Daily Speculations

Nobody Asked Me, But...

...The mid-October moves in bunds, the biggest market in the world ... I could write a sonnet about them. and all the specs in the world could learn an infinity from them, and also an abject lesson in cane investing.

Date  Open   High    Lo      Close  Vol ( mil)
1017 11220 11270 11175 11253 1.2
1016 11247 11290 11222 11231 1.0
1015 11284 11288 11235 11249 1.1
1014 11279 11310 11263 11294 0.8
1013 11341 11343 11281 11297 0.5
1010 11316 11369 11299 11354 0.7

...A passage in The Surgeon's Mate is vintage Patrick O'Brian, describing one of 20 subjects he's on top of, and showing why his readers consider his depth unrivaled in such fields as medicine, nature, food, nautical lore, and now finance. Maturin talking: "If we just knew the whereabouts of the French your money troubles would be over. You wouldn't be discounting bills and you'd be able to marry Sophie. A little speculation in rice would do the trick. Bombay can't feed itself. and if the French are near, no rice will come in and the price will explode. ... or one could just augment the moves in the funds with a little info about the recent fortunes of Napoleon."

...The songs of Yip Harberg, including "Over the Rainbow" and "Brother Can You Spare a Dime" are like the prose of Jack Finney or Rabelais or Cervantes in that they represent a positive view of the frailty, the humor and the greatness of humanity and the nobility of its pursuit.

...Is there a better way to classify stocks into groups than by industry? Correlations between price movements of Nasdaq stocks as opposed to S&P 500 stocks might be greater than the correlation between industries.

...What is it that keeps Sam Eisenstadt and others like him so young, as compared to old people like Buffett and Welch? A book on animal behavior talks about all the studies that show that the size of offspring in lion and antelope
group is all highly correlated with degree of prior social status.

...Will it be possible to short the Rydex hedge fund index? With the high fees that hedge fund managers take out, one must take off the top 8 percentage points for fees, another few points for trading costs, and another few points for disguised sales fees. Put it all together and it comes to at least 20% off the top for the average hedge fund, which to the extent that they are not long only would lead to down 60% over a four-year period. What a great opportunity for someone.

...The long waiting times for a few rises in a row from mid-2000 to present, and then the comparable absence of a few declines in a row during mid-20002, are cause for great feelings of non-randomness.

...What is the evidence that prices don't follow a normal distribution? There are a few two many large declines? But considering the number of hypotheses considered, and the wandering nature of the volatility, the expected number of large declines in the future would not seem significantly different from normal. --Vic (10/13/3)