Apr

27

1. Are there any idiosyncratic moves for 4 trading day weeks that are not around on other weeks?

2. Hammerstein liked to sit with his back to the audience and listen to the ruffling of programs, and the number of coughs to tell if the audience was responding well to his shows. This is similar to Galton's method of counting the number of fidgets. Are similar indirect measures indicative in market moves?

3. When will someone make a good study of the expected moves of individual stocks when they break through round numbers such as 100?

4. Is one of the major causes of the decline of the Roman Empire the hatred and contumele aimed at the rich and the lack of banking during the centuries surrounding the C. E causing a lack of growth, and the need to extract resources by military conquest and slave labor? The book The Invention of Enterprise by David Landes makes this case.

5. To what extent do Hong Kong, Japan, and the US equity markets move in a feedback relation with each other, and is it predictive for any of them?

6. What does the inordinate rise in us stock/us bond and us stocks/dax in the last several weeks foretoken?

7. One is asked frequently why one doesn't trade the 10 year bond versus the 30 year bond because the former is 15 times as liquid as the latter. One notes that the 30 year had a 6 point range last week, and the 10 year a 1 pt range. Ending up down 1/2 a pt or so. Versus 3.5 pts for the 30 year. The answer is that the rake, the vig, is too high on the 10 year.

8. Everything that should have worked last year in predicting the crude is working this year as is generally the case.

9. Are the equity moves bullish in year 5, and bearish for year 7 predictive in any sense?

10. To what extent will Centrals, and plunge protection teams or their counterparts shield major declines in the market during election years?

Stefan Jovanovich writes: 

Quibbles re #4:

We moderns see the fall of the Italian half of the empire as "the decline" because Rome is where the Pope lives; for Gibbon and his readers, the important decline and fall was the loss of the wealth of the East - Egypt and Damascus and Constantinople.

There was no decline in banking around the C.E. That was the period of its tremendous growth, which continued in the East until Gibbon's villain–Christianity–had succeeded in converting the Mediterranean world as a whole into believing that the very notions of profit and interest were sins (of which the Jews were, of course, particularly guilty).

Slavery was always at the root of all economic systems in that world; acquiring slaves was, as they became in the American South, the primary means for an ordinary (sic) person to save and invest. (The first investment a successful free black or Indian made was to acquire his own slaves.) Productive land was already owned by the established families–just as it is in our American West–and you needed a lot of it. That was beyond the means of any "entrepreneur". But slaves could be acquired one at a time; they were fungible and they could be rented out to the landowners as seasonal or long-term workers. ("Rome" (the TV serial drama) gets this right. Vorenus plans to retire from the legion by saving up the rewards from his military service–i.e. the slaves.)

The fiction of an independent libertarian-believing yeomanry of Roman citizens electing a representative government is just that–a fiction. The appeals to the mob began generations before the Republic "fell"; and every successful "middle class" (sic) Roman was a slaveholder.
 


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