I found this curious reference while reading The Drunkard's Walk - -
10/31/03 (CNN/Money) - From wearing the same lucky tie or underwear every day to using the same brand of pen, some traders are very superstitious when it comes to trading. "I never, ever, ever write with a red pen -- red signifies losses," said James Park, senior trader at Brean Murray & Co. "I also keep my desk completely organized. I feel the more organized I am, the better my stocks trade." Park added that when the going gets tough, the tough get food. He said the group at Brean Murray orders a bunch of White Castle burgers with cheese and conducts an eating contest when the market tanks. And there may have been more than one day in the past two weeks that Park and fellow traders stocked up on White Castles. One stock trader said he's entertaining buying more pet fish. "I had fish for a while, and after they died the market didn't do so well," said Brett Gallagher, head of U.S. equities at Julius Baer. Gallagher said one of the portfolio managers in his group believes that a self-contained eco-system, including shrimp that eat plants and whose waste then fertilizes the plants, is key to his success so far. Bond traders may be even more ritualistic. One trader told CNNfn there's a bathroom stall he never uses. "It has a really good track record for losing money," said Alan Palmer, an independent bond futures trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Experts said that superstitions generally run high in jobs that involve risk. "Traders have a very high-pressure job and it's very intense," Dr. Bennett Leventhal, professor at the University of Chicago, told CNNfn. "I think that for many of them the superstitions and the little rituals help them decrease the level of the pressure, the tension and the anxiety."
Be hopeful your broker isn't superstitious about his trading . . . . if he is, move on.
Jan. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Satyam Computer Services Ltd. chairman Ramalinga Raju and his brother Rama were arrested and the remaining directors of the software exporter sacked, as India started investigating an alleged $1 billion fraud.
The brothers were detained on charges including forgery, breach of trust and criminal conspiracy, Inspector General V.S.K. Kaumudi told reporters in the southern city of Hyderabad.
Officials have seized documents and the nation’s accounting body is examining auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers LLC’s local unit, Corporate Affairs Minister Prem Chand Gupta said.
“The developments so far indicate that the current board of Satyam has failed to do what it was supposed to do,” Gupta told reporters in New Delhi. “The government is committed to punish everyone found guilty, including the auditors.”
The world’s biggest owner of supertankers, said oil traders want to charter as many as 10 vessels to stockpile crude to take advantage of higher prices later in the year. About 25 supertankers were already hired for storage and there are enquiries for 5 to 10 more.
The traders would buy crude now and sell it for delivery later, profiting from a futures market situation called contango where prices are higher as the year progresses. The vessels could handle as much as 20 million barrels, or about what is produced by OPEC member Algeria in 15 days. They would add to as much as 50 million barrels already hoarded at sea, for a combined amount equal to almost five days of European Union demand.
“I’ve never before seen storage demand on this scale,” said Didier Labat, a Paris-based shipbroker at Barry Rogliano Salles who has worked in tanker markets for about 20 years.
Thirty-five supertankers represent about 7 percent of the global fleet of very large crude carriers, according to data from London-based Drewry Shipping Consultants Ltd. Storing oil in tankers may buoy rental rates that fell by a record 78 percent last year as slower economic growth sapped demand for energy. Traders are seeking to lease ships for three to nine months, Jensen said. Crude oil for December delivery traded at $61.90 a barrel as of 10:49 a.m. in London, $13.66 more than the February contract. Oil companies and traders may be able to profit from storing the oil, assuming shipping, insurance and financing costs are covered.
A supertanker would cost about 90 cents a barrel a month for storage depending on the length of the rental, according to data last month from shipbroker Galbraith’s Ltd.
Iran, the second-largest member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries after Saudi Arabia, idled as many as 15 of its biggest ships in May to store crude oil. That contributed to three consecutive months of higher rental rates for ships.
The cost of delivering Middle East oil to Asia, the world’s busiest route for supertankers, rose yesterday for the first time since Dec. 5, according to the Baltic Exchange in London.
The next breakcame when two men who are now known to have been in the Illuminati gave John Jacob Astor a special government privilege. The two men were President Jefferson and Secretary Gallatin--both Illuminati members. The United States government had placed an embargo on all U.S. ships from sailing with goods in 1807. But Astor got special permission from these two men for his ship to sail with its cargo. His ship sailed and made close to a $200,000 profit in that day’s money. Astor strangely profited greatly from the War of 1812, which crippled almost all the other American shippers. Prior to 1817, John Jacob Astor entered into the fur trade and remained the biggest player in the fur trade until he got out of it in 1834. Over the years, he had managed to build up a monopoly. How he managed to push everyone else out is a good question.
“The number of people out of the labor force — meaning that they were neither working nor looking for work and that the government did not consider them unemployed — jumped by 637,000 last month, the Labor Department said. The number of part-time workers who said they wanted full-time work — all counted as fully employed — rose by an additional 621,000.
Already, the share of men older than 20 with jobs was at its lowest point last month since 1983, and very close to the low point of the last 60 years. The share of women with jobs is lower than it was eight years ago, which never happened in previous decades.”
is to be headed by former Fed Chief Paul Volcker.
The WSJ noted today that the panel is “modeled on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board established by then-President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, at the height of the Cold War, when officials worried that that the existing bureaucratic structure was inadequate to help the U.S. keep pace with the Soviet threat. The financial crisis has drawn similar worries that the government isn’t properly organized to monitor and respond to modern financial markets.”
The first thing you can do to feel better when someone gives you a gift is to realize that the giver put effort into thinking of a gift for you by going through the process if finding and buying it, or perhaps in making the gift. Don’t feel guilty when you think of this! But realize that no one made the giver think of giving a gift and no one made her go out and get it. She chose to do this herself. Many people enjoy the whole gift giving process. So the whole time, up to and including the point when they gave you their gift, they’ve been doing something pleasant and enjoying themselves.
Index funds, which represent about 10 percent of the stock market, ``got $5 billion from owning BUD.'' BUD is the ticker symbol for Anheuser-Busch, brewer of Budweiser beer. ``The stock that was added was a $500 million weight, so about $4.5 billion has to be put to work,'' said Buek. ``That money was spent across the other 499 names. To perfectly track the close, you'd want to put the $4.5 billion to work on the close.''
4 years ago Bill Fleckenstein wrote . . . "I think the party that has won, in this case the Republicans, might want to be careful what they wish for, in that both the stock and real-estate bubbles will unwind on their watch, with them in full control of the House, the Senate, the presidency and the governorships.
"Perhaps we'll all get lucky and the Republican Party will decide to pursue a flat tax, tort reform, and term limits -- the three major areas of reform which I believe could help the country become more competitive and help extricate us from the horrible fix that I see us in. However, if they continue the pork-barrel politics of the last four years, I would think that next go-round, the Republicans will be bounced from office after people's hopes are dashed in the upcoming economic turmoil."
To review the point that I made in Chapter 7 of my book "Greenspan's Bubbles" and in many columns: In the past expansion, economic growth was almost entirely about real estate. Gross-domestic-product growth, excluding mortgage-equity extraction, was almost nonexistent. In addition, when you consider that 30% to 40% of all jobs were real-estate-oriented, it's clear how hollow the economy is liable to be going forward.
Considering the capital destruction and the credit contraction now under way, I have a hard time seeing where the new jobs will come from to handle all the layoffs that are going to take place. Given that lots of marginal businesses have survived on consumers' wild spending, many of them will not make it as folks retrench aggressively. That's on top of all the carnage in anything related to real estate or finance. click here for more
Their task is to take risks, calculating potential costs for themselves. But they do not take into account the consequences of their losses for the economy as a whole.
Hence the financial market "underprices risk" and is "systematically inefficient," as John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalization and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred - and also proposing solutions, which have been ignored.
The threat became more severe when the Clinton administration repealed the Glass-Steagall act of 1933, thus freeing financial institutions "to innovate in the new economy," in Clinton's words -- and also "to self-destruct, taking down with them the general economy and international confidence in the US banking system," financial analyst Nomi Prins adds.
The unprecedented intervention of the Fed may be justified or not in narrow terms, but it reveals, once again, the profoundly undemocratic character of state capitalist institutions, designed in large measure to socialise cost and risk and privatize profit, without a public voice.
That is, of course, not limited to financial markets. The advanced economy as a whole relies heavily on the dynamic state sector, with much the same consequences with regard to risk, cost, profit, and decisions, crucial features of the economy and political system.
to read more about Noam Chomsky click here
``The forced sale was due to the precipitous drop in XL's share price last week,'' O'Hara said in a statement distributed by PR Newswire today.
from Barry Ritholz at Big Picture blog
To repeat my prior arguments, the proximate cause of the Housing crisis were 1) Ultra-low rates; and 2) Abdication of traditional lending standards, thanks to 3) originators ability to resell mortgages for securitization purposes, and therefore not have to worry about loan defaults.
The credit crisis was caused by 1) the above securitized mortgage paper, that was 2) rated triple AAA by Moody's and Standard & Poors, which then 3) Which was then "insured" by credit default swaps (CDS) -- the unreserved for, shadow insurance products whose exemption was made possible by the Commodities Futures Modernization Act. That legislation exempted these derivatives from any supervision or regulation. The lack of reserve requirements is why there is now $62 trillion in CDS, many of which will never pay their counter parties the promised insurance.
If you are going to blame Fannie/Freddie/CRA, or George Bush or Barney Frank, you are missing the big picture.
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