Google Finance launches
Google launched Google Finance today. Lots of people have written about it already, generally nonplussed. Here’s my quick reaction. I like: News events plotted on the stock chart timeline. I wish...
View ArticleThe Singing Economist – Every Breath Bernanke Takes
Glenn Hubbard, Dean of the Columbia Business School, was recently considered as a potential replacement for Alan Greenspan as head of the US Federal Reserve. Watch this, and think of how much more...
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Maria moves the markets
I sometimes have CNBC on in my office, sort of as background noise. This afternoon I heard Maria Bartiromo describing her weekend conversation with Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. The media and...
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Risk management
Two of the most important skills for long term investment success are capital allocation and risk management. Capital allocation tends to get most of the attention in the press, which publishes...
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It’s better to change your vision than to lose your money
Would you rather be “right” or be successful? Changing your mind about an investment – intellectual, emotional, or financial – is difficult. Munjal Shah, founder and CEO of photo search company Riya,...
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Markets going down? Get short or get levered by going long
If you’re an stock investor, you might be considering the possibility that the markets will go down (more) sometime in the near future. The recently launched ProShares ETFs use derivatives to...
View ArticleHow much is two plus two?
It can be difficult to have a lot of confidence in financial statements published by publicly traded companies. Companies built on intellectual property or financial instruments are especially prone to...
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Apple says “OK, now you can worry about those options”
A couple of weeks ago, Apple Computer announced a better-than-expected quarter, and also mentioned that they didn’t expect any “material adjustments” to result from their stock options accounting...
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The investor sentiment cycle, tech and web 2.0
Silicon Valley is built on optimism and entrepreneurship, but lately, most tech companies can do no good in the eyes of public market investors, who are presently in a mood to sell on no news, bad...
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US housing and the stock market
In the past ten years (1996-2006), the NAHB homebuilders index tends to lead the performance of the S&P 500 by 12 months. The index goes from is based on a survey of homebuilding companies views...
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Correlated risks
Today was a notable down day for most investors. This is a snapshot of the WSJ’s market heat map after today’s close, as monochromatic as I’ve ever seen it. (Update – see TraderMike’s recap of the...
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A day later, a little bounce
Got a relatively weak bounce today after yesterday’s excitement. Here’s a look at today’s market heat map after the close. There’s a lot of green, but this was pretty unenthusiastic. I wasn’t too...
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How to win a million dollars
CNBC is running a stock trading contest starting today, with a prize of one million dollars for the best performance by May 25th. Signing up is free. Each participant gets a notional $1,000,000 to...
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Moving up in the standings, but not for long
It’s hard to find high volatility stocks that are likely to move up in this market. I made a little progress on the CNBC stock contest, but this is going to be a lot lower tomorrow when they update...
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Insufficient volatility to win
I’m currently in the top 4% at 14746 in the CNBC contest. Oddly, they don’t publish the portfolio values on their website, but did show the current portfolio values and standings on TV last Friday....
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Not bad for real money, but not enough for paper trading
It appears I didn’t win the CNBC stock contest, ending up at +30%. The leading portfolios were something like $4-5MM, so there is a huge spread in that top 2% bracket.
View ArticleHacking the stock trading contests
Both CNBC and TheStreet.com have separately reported problems with their respective stock trading contests. The CNBC contest site apparently had a coding flaw that allowed traders to open an order...
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Fast Money at the Computer History Museum
This afternoon I was in the audience at the CNBC Fast Money show, which was taping on the road at the Computer History Museum. Many of the attendees were customers at Charles Schwab, which is holding...
View ArticleMay as well put this guy in charge of the banks
Another day, another subprime-related fiasco. Today GE Asset Management announced that one of its not-quite-money-market short bond funds, the Enhanced Cash Trust, took a loss from subprime holdings,...
View ArticleBookmarks for May 14th through May 15th
These are my links for May 14th through May 15th: Congratulations, Google staff: $210k in profit per head in 2008 | Royal Pingdom – Google had $209,624 in profit per employee in 2008, which beats all...
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