentals of the companies. Investors beware: Even fundamentals can be highly misleading. Continue reading
A recent phenomenon: Talk about inequality
I couldn’t but notice that recent articles and publications have commented about increasing inequality in society. It’s interesting to look at the arguments in this debate, at the facts brought to the table and ponder about potential consequences. Continue reading
Where volatility doesn’t shake up people
As mentioned in previous articles, much of the world is over-indebted, after a long period of boom and buzz. Some banks are still too highly leveraged or their capital base is thin (and vulnerable to write-downs of e.g. Greek government debt, see Dexia for a recent case). Governments are too much in debt, one or the other seems ripe for default. Continue reading