I remember seeing an interview on TV with some guy who’d made millions from spread betting. Not doing it – selling it. And he came out with what I later determined to be a stupid thing to say: “trading is easy, it’s just 50:50. Things either go up or they go down”. What a crock!…
I was at the Royal College of Surgeons last night for the Sir Thomas Gresham Finance Lecture. It was titled ‘Public Interest versus Private Profit – New Models of Risk Sharing’ and was focussed on insurance. Particularly the role government plays in underwriting risk that the public need but which insurers are reticent to provide…
I got an email from IG Index saying how they’re offering some new enhancements on their deal ticket. I designed a much better deal ticket than any that exists in the market place over 10 years ago. There are certain things you need to know when you’re trading and most of them aren’t made available…
It’s a strange existence when you’re focussed on trading. Rather like a soldier has to dehumanise his enemy to be effective, we have to distance ourselves in a similar way to be objective. I got all excited yesterday about seeing some shops closed because it’s another brick in the wall of market failure. If you…
Today here’s one of my Technical Workshop Analysis Tuesday posts or TWAT for short. It’s part of a series of about one million articles to undo some of the damage done by sub-standard private investor training in the UK! If you go on one of these courses you’ll be told about some strategy by someone…
There are lots of things that have no bearing on the stock market right now, and Corbyn is one of them. En passant, he poses an interesting question for the Labour party. They now have a leader voted for by a clear majority of party members, but whose politics do not broadly agree with a…
Lyrics that are now too close to the bone for some are good fun in my book. One classic is the line in the Small Faces’ song ‘Itchycoo Park’: “we can miss out school (won’t that be cool), why go to learn the words of fools?” And another from Mungo Jerry’s ‘In The Summertime’: “Have…
The residential property market is one of the key drivers of the US and UK economies, although not so much in many parts of Europe where they still have a large proportion of renters. Our affair with property in this country started in the ’70s. Rampant inflation caused people to want a store of wealth…
Time for a quick review of the main markets, I think, following recent falls. Are we in a new era? Is it just a blip? I wrote a blog piece last month called ‘Is the Dow Jones Rolling Over’ in which I said that 17,000 was the key level. It failed there and fell really…
Putin has announced that he wants all former Soviet republics to stop using the US dollar. The US dollar has been the world’s reserve currency for quite some years now, and it gives the US an unfair advantage. When they print money it goes into a pool much bigger than their domestic economy. Basically they…
