Moneyterms Blog

How and why you can beat the market part one: irrationality

I promised (on both a comment on Interactive Investor and an earlier post here) to explain why I think it is possible to identify areas of market — or how to tell when every one else is wrong.

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Financial advisers to be independent

The FSA has finally decided that it would be a good idea for “Independent Financial Advisers” to actually be independent. One would have thought it completely obvious that a salesman on commission was an unlikely source of impartial advice. It has finally become obvious to the regulator.

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Active investors lose

I was wondering whether this was worth blogging on again, but Richard Beddard made up my mind with his attack on the efficent markets hypothesis, and his defence of active investing.

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Crowdsourcing investing

A number of websites have attempted to crowdsource stock-picking. This shows a fundamental failure to understand the markets. Attempts to crowdsource investment research are not much better. (more…)

Who should have known the crunch was coming

Who should have known that the credit crunch and ensuing recessions were possible, let alone likely? I think I can safely say far, far more people than those who actually did — not least because those few did try to warn the rest of us, but because there were other indications of trouble ahead.

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Gold bulls beware

Gold bulls have been arguing for years that demand growth would come from growing jewellery sales in emerging markets. Now they are arguing that gold is counter cyclical and demand will be driven by investors globally seeking a safe haven asset. They seem to be forgetting what is happening to demand in emerging markets.

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The moral of Woolworths

The failure of Woolworths has (naturally) attracted a huge amount of comment and analysis, but there is one general lesson about retailers that I think needs to be highlighted.

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The Irish (economic) problem

The numbers in this article on the damage an Obama clamp-down on tax havens could do to Ireland ought to be badly frighten anyone exposed to the Irish economy.

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The rate cut might not help much

There are a two reasons why the rate cut might not help as much as hoped — and why a big rate cut was required.

The first, which has attracted the most attention, is that it may not be passed on in full to borrowers. The other is that interest is a smaller component of the cash outflows on loans than in the past.

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Magical market efficiency

Richard Beddard’s comments on my recent book review, picks up on Mandelbrot’s criticisms of the efficient markets hypothesis. However, Mandelbrot also describes how remarkably efficient markets can be. (more…)