"Gold's crash this weekend is, as Oprah might say, a teachable moment. Crashes like this are a good way to find out how markets work. It's like a game of financial Clue, a way to keep sharp your skills of deduction. You don't have to be a stock investor or a math whiz to figure it out, either – you just have to have a good grasp of news and human psychology." - the Guardian on this week's crash in gold commodity prices.
posted by Slap*Happy
on Apr 18, 2013 -
85 comments
"
Any industry would be proud of an average annual growth rate of 34% over ten years and of a global reach from Austria to Taiwan. But the headlong expansion of exchange-traded funds (ETFs), which by May this year controlled almost $1.5 trillion of assets (not far short of the $2 trillion in hedge funds), has become a matter for concern among financial regulators. Could ETFs be the next source of financial scandal, or even of systemic risk?" Characterizing the Financial sector "like a hyperactive child" that "can never leave a good thing be",
The Economist appears to be
wishing for the
ETFs to be
better regulated because "it would be a shame if reckless expansion spoiled a good innovation".
posted by vidur
on Jun 26, 2011 -
28 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
Afraid to read
the daily news? Need some broader perspective on The Credit Crunch? There are lots of different ideas by lots of different authors floating about ...
[more inside]
posted by Mutant
on Oct 13, 2008 -
34 comments
A
private FDIC?
The Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service, or
CDARS, is a way to conveniently spread bank accounts across multiple banks. CDARS, run by privately held Promontory Interfinancial Network, offers its customers
up to $50 million of deposit insurance, or exactly 500 times single account limit mandated by the FDIC. Promontory does this by arranging to distribute client funds nationwide in $100K increments to over 2,300 banks. Promontory is nothing if not well connected: while founders Mark Jacobsen
previously served as Chief of Staff at the FDIC, co-founders Alan Blinder was
Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve and Eugene Ludwig
was Comptroller of the Currency, several former members of the FDIC currently serve on Promotory's board.
Not surprisingly, some folks are openly critical of Promotory, some going so far as to state
"It undermines a lot of the safeguards around the FDIC deposit fund."
posted by Mutant
on Sep 26, 2008 -
64 comments
The rapid growth of electronic trading
since 1976 has benefited equity market participants by improving competition, reducing cost and increasing liquidity while insuring better pricing.
One unexpected side effect has been the recent emergence of
"dark pools of liquidity", or the secret stock market.
[more inside]
posted by Mutant
on May 20, 2008 -
21 comments
While the US equities markets were closed on Monday for Martin Luther King Day, stock markets around the world took a nosedive,
losing billions in equity; the markets in
Australia,
South Korea,
Japan,
China,
Indonesia, Hong Kong,
Germany,
France,
the UK, and
more countries have dropped at least 5% each (
Canada only fell 4.75%), even though most of those markets had already been seriously down for several days prior.
India has been hit particularly hard, at one point down a whopping 11%, tripping their markets' automatic
"circuit breakers" for a mandatory time-out period, before scraping back up to close at
8% down. US futures markets are
currently predicting a 650+ point drop just at the open Tuesday morning, before even a single trade goes through.
[more inside]
posted by Asparagirl
on Jan 22, 2008 -
306 comments
The Motley Fool's new CAPS stock-picking system keeps track of your stock picks and whether they outperformed or underperformed the market. Then everyone's picks are aggregated, weighted by the quality of their past records, to rank individual stocks.
Here's how it works. (more inside)
posted by ikkyu2
on Oct 4, 2006 -
13 comments
