There is a brilliant doctor in NZ, a plastic surgeon to begin with, who is also a research scientist. Nothing too dramatic about that, except that in doing plastic surgery, he covered a lot of birthmarks on kids. He researched into it with hospital and research funding and when that ran out, he put his own money into it. He has managed to obliterate many birthmarks using novel and less invasive ways of treatment. What is remarkable is that his research is a big stepping stone to curing cancerous tumors.
Birthmarks will grow and multiply, they have stem cells and blood vessels (quite a major discovery by Prof Swee Tan), which means its close to tumors that grow. However, most birthmarks stopped growing after a while as if there is a stop switch. It is that stop switch that Prof Swee Tan is looking for which could very well be the key to curing or stopping cancerous growth.
So, why the headline? Well, he was born and raised in Malaysia. Did his university in Australia but OZ rules that all overseas students had to leave the country on completion. However, it was NZ which saw his potential contribution early and took him in.
Is it Malaysia's loss or Australia's loss??? .... Nah, top local political honchos will just shrug their shoulders saying "apa itu ..., di sini apa pun tarak... buat apa kita try to attract him to stay in Malaysia".
Side note, we have natural resources, we even have great tracts of land for development, Nusajaya is fine but we are at a loss to attract the right people and industry. Imagine over the years, we probably have let slipped at least 100 super achiever types like Prof Swee Tan. If we had nurtured them, provided the funding, resources and attention, we could have a viable plastic surgery sub industry, and we would have Koreans coming to our shores for surgery and not the other way around. And that is ONE TINY LITTLE EXAMPLE. Which is also why the Talent Corp won't be effective because its trying to bring down King Kong with shots of rubber bands from your fingers. It has to be a holistic top-down, from ground zero change of mindset, of education, of entitlement,of meritocracy, of citizenry ...
I believe the Australian medical community regard that as a very big loss - in terms of research leadership and flow on benefits.
But the one reading this feeling most angry , perplexed and disappointed should be the Singapore government "wtf... how can we let that slip through our talent netting, unforgivable, this is easy meat ... we must always take full advantage of 'meats' raised in Malaysia and then they simply allow us to take them in their productive years".
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
First 5 Trading Days of January
2013 has got off to a good start. Santa delivered 2% gain and the first 5 days have delivered 2.2% gain in SPX. The following is from Stock Trader's Almanac:
The last 40 up First Five Days were followed by full-year gains 34 times for an 85.0% accuracy ratio and a 13.6% average gain in all 40 years. In post-presidential election years this indicator has a solid record. Just six of the last fifteen post-election-year’s First Five Days showed gains. Only 1973 was a loser at the start of the major bear caused by Vietnam, Watergate and the Arab Oil Embargo. The other four years gained 22.8% on average (1961, 1965, 1989, 1997, and 2009).
There are couple of nice posts in Bloomberg about the money losing short trades in 2012:
Okay, the headlines are mine but you get the idea.
Does it mean we can now buy some calls on SPY and forget about the market for the rest of the year? Not really. It is going to be a challenging year to say the least. Taxes have gone up. Net consumer earnings will go down and world growth remains a distant memory. At some point markets will catch up with fundamentals. Million dollar question is: when? Well, honestly, no body knows and I am no exception. But at least I have been steadfast in saying that do not short the market and even when I had taken a short position, I was quick to get out. In my heart I am a big bear but I also know that economy and stock markets are two different animals:
So right now I am long and waiting to add to long on weakness. There is only one short trade in commodities . Earlier I would normally deal in indices but this time I have a bunch of individual stocks and ETFs which I think will do better than the average market. Let us see how it goes.
The Godfather of Low Volatility investing , Bob Haugen passed away. I would like to share the following with the readers which resonates with me very well and is actually very similar to my principle of "Relaxed Investor": http://www.marketwatch.com/story/remembering-the-father-of-low-volatility-investing-2013-01-07
Coming back to markets and away from equities, I think coal has made a bottom and coffee is in the process of making one. Normally Crude takes a dive in January but so far this year, it has held steady. Similarly, gold and silver are also making a base. Grains are still few weeks away from making a tradable low.
This week, so far the equity indices are in a consolidation mode and is digesting the gains. We are close to the highs of 2012 and SPX is facing resistance. I would have liked the correction to be little more deep but it is what it is. May be we will get few more days of small reds. Then again, these days I find more opportunities in commodities than in equities. Bonds are out of bounds for me for now because they are moving in a range.
That's all for this evening. Hope you are having a great time and thanks for sharing my thoughts. Stay nimble and good luck trading.
Time Travel
How many can you identify?
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Thats Jimi Hendrix with Mick Jagger
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Not many will get this one, Charlie Chaplin with Albert Einstein
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This one is very hard, James Dean with Elizabeth Taylor
Oh, Mr. President, you make Clinton look like an angel
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Madness of Crowds (Properly Incentivised of course)
This may sound like a "racist posting" but its not, but no need to justify or defend really, facts are facts. Why is it Chinese tourists become a lot more belligerent than travelers from other countries? It happened for tourists from other countries as well, but certainly not the frequency we see from Chinese from China.
I mean, seriously, if you fly in America, the number of times your planes get delayed or canceled due to inclement weather (esp during winter) are enormous. Sure you will get angry but what can they do, they cannot fly in those weather??!! These people learnt fast that the louder and more vociferous you are as a group, the better the compensation for food and lodging, plus inconvenience caused.
I believe its motivated by two main factors:
a) the louder and more belligerent you get, the higher the chances of getting "paid off" by the airlines. There were plenty of cases in HK where the Chinese tourists will stay on the tour bus or planes and refused to budge, and even have team leader for negotiations for compensation ... sigh ...
b) crowd mentality, or madness of crowds, all you need is an instigator and apparently there are plenty of them around ... just like guys are usually assholes in groups, you know they behave like idiots in a group (macho posturing) e.g. construction site workers whistling and making lewd remarks to girls passing by ... but the same idiots are pretty quiet when they are alone when a girl passes by ... sigh ...
Do we have the same idiots in Malaysia? Why, yes of course, some political parties will always have some idiots doing the slogan shouting and intimidation ... you fill in the blanks. When we can be motivated or incentivised to do stupid things with just a paltry sum, we are idiots.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/wild-scenes-as-passengers-vent-anger-over-delays-20130107-2cbvr.html#ixzz2HGuc6FcJ
I mean, seriously, if you fly in America, the number of times your planes get delayed or canceled due to inclement weather (esp during winter) are enormous. Sure you will get angry but what can they do, they cannot fly in those weather??!! These people learnt fast that the louder and more vociferous you are as a group, the better the compensation for food and lodging, plus inconvenience caused.
I believe its motivated by two main factors:
a) the louder and more belligerent you get, the higher the chances of getting "paid off" by the airlines. There were plenty of cases in HK where the Chinese tourists will stay on the tour bus or planes and refused to budge, and even have team leader for negotiations for compensation ... sigh ...
b) crowd mentality, or madness of crowds, all you need is an instigator and apparently there are plenty of them around ... just like guys are usually assholes in groups, you know they behave like idiots in a group (macho posturing) e.g. construction site workers whistling and making lewd remarks to girls passing by ... but the same idiots are pretty quiet when they are alone when a girl passes by ... sigh ...
Do we have the same idiots in Malaysia? Why, yes of course, some political parties will always have some idiots doing the slogan shouting and intimidation ... you fill in the blanks. When we can be motivated or incentivised to do stupid things with just a paltry sum, we are idiots.
Stranded travellers argue with police and airport officials at Changshui International Airport. Photo: AFP
Thousands of angry passengers were stranded after heavy fog delayed flights at a Chinese airport early on Saturday, as the country was shivered through its coldest weather in almost three decades.
Ten thousand passengers were stuck in Changshui International Airport in the southern Chinese city of Kunming on Saturday morning after thick fog grounded more than 280 flights, state-run Xinhua news agency said.
Angry passengers stranded at the airport for more than a day struggled with airline staff, damaging computer equipment belonging to an airline, while police broke up scuffles, a photographer present at the scene late on Friday said.
Stranded travellers crowd an airline counter at Changshui International Airport in Kunming after massive flight delays. Photo: AFP
"The passengers were really furious, they kept going to the service desk to ask for information, but didn't get any answers," the photographer said.
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Flights at the airport resumed on Saturday afternoon after the fog lifted, Xinhua said.
Air passengers in China have developed a reputation for going to extreme measures to vent their anger over delayed and cancelled flights. Cabin crew have been assaulted, passengers have run out on to the tarmac and even opened emergency exits to get off planes.
Stranded travellers argue with police and airline staff at Changshui International Airport. Photo: AFP
In October, a Jetstar crew was held hostage by angry passengers at Shanghai Airport after a delay due to fog. On that occasion, up to 150 passengers cornered the flight crew when they attempted to leave after the delay pushed them over their legal flying hours limit.
A witness told Fairfax Media at the time that security, immigration and customs officials stood by and watched while the crew were cornered and intimidated.
In another incident last year around 20 angry passengers dashed towards the runway at Shanghai's main international airport, coming within 200 metres of an oncoming plane from the United Arab Emirates. Their action was sparked by a 16-hour flight delay.
Stranded travellers argue with police and airline personnel at Changshui International Airport. Photo: AFP
It was not clear why they charged on to to the tarmac, unless they were seeking to create a scene in order to boost their chances of getting compensation.
In August, two passengers furious after being refused compensation for a delay yanked open an emergency exit door on their plane – resulting in a further delay.
The cause of these protests partly lies with the Chinese carriers themselves. It is not uncommon for passengers to have to wait for hours inside a plane or at the boarding gate without any information about how long the delay might last.
A woman is helped by police and airline personnel after being pushed by the crowd of stranded travellers. Photo: AFP
Air travel is growing rapidly in China, but the country's air corridors remain restricted by the government, creating a clogged, struggling air travel network.
Some 30 years ago, flying was a travel option only available to top government and company officials who needed to submit a special document from their employer to buy a plane ticket.
While most Chinese people still use trains for long-distance travel because of the lower cost, rising income and cheaper flights as a result of increased competition means more are now using planes.
Travellers argue with police and airline staff at Changshui International Airport in Kunming. Photo: AFP
Over 270 million passengers flew on domestic routes in China last year, up nearly 10 per cent from 2010 and over 70 per cent from 2003, according to government data. The International Air Transport Association projects 379 million will be flying domestically by 2014.
China is suffering its coldest winter for 28 years, the news agency on Saturday quoted China's Meteorological Administration as saying.
Temperatures recorded over the country since November have averaged minus 3.8 degrees Celsius, while northeast China saw average temperatures of minus 15.3 degrees Celsius, its coldest winter for 43 years.
Plunging temperatures trapped around 1000 ships in sea ice off eastern China's Shandong province this week, Xinhua reported, while snowfall delayed more than 140 flights in Beijing last month, the China Daily said.
An annual Ice and Snow Festival in the northeastern city of Harbin, famous for its enormous ice-sculptures, opened yesterday as temperatures in the city fall below minus 24 degrees Celsius.
Temperatures in northern China are expected to pick up this week, although parts of south China will continue to experience snow, Xinhua reported.
AFP/Reuters
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/wild-scenes-as-passengers-vent-anger-over-delays-20130107-2cbvr.html#ixzz2HGuc6FcJ
Inequality, chemistry and crime
My latest column in Bloomberg (published Sunday night in the US, I think) looks a little at the link between socioeconomic inequality and crime. That there is such a link has been established rather convincingly by statistical analyses across many nations spanning decades. This was all laid out convincingly in the 2009 book The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. See also this short TED talk by Wilkinson which covers the main points very clearly.
But I also referred (rather vaguely) in my column to two other lines of research that deserve some discussion. One is an idea in criminology known as "routine activity theory" which has increasingly become a branch of applied computational social science. In effect, it views crime as a kind of natural social chemistry taking place between potential offenders and targets, and has a good track record in accounting for empirical patterns of crimes of all kinds by considering simple factors such as patterns of human movement on streets, of street lighting, of building architecture and so on. It more or less gives up on thinking about the deep psychology of crime and its motivation. In general, this perspective asserts, you tend to get more crime where you have more targets coming together more frequently with more potential offenders, just as you get more chemical reactions whenever potential reactant molecules come into contact more frequently. I've written about this a little before in New Scientist (a copy of that article is on the web here).
The empirical success of routine activity theory is sometimes taken as evidence that factors such as poverty and social inequality don't matter in crime, as the theory doesn't explicitly consider such factors. This is a serious misunderstanding. After all, the theory focuses on the factors that bring together potential or motivated offenders with potential targets, and doesn't attempt to explore the factors that might give a person the motivation to commit crime in the first place. Here the analogy to chemistry is again constructive, I think. In chemistry, reactants coming together isn't enough. They generally need sufficient energy (or a catalyst) to help them overcome an energy barrier (caused by repulsive forces between molecules) before they can react. It's entirely plausible to think of prevailing social norms as a kind of energy barrier to the commission of crimes, as these forces tend to persuade people to avoid crime. In general, we should expect high levels of trust and strong social norms to suppress and discourage crime, much as a lowering the temperature of a chemical solution makes reactions go more slowly. (Low temperature increases the effective size of energy barriers to reaction, which must be overcome by collisions between molecules; these are stronger at higher temperatures.)
Analogies aside, the point is that routine activity theory actually fits together quite well with the existence of larger social factors that influence overall probabilities of crime. The factors considered in the theory can determine detailed patterns of crime, even as the larger global factors influence overall rates. The work considered by Wilkinson and Pickett strongly suggests that social inequality is one of the most important global factors encouraging crime (and other measures of social dysfunction).
The second body of work I wanted to add a little detail on looks at what creates high levels of inequality in the first place. On the drivers of inequality, of course, there is a huge literature in social science and economics and I don't pretend to be an expert on it. However, there is an interesting perspective motivated by physics that I think should be much more widely known. This paper from several years ago by Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and Marc Mezard analyses a very simple model of an economy and shows that a high level of economic inequality is a more or less generic and unavoidable outcome. It is something to be expected on mathematical grounds alone. The basic idea is to model an economy as a system in which wealth flows around among people by two fundamentally different processes. First, it flows between individuals when they make exchanges or trades, through contracts, employment, sales and so on. Second, wealth also accrues to individuals (or departs from them) on account of investments in instruments yielding uncertain returns. Importantly, the second factor contributes an element to individual wealth that involves a random multiplicative factor -- random because investments are uncertain, and multiplicative because, quite sensibly, the wealthier invest more than the poorer, and typically more in direct proportion to their wealth. The poor partake very weakly in this multiplicative channel to wealth growth, while the wealthy participate progressively more strongly.
Bouchaud and Mezard showed that the inevitable outcome in such a basic system is that a large fraction of the total wealth in the economy ends up being held by a small faction of the population. This is the case even if every individual is considered to have the same inherent money making skills. (The authors, of course, do not believe this to be the case; but making this assumption makes it possible to explore how natural economic dynamics can drive large wealth disparities even in the absence of any differences in skill.) It's the multiplicative nature of the returns on investments that makes it happen. This pattern in the distribution of wealth holds in every nation and was known long ago, being first described by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. This paper gave to my knowledge the first really fundamental explanation of why this pattern holds everywhere. Since then a number of works have taken this approach much further.
However, the universal form of this distribution does not preclude the possibility of some societies being more unequal than others. You can have a society in which the top 5% hold 90% of the wealth, or in which that same top 5% holds 99.9% of the wealth. Such variations are driven by the relative strength of multiplicative returns on investment versus the flows in an economy that might act to reduce inequality. Obviously, taxation is one mechanism that leads to a redistribution of wealth from richer to poorer and one should expect, in a broad brush way, that lower taxes should tend to associate with higher levels of wealth inequality.
I strongly recommend this paper -- it's short and you can skip over some of the mathematical detail -- as it shows how some very important global economic realities may have quite simple underlying causes. The bigger problem, of course, is learning then how to craft real world policies so as to keep inequality within bounds, avoiding the many kinds of social dysfunction it clearly seems to give rise to.
But I also referred (rather vaguely) in my column to two other lines of research that deserve some discussion. One is an idea in criminology known as "routine activity theory" which has increasingly become a branch of applied computational social science. In effect, it views crime as a kind of natural social chemistry taking place between potential offenders and targets, and has a good track record in accounting for empirical patterns of crimes of all kinds by considering simple factors such as patterns of human movement on streets, of street lighting, of building architecture and so on. It more or less gives up on thinking about the deep psychology of crime and its motivation. In general, this perspective asserts, you tend to get more crime where you have more targets coming together more frequently with more potential offenders, just as you get more chemical reactions whenever potential reactant molecules come into contact more frequently. I've written about this a little before in New Scientist (a copy of that article is on the web here).
The empirical success of routine activity theory is sometimes taken as evidence that factors such as poverty and social inequality don't matter in crime, as the theory doesn't explicitly consider such factors. This is a serious misunderstanding. After all, the theory focuses on the factors that bring together potential or motivated offenders with potential targets, and doesn't attempt to explore the factors that might give a person the motivation to commit crime in the first place. Here the analogy to chemistry is again constructive, I think. In chemistry, reactants coming together isn't enough. They generally need sufficient energy (or a catalyst) to help them overcome an energy barrier (caused by repulsive forces between molecules) before they can react. It's entirely plausible to think of prevailing social norms as a kind of energy barrier to the commission of crimes, as these forces tend to persuade people to avoid crime. In general, we should expect high levels of trust and strong social norms to suppress and discourage crime, much as a lowering the temperature of a chemical solution makes reactions go more slowly. (Low temperature increases the effective size of energy barriers to reaction, which must be overcome by collisions between molecules; these are stronger at higher temperatures.)
Analogies aside, the point is that routine activity theory actually fits together quite well with the existence of larger social factors that influence overall probabilities of crime. The factors considered in the theory can determine detailed patterns of crime, even as the larger global factors influence overall rates. The work considered by Wilkinson and Pickett strongly suggests that social inequality is one of the most important global factors encouraging crime (and other measures of social dysfunction).
The second body of work I wanted to add a little detail on looks at what creates high levels of inequality in the first place. On the drivers of inequality, of course, there is a huge literature in social science and economics and I don't pretend to be an expert on it. However, there is an interesting perspective motivated by physics that I think should be much more widely known. This paper from several years ago by Jean-Philippe Bouchaud and Marc Mezard analyses a very simple model of an economy and shows that a high level of economic inequality is a more or less generic and unavoidable outcome. It is something to be expected on mathematical grounds alone. The basic idea is to model an economy as a system in which wealth flows around among people by two fundamentally different processes. First, it flows between individuals when they make exchanges or trades, through contracts, employment, sales and so on. Second, wealth also accrues to individuals (or departs from them) on account of investments in instruments yielding uncertain returns. Importantly, the second factor contributes an element to individual wealth that involves a random multiplicative factor -- random because investments are uncertain, and multiplicative because, quite sensibly, the wealthier invest more than the poorer, and typically more in direct proportion to their wealth. The poor partake very weakly in this multiplicative channel to wealth growth, while the wealthy participate progressively more strongly.
Bouchaud and Mezard showed that the inevitable outcome in such a basic system is that a large fraction of the total wealth in the economy ends up being held by a small faction of the population. This is the case even if every individual is considered to have the same inherent money making skills. (The authors, of course, do not believe this to be the case; but making this assumption makes it possible to explore how natural economic dynamics can drive large wealth disparities even in the absence of any differences in skill.) It's the multiplicative nature of the returns on investments that makes it happen. This pattern in the distribution of wealth holds in every nation and was known long ago, being first described by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. This paper gave to my knowledge the first really fundamental explanation of why this pattern holds everywhere. Since then a number of works have taken this approach much further.
However, the universal form of this distribution does not preclude the possibility of some societies being more unequal than others. You can have a society in which the top 5% hold 90% of the wealth, or in which that same top 5% holds 99.9% of the wealth. Such variations are driven by the relative strength of multiplicative returns on investment versus the flows in an economy that might act to reduce inequality. Obviously, taxation is one mechanism that leads to a redistribution of wealth from richer to poorer and one should expect, in a broad brush way, that lower taxes should tend to associate with higher levels of wealth inequality.
I strongly recommend this paper -- it's short and you can skip over some of the mathematical detail -- as it shows how some very important global economic realities may have quite simple underlying causes. The bigger problem, of course, is learning then how to craft real world policies so as to keep inequality within bounds, avoiding the many kinds of social dysfunction it clearly seems to give rise to.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Official End of Santa Rally
Santa Rally officially consists of last five trading days of December and first two trading days of January. It seems this year, Santa's elves and reindeer gang were on strike and Santa was late in coming to Wall St.
Santa was hanging near the cliff and somehow made peace and arrived just in the nick of time. Now that we have the end of Santa Rally, SPX is up 1.5% during this period. During this period we have also seen back to back accumulation days which A/D ratio at 17:1 and 12:1. Very robust to say the least. Consider this, SPX is 14% higher today than it was at this time last year. And still we want to make money shorting the market?
Next we need to see the 1st five trading days of January and we want them to be positive.
Does anyone remember last January? The market kept grinding up and up till March and everyone kept shorting the market till there were no bears in town. I suspect this year we will have a repeat because already I am hearing about folks shorting the index and talking about over bought. They forget that overbought can remain overbought for a long time. While I do expect a short term correction, I do not want to short the market because cycles have bottomed and is up for quite a while. Any correction will be an opportunity to add to the existing long positions.
It is a fool's errand to predict the future but if I have to make a guess, I would think that correction would come towards the end of next week. The market may just grind around this level for few days, consolidating and correcting in time if not in price. SPX may even target 1475 before correcting back to 1450 level for the next upward journey.
I am yet to see anyone who is happy about 2012. The beginning of the year was a wash for TA enthusiasts who kept calling for corrections day after day. The 2nd half was a massive meat grinder with chops and whipsaws. Almost all of Wall St. got 2012 market calls wrong : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-04/almost-all-of-wall-street-got-2012-market-calls-wrong.html
Coming back to Friday's market action, the most notable thing was the collapse of VIX.
This is a weekly chart and as you can see VIX has not been so low since 2007. If you remember my last post (only few days back) I wrote that I expect VIX to reach in low double figure and we still have 3 more points to go before we reach bottom. And no, I am not going to buy UVXY or TVX even if VIX goes up a little by middle of January, because the dominant cycle for VIX is pointing down. I would never trade against cycles, even if I have to give up some trades or profits because I believe in "safety first".
So how was your market return in 2012? I want to share an article written by Phil Pearlman, executive director and investor of Stocktwits: Successful market participation is a gruelling process, a marathon. There are so many components and it is such a complex challenge that you must spend years improving while facing serious stress and financial setbacks. You will need to master multiple skills and it will take time.
Next we need to see the 1st five trading days of January and we want them to be positive.
Does anyone remember last January? The market kept grinding up and up till March and everyone kept shorting the market till there were no bears in town. I suspect this year we will have a repeat because already I am hearing about folks shorting the index and talking about over bought. They forget that overbought can remain overbought for a long time. While I do expect a short term correction, I do not want to short the market because cycles have bottomed and is up for quite a while. Any correction will be an opportunity to add to the existing long positions.
It is a fool's errand to predict the future but if I have to make a guess, I would think that correction would come towards the end of next week. The market may just grind around this level for few days, consolidating and correcting in time if not in price. SPX may even target 1475 before correcting back to 1450 level for the next upward journey.
I am yet to see anyone who is happy about 2012. The beginning of the year was a wash for TA enthusiasts who kept calling for corrections day after day. The 2nd half was a massive meat grinder with chops and whipsaws. Almost all of Wall St. got 2012 market calls wrong : http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-04/almost-all-of-wall-street-got-2012-market-calls-wrong.html
Coming back to Friday's market action, the most notable thing was the collapse of VIX.
This is a weekly chart and as you can see VIX has not been so low since 2007. If you remember my last post (only few days back) I wrote that I expect VIX to reach in low double figure and we still have 3 more points to go before we reach bottom. And no, I am not going to buy UVXY or TVX even if VIX goes up a little by middle of January, because the dominant cycle for VIX is pointing down. I would never trade against cycles, even if I have to give up some trades or profits because I believe in "safety first".
So how was your market return in 2012? I want to share an article written by Phil Pearlman, executive director and investor of Stocktwits: Successful market participation is a gruelling process, a marathon. There are so many components and it is such a complex challenge that you must spend years improving while facing serious stress and financial setbacks. You will need to master multiple skills and it will take time.
For 2013, you will not need to or be able to conquer it all.
Instead, choose one critical aspect of this craft to improve on and then make it your mission to crush that one thing.
For some of you, this will mean risk management but it may be something else like managing trades once you are in them or trade selection.
But whatever you choose, that one important thing, devour it, become it, crush it…
Focus on that one thing with religious fervor. Learn everything you can, seek guidance from those who have been successful, read about it everywhere, consume yourself in it, think about it when you should be doing other things and cultivate your own process.
Then practice practice practice that one thing you will improve in your trading until it becomes so automatic and so much a part of your routine that you do it every single solitary time as a function of habit.
Very Prophetic! For my part, I am working on risk management and preservation of capital. What is your goal for 2013?
We have scaled in our positions and will add more on weakness. I think Gold and Gold Miners have made a bottom. Although I have not taken any position in GDX, I thought it would be interesting to share this chart of gold miners with you:
(H/T: Arthur Hill, Stock Charts.com)
Seasonality also favours the PM sector.
That's all for this weekend. Thank you for reading the blog. Please forward it to your friends who may like it. I look forward to your comments and suggestions.
We have scaled in our positions and will add more on weakness. I think Gold and Gold Miners have made a bottom. Although I have not taken any position in GDX, I thought it would be interesting to share this chart of gold miners with you:
(H/T: Arthur Hill, Stock Charts.com)
Seasonality also favours the PM sector.
That's all for this weekend. Thank you for reading the blog. Please forward it to your friends who may like it. I look forward to your comments and suggestions.
FOCUS vs The Edge
I read a couple of issues of Focus, the new weekly business magazine, it was pretty good. But I opted to wait for another issue before issuing a verdict. Got the latest issue. The tag line for Focus is "business analysed" and they stick pretty close to that.
The Edge is a victim of posturing towards their revenue, i.e. too much of the publication is geared towards lifestyle articles, which makes it a lot more like a watered down issue of Prestige or The Peak. We cannot really blame The Edge for that, I guess, I mean, the advertisers are the luxury products and property companies after all (largely).
Does that mean we cannot get a more than decent business weekly? Will it be supported by advertisers then or will they go down the same road as The Edge?
Focus is very good (for now). Staying true to the tag line, it covers not just listed companies but also business policy issues and SMEs, and even little private enterprises.
The article on Air Asia charging RM75 processing fee for a customer to recoup RM25 in airport tax was, shall I say, necessary and audacious, the former applying to the business transparency and the latter to Air Asia.
The spotlight on the high cost of international schools was very good and informative. We have to ask ourselves why? Why the proliferation of international schools?
Their pullout edition is not "luxury goods" thankfully but people and life. It focuses on enterprising people in business. Things which are very much business in nature and exciting to know and examine further. How the Tom Dick & Harry team are expanding much like Ben/Plan B, sounds exciting to note.
The pullout also has a brief article on "nostalgia businesses", though it deserves a much longer article. Why are they succeeding or is it just kopitiams and refurbished hotels? Why are we clamouring for nostalgia? Is that viable or a fad as a business platform. The failure of Heritage Row could have been expanded to note the pitfalls for other entrepreneurs.
The columnists are a lot more relevant than The Edge. They examine current and local issues, things we want to read, be discussed and dissected. The Edge has too many columnists writing about things we don't care about, or so peripheral we just keep on flipping. The Edge already has too many syndicated articles (i.e. from other publications / financial media outlets).
I hope Focus stays on the path and won't pander to the advertisers like The Edge. I hope there are more advertisers who will support Focus so that they can stay true as well. Hard balance to strike.
Verdict: Focus gives a lot more bite per ringgit. Good balance on issues, listed companies, investigative reporting, SMEs and smaller private enterprising businesses.
The Edge is a victim of posturing towards their revenue, i.e. too much of the publication is geared towards lifestyle articles, which makes it a lot more like a watered down issue of Prestige or The Peak. We cannot really blame The Edge for that, I guess, I mean, the advertisers are the luxury products and property companies after all (largely).
Does that mean we cannot get a more than decent business weekly? Will it be supported by advertisers then or will they go down the same road as The Edge?
Focus is very good (for now). Staying true to the tag line, it covers not just listed companies but also business policy issues and SMEs, and even little private enterprises.
The article on Air Asia charging RM75 processing fee for a customer to recoup RM25 in airport tax was, shall I say, necessary and audacious, the former applying to the business transparency and the latter to Air Asia.
The spotlight on the high cost of international schools was very good and informative. We have to ask ourselves why? Why the proliferation of international schools?
Their pullout edition is not "luxury goods" thankfully but people and life. It focuses on enterprising people in business. Things which are very much business in nature and exciting to know and examine further. How the Tom Dick & Harry team are expanding much like Ben/Plan B, sounds exciting to note.
The pullout also has a brief article on "nostalgia businesses", though it deserves a much longer article. Why are they succeeding or is it just kopitiams and refurbished hotels? Why are we clamouring for nostalgia? Is that viable or a fad as a business platform. The failure of Heritage Row could have been expanded to note the pitfalls for other entrepreneurs.
The columnists are a lot more relevant than The Edge. They examine current and local issues, things we want to read, be discussed and dissected. The Edge has too many columnists writing about things we don't care about, or so peripheral we just keep on flipping. The Edge already has too many syndicated articles (i.e. from other publications / financial media outlets).
I hope Focus stays on the path and won't pander to the advertisers like The Edge. I hope there are more advertisers who will support Focus so that they can stay true as well. Hard balance to strike.
Verdict: Focus gives a lot more bite per ringgit. Good balance on issues, listed companies, investigative reporting, SMEs and smaller private enterprising businesses.
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