"We have little trouble recognizing that a chess grandmaster’s victory over a novice is skill, as well as assuming that Paul the octopus’s ability to predict World Cup games is due to chance. But what about everything else?" [
Luck and Skill Untangled: The Science of Success]
posted by vidur
on Nov 20, 2012 -
16 comments
Analog, Warren Buffett and Digital Media - Why Warren Buffett invests in newspapers: " You essentially have a business that will make a lot of money if you are terrific, it will make a lot of money if you're lousy," Buffett said, "...how good a newspaper is depends entirely on the wishes of its owner. There is no correlation between profits and excellence," Buffett added, "there's really nothing like that in American business." Enjoy nearly a full
60 minutes of Warren Buffet's (all too rare) public teaching style in
this recently uploaded video from 1992.
posted by spock
on Sep 28, 2012 -
15 comments
Best known for the (exaggerated) tales of her miserliness,
Hetty Green was arguably the greatest female
investor in history. During the
1907 Bankers' Panic, her loan of $1.1 million helped keep New York City solvent. Her estate - greater than that of J.P. Morgan's - was valued at more than $2 billion in today's money.
[more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Feb 5, 2012 -
18 comments
What Good is Wall Street? Think of all the profits produced by businesses operating in the U.S. as a cake. Twenty-five years ago, the slice taken by financial firms was about a seventh of the whole. Last year, it was more than a quarter. (In 2006, at the peak of the boom, it was about a third.) In other words, during a period in which American companies have created iPhones, Home Depot, and Lipitor, the best place to work has been in an industry that doesn’t design, build, or sell a single tangible thing.
posted by shivohum
on Nov 22, 2010 -
102 comments
Afraid that Jobs' wild spending and Woz's recurrent "flights of fancy" would cause Apple to flop, Wayne decided to abdicate his role as adult-in-chief and bailed out after 12 days. Terrified to be the only one of the three founders with assets that creditors could seize, he sold back his shares for $800.
An interview with Apple Computer co-founder Ron Wayne (he also designed
Apple's first logo). Had he held out, his shares today would be worth $22 billion.
posted by Chinese Jet Pilot
on Jun 4, 2010 -
49 comments
Every year the Strategy Team at
Saxo Bank, a Danish
virtual bank, publishes a list of ten black swan class market events. Some of the more dramatic possibilities Saxo advance for 2009: crude trading down to $25 a barrel causing severe social unrest in Iran, the S&P 500 falling to 500, Chinese GDP approaching zero and several member states dropping the Euro. The complete
2009 list is here and for completeness their
2008 [ .pdf ] ,
2007 [ .pdf ] and
2006 lists [ .pdf ] are also available.
[more inside]
posted by Mutant
on Jan 7, 2009 -
32 comments
Follow the money: for the past year,
the big trade was short bank stocks, and use the cash to go long oil. Massively profitable, but now that trade is unwinding. So where is the big money being invested now? Lots of places:
diamonds,
fine art,
guitars, and
Madonna.
posted by Mutant
on Aug 20, 2008 -
36 comments
Sure, you can make your IRA contribution just before the deadline this year in plain old mutual funds, but did you know it is possible to put retirement money into
Costa Rican hardwoods? Or
income properties or perhaps even
Chinese currency (not much yield there)? You can set up a self-directed IRA, where you choose the investments, which opens up quite a range of
possibilities and perils. The dangers are obvious, and be sure watch the
fees, though, and, of course, consult with your legal, tax, and financial advisors first.
posted by Adamchik
on Apr 13, 2007 -
7 comments
Want to learn about investing? Morningstar, an independent investment researcher, is offering 172 free online "classes" on stocks, bonds, funds, and portfolio building. And there's nifty quizzes at the end of each lesson where you can earn points that can be used for Morningstar products.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero
on Jan 9, 2007 -
20 comments
Get Rich Slowly, a personal finance web site (created by our
jdroth), has been educational to someone who spent most of his life until now pretending financial matters don't exist. His blog is updated frequently, and contains insightful tips on living frugally, eliminating debt, saving and investing. Between his site, and another very educational site entitled
I Will Teach You To Be Rich (start
here), I've greatly expanded my knowledge about managing my money effectively. Perhaps most importantly, they're both consistently interesting and easy reads.
[more inside]
posted by knave
on Aug 1, 2006 -
73 comments
Carl Icahn's Time Warner efforts find a powerful ally in
"white-shoe" investment bank
Lazard. Wall Street M&A advisors have been hesitant to support efforts by Icahn and his hedge fund brethren in their share-holder activist efforts for fear of alienating fee-paying corporate clients (investment banking, legal and registration fees on the
Time Warner/AOL deal were approximately $300 million). By
hiring Lazard, which is led by banking legend Bruce Wasserstein (
1,
2,
3), Icahn is surely raising the intensity of his campaign against Time Warner management. Icahn has been successful in previous shareholder activist campaigns, most notably against Blockbuster (
1,
2), and talks a
pretty mean game. Wall Street will be watching this closely - hedge fund activism is becoming a very real fear for company management/directors:
Circuit City/Highfields Capital,
Wendy's/Pershing,
Bally's Fitness/Pardus Capital & Liberation Investment Group,
Axciom/ValueAct Capital,
MSC Software/ValueAct Capital (reg. required),
Beazer Homes/Tontine Capital (second story on page) and
more.
posted by mullacc
on Nov 30, 2005 -
9 comments
An unexpected side effect of iTunes. Remember
Bowie Bonds? Introduced in 1997, bonds tied to future profits of music artists (besides Bowie, James Brown and the Isley Brothers offered them) tanked with the advent of online filesharing. Thanks to iTunes, some on Wall Street are betting that the Bowie Bond is a concept with a future.
posted by me3dia
on Aug 23, 2005 -
16 comments
The Watchful Investor "
Bringing you the underreported, the underappreciated, and the overlooked news from the markets."
Jim Waddell created this frequently updated journal providing economic news and commentary, as well as a newsletter which gives more detailed coverage of specific market events and issues. Accessible and interesting, yet not dumbed down.
posted by knave
on Jul 18, 2005 -
9 comments
One man's retirement math: Social Security wins At the heart of President Bush's plan to sell Social Security private accounts is a simple notion: You're always better off investing your retirement money than letting the government do it.
By doing it yourself, you can stow some money in the stock market, and over the long run will get a better return on that investment than today's Social Security system offers.
The idea is broadly accepted. That's why the administration's plan to partially privatize the system sounds appealing to many. But that better return won't always happen.
Just ask Stanley Logue of San Diego.
For 45 years, the defense-industry analyst paid into the system until his retirement in 1994. But with all the recent hoopla over reform, Mr. Logue, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, decided to go back and check his own records. Would he have done better investing his money than the bureaucrats at the Social Security Administration?
posted by Postroad
on Dec 27, 2004 -
80 comments
America's Black Budget - the Manipulation of Mortgage and Financial Markets Investors benefit from understanding the federal budget, credit policies and covert intervention that drive markets -- often overriding fundamental economics. How has the US governmental apparatus become so powerful in the marketplace and what does it mean to the health of our economy? How unstable is the mortgage bubble and where are the opportunities for investors if the bubble bursts?
posted by willnot
on Jun 28, 2004 -
21 comments
Is a Market Disaster Immement? The Federal Reserve has confirmed [a] Stock Market Crash forecast by raising the Money Supply (M-3) by crisis proportions, up another 46.8 billion this past week. What awful calamity do they see? Something is up. This is unprecedented, unheard-of pre-catastrophe M-3 expansion. M-3 is up an amount that we've never seen before without a crisis
posted by willnot
on Jun 2, 2004 -
45 comments
The Washington Post has one of the better articles about nanotechnology that I've seen, providing both a view of the billions of dollars of investment in the technology, and the concerns of environmentalists and consumer health advocates. The article predicts upcoming regulatory battles over how and when this technology should be released.
Perhaps one of the brighter points of light is that concerns have shifted away from the superlative
grey goo (IMHO: if a grey goo was chemically possible, bacteria would have done it already) towards the possible risks of disease due to exposure. Rice University has a page devoted to
current information on research regarding nanotechnology and health.
posted by KirkJobSluder
on Feb 1, 2004 -
18 comments
"It's good policy and good business." NYC's Employees Retirement System (5 funds managing $78.6 billion in holdings) is targeting Fortune 500 companies to adopt policies that specifically bar discrimination based on sexual orientation. One of them, CSX Corp., didn't even wait for their shareholder meeting, but immediately amended their policy in response.
These funds recently had
great success after a decade-long battle with Cracker Barrel Restaurants--infamous for firing gay and lesbian employees because they don't “demonstrate normal heterosexual values."
Here's wishing an especially happy holiday to employees of those
companies that have stopped discriminating and hopes for many more to join in. More info on this "shareholder activism" at
The Equality Project.
posted by amberglow
on Dec 24, 2003 -
4 comments
Space-time continuum abused for financial gain Federal investigators have arrested a Wall Street whizz who made $350 million from an initial investment of just $800 in two weeks. The man has confessed to insider dealing, explaining that he travelled back from the year 2256 in his 'time craft' specifically to make a killing on recorded past stock plunges. The kicker? There's no record of the man's existence prior to December 2002.
posted by skylar
on Mar 28, 2003 -
41 comments
Anti-PC investing. Tired of all those namby-pamby "
socially responsible" mutual funds out there? Me too. That's why I'm putting my money in the
Vice Fund, the first socially
irresponsible mutual fund. It started trading today, investing in companies that benefit from smoking, drinking, gambling and defense spending.
"It is our philosophy that although often considered politically incorrect, these and similar industries and products...will continue to experience significant capital appreciation during good and bad markets. We consider these industries to be nearly 'recession-proof.'"
posted by me3dia
on Sep 3, 2002 -
34 comments
Malcom Gladwell's got a new one in the New Yorker about a guy whose investment strategy positions him to profit from unlikely and scary random catastrophes like 9/11. Its' not on newyorker.com, but the story's
subject was kind enough to scan it and
post it.
posted by luser
on Apr 16, 2002 -
8 comments
Invest now! The SEC has created a
fake website to try and educate the naive. I can't decide if this is a good idea, or if someone has too much time on their hands and is wasting my tax dollars.
posted by FreezBoy
on Jan 30, 2002 -
8 comments
Learn about the Foolish Workshop at the Motley Fool and let the numbers decide which stocks to pick.
posted by MarkO
on Jun 28, 2001 -
9 comments
Buffett calls Internet investing "a big trap" If only many investors would have listened to Mr. Buffett a few years ago. Today, in Omaha, Buffett said, "But I think the idea that you could take any business idea and turn it into wealth on the Internet is just wrong." Common sense strikes again.
posted by shackbar
on Apr 29, 2001 -
14 comments
An
Australian Man who sent millions of e-mails around the world falsely stating shares in an American company would rise 900 per cent was today sentenced to two years in jail. The charges filed are believed among the first of their type made against anyone in the world.
Mr Hourmouzis had pleaded guilty to two charges of making a false statement on the Internet.
posted by murray_kester
on Oct 29, 2000 -
4 comments
