You’ve probably heard the expression “When a butterfly flaps its wings, it can cause a hurricane to form halfway around the world.” That simple little saying suggests just how unpredictably complex a system can be. But it’s not just our weather that can be described as complex. Virtually every system in the world can be described in the same way.
What if everything professional investors thought they knew about risk was completely wrong? Or what if the way that hundreds of billions of dollars are structured in hedge funds was totally off base? And what if this simple misunderstanding was actually exposing us to a potential meltdown that could wipe out
I have a dilemma. I hate both austerity and excessive government spending. Can you blame me? I spent several years in the government. Not the one controlled by Washington. This one was controlled by Annapolis, the seat of Maryland’s state government where I worked under the late and great Governor William Donald
I’m a stock picker and a firm believer that there are better and worse companies populating the S&P 500 and that if you have a clue as to which is which, you’re going to do much better than investors who rely on ETFs. Laszlo Birinyi, head of Birinyi Associates, the widely respected
The S&P 500 is threatening to end the year not only on the upswing but also in the black for the past 12 months. So why exactly is this terrible news? Well, it’s not for you and me. But it is for the many fund managers who are underperforming the market. Says
US banks had another forgettable year. The third quarter was their worst since the financial crisis. Now, it looks like the fourth quarter will be even more abysmal. US banks have very little positive developments to point to. Fixed-income trading may fall 12% from the third quarter… equities may drop 10%… and
An exclusive group of powerful Wall Street insiders, many of them alumni of Goldman Sachs, got an advance heads-up from then Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could be going into government conservatorship. The trade implications were obvious: Freddie and Fannie’s shares would be going down the
In theory, nobody apart from the C-level executives knows more about a company than the 5,000 or so analysts who follow American companies.
