Finance Stock Quotes

Babcock silenced himself when he caught a gratifying sight on the broker’s shelf—his finance book, Moving Ones and Zeros Around like a Goddamn God!

Babcock fidgeted with one of his cufflinks while staring down the remaining brokers in his office. He then delivered something akin to a pep talk in a severe tone. "... The world depends on our services. Services that must not be impeded. We don't break our backs producing things that have no real value—food, shelter, clothes ... art. No! We're titans of finance. We move intangible things and ideas around the world on digital platforms. No one else in the world can accumulate as much wealth as we do by simply moving around one and zeros on computers.

After all, what does the stock market sell us if not the unfounded hope of a rosy future?

The slave trade was not controlled by any state or government. It was a purely economic enterprise, organised and financed by the free market according to the laws of supply and demand. Private slave-trading companies sold shares on the Amsterdam, London and Paris stock exchanges. Middle-class Europeans looking for a good investment bought these shares. Relying on this money, the companies bought ships, hired sailors and soldiers, purchased slaves in Africa, and transported them to America. There they sold the slaves to the plantation owners, using the proceeds to purchase plantation products such as sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton and rum.

The fact that a thesis is flawed does not mean that we should not invest in it as long as other people believe in it and there is a large group of people left to be convinced. The point was made by John Maynard Keynes when he compared the stock market to a beauty contest where the winner is not the most beautiful contestant but the one whom the greatest number of people consider beautiful. Where I have something significant to add is in pointing out that it pays to look for the flaws; if we find them, we are ahead of the game because we can limit our losses when the market also discovers what we already know. It is when we are unaware of what could go wrong that we have to worry.

Losses are necessary, as long as they are associated with a technique to help you learn from them

No man can always have adequate reasons for buying or selling stocks daily - or sufficient knowledge to make his play an intelligent play.

We can't all be bakers or chefs. Many of us have modest ambitions. But we can all buy a piece of the pie.

Your money habits and investment strategy is not all about what you do, but much about who you are. Become the person it takes to do, succeed, and innovate.

Not money, Not skills, but Time is the biggest lever for massive wealth creation

One can try to evade the problem by adopting a ‘morality of intentions’. What’s important is what I intend, not what I actually do or the outcome of what I do. However, in a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know. The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed, but even more so from ignorance and indifference. Charming English ladies financed the Atlantic slave trade by buying shares and bonds in the London stock exchange, without ever setting foot in either Africa or the Caribbean. They then sweetened their four o’clock tea with snow-white sugar cubes produced in hellish plantations – about which they knew nothing.

Instead of stocks investors should invest in blankets, that way they’ll at least have something to keep them warm after they’ve lost all their money when the company goes under.

I love supporting the blue-chip companies’ revival. Shows wise when you are on the top and you are still not ignorant & arrogant to realise your weaknesses.

Everybody is a long-term investor till the market drops by 10% or more.

In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in — or more precisely not in — the country’s businesses and banks. This inventory — it should perhaps be called the bezzle — amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks. … Just as the boom accelerated the rate of growth, so the crash enormously advanced the rate of discovery. Within a few days, something close to a universal trust turned into something akin to universal suspicion. Audits were ordered. Strained or preoccupied behavior was noticed. Most important, the collapse in stock values made irredeemable the position of the employee who had embezzled to play the market. He now confessed.

A 10% loss in any investment can be recovered, not by 10%, but only by 11% gain. A 50% loss in any investment can be recovered only by 100% gain. And a 90% loss in any investment can be recovered only by a whopping 1,000% gain. Yes, all the above statements are true. Numbers can confuse the best of financial wizards. It needs a rare trait of common sense to unravel the mysteries of finance. For your investments: - Keep them Simple. - Avoid Jargons. - Exhibit Discipline. - Be Consistent. - Apply Common Sense

Would you believe me if I told you that there’s an investment strategy that a seven-year-old could understand, will take you fifteen minutes of work per year, outperform 90 percent of finance professionals in the long run, and make you a millionaire over time?   Well, it is true, and here it is: Start by saving 15 percent of your salary at age 25 into a 401(k) plan, an IRA, or a taxable account (or all three). Put equal amounts of that 15 percent into just three different mutual funds:   A U.S. total stock market index fund An international total stock market index fund A U.S. total bond market index fund.   Over time, the three funds will grow at different rates, so once per year you’ll adjust their amounts so that they’re again equal. (That’s the fifteen minutes per year, assuming you’ve enrolled in an automatic savings plan.)   That’s it; if you can follow this simple recipe throughout your working career, you will almost certainly beat out most professional investors. More importantly, you’ll likely accumulate enough savings to retire comfortably.

Cruelty links all three primitives [pleasure, pain, and desire]: Spinoza defines it as the desire to inflict pain on someone we love or pity. Financial speaking, cruelty is analogous to a convertible bond whose debt and equity depend on three economic underliers: the stock price, the level of interest rates, and the credit worthiness of the company's debt.

Becoming a successful investor in future should be effortless when you understand and let the market do the work for you." - Adam Messina

If anyone could anticipate a market drop, no one would ever invest in the market above the level to which it will decline. That is to say, market corrections are unforeseen events.

You don't need to chase wealth, just become a real entrepreneur and the world is your oyster.

2020 is the year of the bear market.

No matter whom the people elect, you always get JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs in charge. the shit going on is unbelievable. all to save massively overpriced assets.

the fed can print credit as long as someone will borrow it into existence... the fed cannot print product (or production)

Big market price changes happen when lots of people are forced to reevaluate their prejudices, not necessarily when the world actually changes. — Colm O'Shea

I have always believed that a single talented analyst, working very hard, can cover an amazing amount of investment landscape, and this belief remains unchallenged in my mind.

If compound interest is indeed the 8th wonder of the world, then leveraged compounding is certainly the 9th, 10th and 11th.

There are certain things that cannot be adequately explained to a virgin either by words or pictures.

Holding a Bitcoin today is like owning a Facebook, Amazon, or Apple stock positions in the early 2000's. Blockchain technology has a lot more on offer if you could just adopt it.

Zofia's heart remained splintered over how people weren't treated equally, depending on their finances. If the world functioned on love rather than on monetary value, all would benefit

The stock market is almost magical because it always leads the economy. It goes down long before the economy drops and then heads higher long before the economy rebounds. It always has.

But money doesn’t work in the sense that labor or tangible capital expends effort to produce commodities. Credit is debt, and debt extracts interest. Financial salesmen who promise investors, “Make your money work for you” actually mean that society should work for the creditors — and that means for the banks that create credit. The effect is to turn the economic surplus into a flow of interest payments, diverting revenue from tangible capital investment. As the economy’s reproductive powers are dried up, the financialization process is kept going by easing credit terms and lending — not to produce more goods and services, but to bid up prices for the real estate, stocks and bonds being pledged as collateral for larger and larger loans.

What is weak, emphasize as strong. Not sure how to pronounce a word? Then say it loudly with confidence. If technology is outdated, the company board of directors will spend fortunes advertising that their products are the newest and best. To finance the lies, the board will fire a third of the employees, making stock prices go up. Then, before customers disconnect and go to competitors, the company will have made enough money on its lies to buy a startup company with new technology. But, of course, the new technology should not be a backdoor for thieves.

The motivation for taking on debt is to buy assets or claims rising in price. Over the past half-century the aim of financial investment has been less to earn profits on tangible capital investment than to generate “capital” gains (most of which take the form of debt-leveraged land prices, not industrial capital). Annual price gains for property, stocks and bonds far outstrip the reported real estate rents, corporate profits and disposable personal income after paying for essential non-discretionary spending, headed by FIRE [Finance, Insurance, Real Estate]-sector charges.

Most of us know how much we earn every month, but not many of us are clear about where our money gets spent. This exercise should show you clearly how you should manage your finances to achieve your goals.

Reliability investing requires finding companies trading below their inherent worth--stocks with strong fundamentals including earnings, dividends, book value, and cash flow selling at bargain prices give their quality.

The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed, but even more so from ignorance and indifference. Charming English ladies financed the Atlantic slave trade by buying shares and bonds in the London stock exchange, without ever setting foot in either Africa or the Caribbean. They then sweetened their four o'clock tea with snow-white sugar cubes produced in hellish plantations - about which they knew nothing.

In a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know. The greatest crimes in modern history resulted not just from hatred and greed, but even more so from ignorance and indifference. Charming English ladies financed the Atlantic slave trade by buying shares and bonds in the London stock exchange, without ever setting foot in either Africa or the Caribbean. They then sweetened their four o'clock tea with snow-white sugar cubes produced in hellish plantations – about which they knew nothing.

All through time, people have basically acted and reacted the same way in the market as a result of greed, fear, ignorance, and hope. That is why the numerical formations and patterns recur on a constant basis. Over and over, with slight variations. Because markets are driven by humans and human nature never changes.

The options also were a way of shifting enormous risk from Renaissance to the banks. Because the lenders technically owned the underlying securities in the basket-options transactions, the most Medallion could lose in the event of a sudden collapse was the premium it had paid for the options and the collateral held by the banks. That amounted to several hundred million dollars. By contrast, the banks faced billions of dollars of potential losses if Medallion were to experience deep troubles. In the words of a banker involved in the lending arrangement, the options allowed Medallion to “ring-fence” its stock portfolios, protecting other parts of the firm, including Laufer’s still-thriving futures trading, and ensuring Renaissance’s survival in the event something unforeseen took place. One staffer was so shocked by the terms of the financing that he shifted most of his life savings into Medallion, realizing the most he could lose was about 20 percent of his money.

many people mistaken for entrepreneurs fail to have true skin in the game in the sense that their aim is to either cash out by selling the company they helped create to someone else, or “go public” by issuing shares in the stock market. The true value of the company, what it makes, and its long-term survival are of small relevance to them. This is a pure financing scheme and we will exclude this class of people from our “entrepreneur” risk-taker class (this form of entrepreneurship is the equivalent of bringing great-looking and marketable children into the world with the sole aim of selling them at age four). We can easily identify them by their ability to write a convincing business plan.

The Memoirs became the most celebrated unfinished, unpublished, unread book in history. But Chateaubriand was still broke. So Madame Récamier came up with a new scheme, and this one worked - or sort of worked. A stock company was formed, and people bought shares in the manuscript. Word futures, I guess you could call them, in the same way that people from Wall Street gamble on the price of soybeans and corn. In effect, Chateaubriand mortgaged his autobiography to finance his old age. They gave him a nice chunk of money up front, which allowed him to pay off his creditors, and a guaranteed annuity for the rest of his life. It was a brilliant arrangement. The only problem was that Chateaubriand kept on living.

We find the same situation in the economy. On the one hand, the battered remnants of production and the real economy; on the other, the circulation of gigantic amounts of virtual capital. But the two are so disconnected that the misfortunes which beset that capital – stock market crashes and other financial debacles – do not bring about the collapse of real economies any more. It is the same in the political sphere: scandals, corruption and the general decline in standards have no decisive effects in a split society, where responsibility (the possibility that the two parties may respond to each other) is no longer part of the game. This paradoxical situation is in a sense beneficial: it protects civil society (what remains of it) from the vicissitudes of the political sphere, just as it protects the economy (what remains of it) from the random fluctuations of the Stock Exchange and international finance. The immunity of the one creates a reciprocal immunity in the other – a mirror indifference. Better: real society is losing interest in the political class, while nonetheless availing itself of the spectacle. At last, then, the media have some use, and the ‘society of the spectacle’ assumes its full meaning in this fierce irony: the masses availing themselves of the spectacle of the dysfunctionings of representation through the random twists in the story of the political class’s corruption. All that remains now to the politicians is the obligation to sacrifice themselves to provide the requisite spectacle for the entertainment of the people.

It does not take much to provide the objective biological needs of Homo sapiens. After those needs are met, more money can be spent on building pyramids, taking holidays around the world, financing election campaigns, funding your favourite terrorist organisation, or investing in the stock market and making yet more money – all of which are activities that a true cynic would find utterly meaningless.

A more recent concern relates to “financialization” and associated short-termism. Financialization is the growing importance of norms, metrics, and incentives from the financial sector to the wider economy. Some of the concerns expressed are that, for example, managers are increasingly awarded stock options to align their incentives with those of shareholders; companies are often explicitly managed to increase short-term shareholder value; and financial engineering, such as share buybacks and earnings management, has become a more important part of senior managers’ jobs. The end result is that rather than finance serving business, business serves finance: the tail wags the dog. What John Kay described as “obliquity,” the idea that making money was a consequence of, or a second-order benefit of, serving one’s customers and building good businesses, is driven out (Kay 2010).

Like all financial schemes, the Mississippi Scheme was constructed upon the volatile foundation of confidence. For the public to continue to use the Banque Royale’s banknotes, it had to remain confident that those banknotes would retain and represent their stated face value. And for the public to continue to invest in Mississippi Company shares, it had to remain confident that the prospects of the Mississippi Company justified the market price of the shares.

There is a crucially important difference about playing the game of investing compared to virtually any other activity. Most of us have no chance of being as good as the average in any pursuit where others practice and hone skills for many, many hours. But we can be as good as the average investor in the stock market with no practice at all. Jeremy Siegel, Professor of Finance, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and author of Stocks for the Long Run

Say Joe what’s the dope about this war business?” “I guess they are in for it this time. . . . I’ve known it was coming ever since the Agadir incident.” “Jez I like to see somebody wallop the pants off England after the way they wont give home rule to Ireland.” “We’d have to help em. . . . Any way I dont see how this can last long. The men who control international finance wont allow it. After all it’s the banker who holds the purse strings.” “We wouldn’t come to the help of England, no sir, not after the way they acted in Ireland and in the Revolution and in the Civil War. . . . ” “Joey you’re getting all choked up with that history you’re reading up in the public library every night. . . . You follow the stock quotations and keep on your toes and dont let em fool you with all this newspaper talk about strikes and upheavals and socialism. . . . I’d like to see you make good Joey. . . . Well I guess I’d better be going.

Financing is an art form. One of the challenges is how to correctly finance a company. In certain periods of time, more covenants need to be put into deals. You have to be sure the company has the right covenant -- to allow it the freedom to grow, but also to insure the integrity of the credit. Sometimes a company should issue convertible bonds instead of straight bonds. Sometimes it should issue preferred stock. Each company and each financing is different, and the process can’t be imitative.

The panic was blamed on many factors—tight money, Roosevelt’s Gridiron Club speech attacking the “malefactors of great wealth,” and excessive speculation in copper, mining, and railroad stocks. The immediate weakness arose from the recklessness of the trust companies. In the early 1900s, national and most state-chartered banks couldn’t take trust accounts (wills, estates, and so on) but directed customers to trusts. Traditionally, these had been synonymous with safe investment. By 1907, however, they had exploited enough legal loopholes to become highly speculative. To draw money for risky ventures, they paid exorbitant interest rates, and trust executives operated like stock market plungers. They loaned out so much against stocks and bonds that by October 1907 as much as half the bank loans in New York were backed by securities as collateral—an extremely shaky base for the system. The trusts also didn’t keep the high cash reserves of commercial banks and were vulnerable to sudden runs.

gold standard,” which the United States had dropped in 1933. Ever since, the Treasury had been printing money freely to finance first the New Deal and now the war. Howard feared that someday the United States might wind up like Germany in the 1920s, when people had to cart wheelbarrows of money down the street to buy a head of cabbage—the direct result of Germany being forced to deplete its gold stock to pay reparations after World War I.1 The economic chaos that resulted was one of the major factors that had led to Hitler.

Early in this book, I said that the feeling I got from buying a Polish stock that went up ten times was the best thing to ever happen to me in my career. But the feeling I had on that balcony in Brussels with Sergei’s widow and son, as we watched the largest lawmaking body in Europe recognize and condemn the injustices suffered by Sergei and his family, felt orders of magnitude better than any financial success I’ve ever had. If finding a ten bagger in the stock market was a highlight of my life before, there is no feeling as satisfying as getting some measure of justice in a highly unjust world.

In the real world of globalised finance, where investment portfolios for the major centres are combined, where the markets (stock, bond, money, real estate, government securities, forex and commodities) tick almost round-the-clock from Tokyo Monday morning to New York Friday 5 pm, via London, Frankfurt, etc, in between (and the digital books are passed at the appropriate times), tracking such practices as “round tripping” – discovering the real footprints – is going to be exceedingly difficult. It would be better to focus on tracing the footprints of the black incomes where they are generated, i e, in India itself.

If you are going to use probability to model a financial market, then you had better use the right kind of probability. Real markets are wild. Their price fluctuations can be hair-raising-far greater and more damaging than the mild variations of orthodox finance. That means that individual stocks and currencies are riskier than normally assumed. It means that stock portfolios are being put together incorrectly; far from managing risk, they may be magnifying it. It means that some trading strategies are misguided, and options mis-priced. Anywhere the bell-curve assumption enters the financial calculations, an error can come out.

The easiest way to run developmentally efficient finance continues to be through a banking system, because it is banks that can most easily be pointed by governments at the projects necessary to agricultural and industrial development. Most obviously, banks respond to central bank guidance. They can be controlled via rediscounting loans for exports and for industrial upgrading, with the system policed through requirements for export letters of credit from the ultimate borrowers. The simplicity and bluntness of this mechanism makes it highly effective. Bond markets, and particularly stock markets, are harder for policymakers to control. The main reason is that it is difficult to oversee the way in which funds from bond and stock issues are used. It is, tellingly, the capacity of bank-based systems for enforcing development policies that makes entrepreneurs in developing countries lobby so hard for bond, and especially stock, markets to be expanded. These markets are their means to escape government control. It is the job of governments to resist entrepreneurs’ lobbying until basic developmental objectives have been achieved. Equally, independent central banks are not appropriate to developing countries until considerable economic progress has been made.

Probably the first book that Hamilton absorbed was Malachy Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, a learned almanac of politics, economics, and geography that was crammed with articles about taxes, public debt, money, and banking. The dictionary took the form of two ponderous, folio-sized volumes, and it is touching to think of young Hamilton lugging them through the chaos of war. Hamilton would praise Postlethwayt as one of “the ablest masters of political arithmetic.” A proponent of manufacturing, Postlethwayt gave the aide-de-camp a glimpse of a mixed economy in which government would both steer business activity and free individual energies. In the pay book one can see the future treasury wizard mastering the rudiments of finance. “When you can get more of foreign coin, [the] coin for your native exchange is said to be high and the reverse low,” Hamilton noted. He also stocked his mind with basic information about the world: “The continent of Europe is 2600 miles long and 2800 miles broad”; “Prague is the principal city of Bohemia, the principal part of the commerce of which is carried on by the Jews.” He recorded tables from Postlethwayt showing infant-mortality rates, population growth, foreign-exchange rates, trade balances, and the total economic output of assorted nations.

Almost every woman had a primary role in the “female-dominated” family structure; only a small percentage of men had a primary role in the “male-dominated” governmental and religious structures. Many mothers were, in a sense, the chair of the board of a small company—their family. Even in Japan, women are in charge of the family finances—a fact that was revealed to the average American only after the Japanese stock market crashed in 1992 and thousands of women lost billions of dollars that their husbands never knew they had invested.23 Conversely, most men were on their company’s assembly line—either its physical assembly line or its psychological assembly line.

A 1997 study of the consumer product design firm IDEO found that most of the company’s biggest successes originated as “combinations of existing knowledge from disparate industries.” IDEO’s designers created a top-selling water bottle, for example, by mixing a standard water carafe with the leak-proof nozzle of a shampoo container. The power of combining old ideas in new ways also extends to finance, where the prices of stock derivatives are calculated by mixing formulas originally developed to describe the motion of dust particles with gambling techniques. Modern bike helmets exist because a designer wondered if he could take a boat’s hull, which can withstand nearly any collision, and design it in the shape of a hat. It even reaches to parenting, where one of the most popular baby books—Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, first published in 1946—combined Freudian psychotherapy with traditional child-rearing techniques. “A lot of the people we think of as exceptionally creative are essentially intellectual middlemen,” said Uzzi. “They’ve learned how to transfer knowledge between different industries or groups. They’ve seen a lot of different people attack the same problems in different settings, and so they know which kinds of ideas are more likely to work.” Within sociology, these middlemen are often referred to as idea or innovation brokers. In one study published in 2004, a sociologist named Ronald Burt studied 673 managers at a large electronics company and found that ideas that were most consistently ranked as “creative” came from people who were particularly talented at taking concepts from one division of the company and explaining them to employees in other departments. “People connected across groups are more familiar with alternative ways of thinking and behaving,” Burt wrote. “The between-group brokers are more likely to express ideas, less likely to have ideas dismissed, and more likely to have ideas evaluated as valuable.” They were more credible when they made suggestions, Burt said, because they could say which ideas had already succeeded somewhere else.

Greece’s economic problems weren’t new. For decades, the country had been plagued by low productivity, a bloated and inefficient public sector, massive tax avoidance, and unsustainable pension obligations. Despite that, throughout the 2000s, international capital markets had been happy to finance Greece’s steadily escalating deficits, much the same way that they’d been happy to finance a heap of subprime mortgages across the United States. In the wake of the Wall Street crisis, the mood grew less generous. When a new Greek government announced that its latest budget deficit far exceeded previous estimates, European bank stocks plunged and international lenders balked at lending Greece more money. The country suddenly teetered on the brink of default.

Inefficiency. A centralized financial system has many inefficiencies. Perhaps the most egregious example is the credit card interchange rate that causes consumers and small businesses to lose up to 3 percent of a transaction's value with every swipe due to the payment network oligopoly's pricing power. Remittance fees are 5–7 percent. Time is also wasted in the two days it takes to “settle” a stock transaction (officially transfer ownership). In the Internet age, this seems utterly implausible. Other inefficiencies include costly (and slow) transfer of funds, direct and indirect brokerage fees, lack of security, and the inability to conduct microtransactions, many of which are not obvious to users. In the current banking system, deposit interest rates remain very low and loan rates high because banks need to cover their brick-and-mortar costs. The insurance industry provides another example.

This vision is very much in line with the views of the economist John Kay in his book Other People’s Money (2015). As he says, stock markets, when first started, were the vehicles for raising finance often for large infrastructure projects (typically railways) from many dispersed shareholders. But markets no longer provide this function. Almost no new projects are financed via the stock market. (Indeed, the observation that few early-state companies come to the stock market for financing rather confirms the hypothesis that stock markets have significant problems dealing with them.) Rather, stock market trading is dominated by large asset managers trading with each other. In Kay’s view, they are searching for returns over and above those available to the market as a whole (searching for “alpha”) by trying to anticipate what others are thinking about the value of assets rather than the value of the underlying assets themselves.

The slave trade was not controlled by any state or government. It was a purely economic enterprise, organised and financed by the free market according to the laws of supply and demand. Private slave-trading companies sold shares on the Amsterdam, London and Paris stock exchanges. Middle-class Europeans looking for a good investment bought these shares. Relying on this money, the companies bought ships, hired sailors and soldiers, purchased slaves in Africa, and transported them to America. There they sold the slaves to the plantation owners, using the proceeds to purchase plantation products such as sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton and rum. They returned to Europe, sold the sugar and cotton for a good price, and then sailed to Africa to begin another round. The shareholders were very pleased with this arrangement. Throughout the eighteenth century the yield on slave-trade investments was about 6 per cent a year – they were extremely profitable, as any

The slave trade was not controlled by any state or government. It was a purely economic enterprise, organised and financed by the free market according to the laws of supply and demand. Private slave-trading companies sold shares on the Amsterdam, London and Paris stock exchanges. Middle-class Europeans looking for a good investment bought these shares. Relying on this money, the companies bought ships, hired sailors and soldiers, purchased slaves in Africa, and transported them to America. There they sold the slaves to the plantation owners, using the proceeds to purchase plantation products such as sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton and rum. They returned to Europe, sold the sugar and cotton for a good price, and then sailed to Africa to begin another round. The shareholders were very pleased with this arrangement. Throughout the eighteenth century the yield on slave-trade investments was about 6 per cent a year – they were extremely profitable, as any modern consultant would be quick to admit.

By now Soros had melded Karl Popper’s ideas with his own knowledge of finance, arriving at a synthesis that he called “reflexivity.” As Popper’s writings suggested, the details of a listed company were too complex for the human mind to understand, so investors relied on guesses and shortcuts that approximated reality. But Soros was also conscious that those shortcuts had the power to change reality as well, since bullish guesses would drive a stock price up, allowing the company to raise capital cheaply and boosting its performance. Because of this feedback loop, certainty was doubly elusive: To begin with, people are incapable of perceiving reality clearly; but on top of that, reality itself is affected by these unclear perceptions, which themselves shift constantly. Soros had arrived at a conclusion that was at odds with the efficient-market view. Academic finance assumes, as a starting point, that rational investors can arrive at an objective valuation of a stock and that when all information is priced in, the market can be said to have attained an efficient equilibrium. To a disciple of Popper, this premise ignored the most elementary limits to cognition.

IRA funds became a form of play money for the middle class... Because the pool of capital that made up an IRA could not be withdrawn for twenty or thirty years, many people viewed their IRAs as containing money they could experiment with. They could use an IRA to buy their first stock or their first mutual fund. They could put in in a money market fund first, and then, as they got bolder - and the bull market became more irresistible - shift some of it into something a little riskier. IRAs gave people a way to try on the stock and bond markets for size, to see how they felt, and to become slowly comfortable with the idea of investing. The knowledge that the money couldn't easily be withdrawn acted as a psychological safety net, allowing investors to feel as though they could take a chance or two. If they made a mistake, they reasoned, there was still time to recoup - several decades, perhaps.Over time, many people came to believe that it as imperative to maximize the returns they were getting on their IRA account, even at the risk of taking a loss. How else would they ever have enough to retire on? This, surely, is the classic definition of investment capital.

And as a long-short fund, he'd also been obligated to take short positions — betting against companies — which was a tactic that, to most experts in finance, was uncontroversial. The thinking went, when companies were performing poorly, or were mismanaged, or were in an industry that was being overrun, or were simply likely to fail, taking a short position wasn't just logical — it protected the marketplace by pointing out overpriced stocks, prevented fraud by acting as a check against dubious management, and poked holes in potential bubbles. Short sellers also added liquidity and volume to a stock — because they were obligated to buy the stock back at some point in the future. Yes, short sellers profited when companies failed, but usually a short seller wasn't banking on a company failing — just that the stock's price would eventually correct toward its true valuation. Sometimes, though, a trader picked up a short position because the company in question really was going to fail. Because, perhaps, it was in an industry that was dying; had management that seemed completely unable or unwilling to pivot; and had deep fundamental issues in its financing that seemed impossible to overcome.

Then, in 1950, Andy became something more than a model prisoner. In 1950, he became a valuable commodity, a murderer who did tax-returns better than H & R Block. He gave gratis estate-planning advice, set up tax-shelters, filled out loan applications (sometimes creatively). I can remember him sitting behind his desk in the library, patiently going over a car-loan agreement paragraph by paragraph with a screwhead who wanted to buy a used DeSoto, telling the guy what was good about the agreement and what was bad about it, explaining to him that it was possible to shop for a loan and not get hit quite so bad, steering him away from the finance companies, which in those days were sometimes little better than legal loan-sharks. When he’d finished, the screwhead started to put out his hand . . . and then drew it back to himself quickly. He’d forgotten for a moment, you see, that he was dealing with a mascot, not a man. Andy kept up on the tax laws and the changes in the stock market, and so his usefulness didn’t end after he’d been in cold storage for awhile, as it might have done. He began to get his library money, his running war with the sisters had ended, and nobody tossed his cell very hard. He was a good nigger.

The slave trade was not controlled by any state or government. It was a purely economic enterprise, organised and financed by the free market according to the laws of supply and demand. Private slave-trading companies sold shares on the Amsterdam, London and Paris stock exchanges. Middle-class Europeans looking for a good investment bought these shares. Relying on this money, the companies bought ships, hired sailors and soldiers, purchased slaves in Africa, and transported them to America. There they sold the slaves to the plantation owners, using the proceeds to purchase plantation products such as sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton and rum. They returned to Europe, sold the sugar and cotton for a good price, and then sailed to Africa to begin another round. The shareholders were very pleased with this arrangement. Throughout the eighteenth century the yield on slave-trade investments was about 6 per cent a year – they were extremely profitable, as any modern consultant would be quick to admit. This is the fly in the ointment of free-market capitalism. It cannot ensure that profits are gained in a fair way, or distributed in a fair manner. On the contrary, the craving to increase profits and production blinds people to anything that might stand in the way.

Many aspects of the modern financial system are designed to give an impression of overwhelming urgency: the endless ‘news’ feeds, the constantly changing screens of traders, the office lights blazing late into the night, the young analysts who find themselves required to work thirty hours at a stretch. But very little that happens in the finance sector has genuine need for this constant appearance of excitement and activity. Only its most boring part—the payments system—is an essential utility on whose continuous functioning the modern economy depends. No terrible consequence would follow if the stock market closed for a week (as it did in the wake of 9/11)—or longer, or if a merger were delayed or large investment project postponed for a few weeks, or if an initial public offering happened next month rather than this. The millisecond improvement in data transmission between New York and Chicago has no significance whatever outside the absurd world of computers trading with each other. The tight coupling is simply unnecessary: the perpetual flow of ‘information’ part of a game that traders play which has no wider relevance, the excessive hours worked by many employees a tournament in which individuals compete to display their alpha qualities in return for large prizes. The traditional bank manager’s culture of long lunches and afternoons on the golf course may have yielded more useful information about business than the Bloomberg terminal. Lehman

When we talk about finding or having found our soul mate (if we do), we do not believe ourselves to be immersed in the capitalist economy. But this is an even more important terrain for capitalism than the convenience store where we buy a soda and candy bar or the stock exchange floor where companies are financed. The idea of the soul mate plays a crucial role in the promulgation of consumption. If I believe that a perfect commodity exists in the romantic field, this changes my relationship to all commodities. Commodities become more attractive insofar as each one stands in for the perfect partner. Though a hammer at the hardware store most likely cannot function as my soul mate, I will find more pleasure in purchasing it with the idea of an ideal commodity informing the purchase, and this is what the soul mate provides. That is to say, the idea of the soul mate underwrites all consumption within the capitalist universe. The soul mate is the commodity in the form of the subject’s complement. This is why the idea of the soul mate has such importance for capitalism. The subject experiences itself as lacking whenever it desires, and no object can fill this lack. But the promise of the soul mate is the promise of completion, an object that would complement the lacking subject perfectly and thereby ameliorate its lack. No such complement exists outside of ideological fantasies, but capitalism requires subjects who invest themselves in such fantasies.

Decouplers often trip up on this step in two ways. First, they are overly generic in articulating the CVC. When mapping the process of buying a car, auto executives tend to describe it as: feel the need to buy car > become aware of a car brand > develop an interest in the brand > visit the dealer > purchase the car. This is a start, but it is not specific enough. Decouplers must ask: When do people actually need a new car? How exactly do people become aware of car brands? How do people become interested in a make or model? And so on. The generic process of awareness, interest, desire, and purchase isn’t specific enough to help. Decouplers also flounder by failing to identify all the relevant stages in the value chain. For the car-buying process, a better description of the CVC might be: become aware that your car lease will expire in one month > feel the need to purchase a new car > develop a heightened interest in car ads > visit car manufacturers’ websites > create a set of two or three brands of interest > visit third-party auto websites > compare options of cars in the same category > choose a model > shop online for the best price > visit the nearest dealer to see if they have the model in stock > see if they can beat the best online price > test-drive the cars > decide about financing, warranty, and other add-ons > negotiate a final price > sign the contract > pick up the car > use it > wait for the lease to expire again. With this far more detailed CVC, we can fully appreciate the complexity of the car-buying

It is untrue that I or anybody else in Germany wanted war in 1939. It was desired and instigated exclusively by those international statesmen who were either of Jewish origin or working for Jewish interests. I have made so many offers for the reduction and elimination of armaments, which posterity cannot explain away for all eternity, that the responsibility for the outbreak of this war cannot rest on me. Furthermore, I never desired that after the first terrible World War a second war should arise against England or even against America. Centuries may pass, but out of the ruins of our cities and monuments of art there will arise anew the hatred for the people who alone are ultimately responsible: International Jewry and its helpers! As late as three days before the outbreak of the German-Polish War, I proposed to the British Ambassador in Berlin a solution for the German-Polish problem -- similar to the problem of the Saar area, under international control. This offer cannot be explained away, either. It was only rejected because the responsible circles in English politics wanted the war, partly in the expectation of business advantages, partly driven by propaganda promoted by international Jewry. But I left no doubt about the fact that if the peoples of Europe were again only regarded as so many packages of stock shares by these international money and finance conspirators, then that race, too, which is the truly guilty party in this murderous struggle would also have to be held to account: the Jews! I further left no doubt that this time we would not permit millions of European children of Aryan descent to die of hunger, nor millions of grown-up men to suffer death, nor hundreds of thousands of women and children to be burned and bombed to death in their cities, without the truly guilty party having to atone for its guilt, even if through more humane means.

Learning to meditate helped too. When the Beatles visited India in 1968 to study Transcendental Meditation at the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, I was curious to learn it, so I did. I loved it. Meditation has benefited me hugely throughout my life because it produces a calm open-mindedness that allows me to think more clearly and creatively. I majored in finance in college because of my love for the markets and because that major had no foreign language requirement—so it allowed me to learn what I was interested in, both inside and outside class. I learned a lot about commodity futures from a very interesting classmate, a Vietnam veteran quite a bit older than me. Commodities were attractive because they could be traded with very low margin requirements, meaning I could leverage the limited amount of money I had to invest. If I could make winning decisions, which I planned to do, I could borrow more to make more. Stock, bond, and currency futures didn’t exist back then. Commodity futures were strictly real commodities like corn, soybeans, cattle, and hogs. So those were the markets I started to trade and learn about. My college years coincided with the era of free love, mind-expanding drug experimentation, and rejection of traditional authority. Living through it had a lasting effect on me and many other members of my generation. For example, it deeply impacted Steve Jobs, whom I came to empathize with and admire. Like me, he took up meditation and wasn’t interested in being taught as much as he loved visualizing and building out amazing new things. The times we lived in taught us both to question established ways of doing things—an attitude he demonstrated superbly in Apple’s iconic “1984” and “Here’s to the Crazy Ones,” which were ad campaigns that spoke to me. For the country as a whole, those were difficult years. As the draft expanded and the numbers of young men coming home in body bags soared, the Vietnam War split the country. There was a lottery based on birthdates to determine the order of those who would be drafted. I remember listening to the lottery on the radio while playing pool with my friends. It was estimated that the first 160 or so birthdays called would be drafted, though they read off all 366 dates. My birthday was forty-eighth.

At the G-20 meeting in Paris in 2011, finance ministers expressed fears that U.S.-driven global inflation was threatening global stability. George Melloan was among those who made the connection between this unrest and QE. He acknowledged in the Wall Street Journal: “Probably few of the protesters in the streets connect their economic travail to Washington. But central bankers do.” To appreciate the depth of political upheaval created by the 2008 financial crisis, just tally the power shifts that occurred in its wake. In addition to the turmoil in the Middle East, 13 out of 17 European governments changed over as a result of the initial financial crisis. In the United States, the stock market panic in September 2008 reversed the slight lead of John McCain and helped sweep the far-left Barack Obama into office.

Your committee is satisfied from the proofs submitted ... that there is an established and well defined identity and community of interest between a few leaders of finance ... which has resulted in great and rapidly growing concentration of the control of money and credit in the hands of these few men.... Under our system of issuing and distributing corporate securities the investing public does not buy directly from the corporation. The securities travel from the issuing house through middlemen to the investor. It is only the great banks or bankers with access to the mainsprings of the concentrated resources made up of other people's money, in the banks, trust companies, and life insurance companies, and with control of the machinery for creating markets and distributing securities, who have had the power to underwrite or guarantee the sale of large-scale security issues. The men who through their control over the funds of our railroad and industrial companies are able to direct where such funds shall be kept, and thus to create these great reservoirs of the people's money are the ones who are in a position to tap those reservoirs for the ventures in which they are interested and to prevent their being tapped for purposes which they do not approve.... When we consider, also, in this connection that into these reservoirs of money and credit there flow a large part of the reserves of the banks of the country, that they are also the agents and correspondents of the out-of-town banks in the loaning of their surplus funds in the only public money market of the country, and that a small group of men and their partners and associates have now further strengthened their hold upon the resources of these institutions by acquiring large stock holdings therein, by representation on their boards and through valuable patronage, we begin to realize something of the extent to which this practical and effective domination and control over our greatest financial, railroad and industrial corporations has developed, largely within the past five years, and that it is fraught with peril to the welfare of the country.3 Such was the nature of the wealth and power represented by those six men who gathered in secret that night and travelled in the luxury of Senator Aldrich's private car.

Professor Fisher declared, “Stock prices are not too high, and Wall Street will not experience anything in the nature of a crash.

The stock market cares about only one thing above all else: anticipated earnings. If companies make more money, their share prices eventually rise. The stock price is simply a reflection of a company's earning power. Everything else is noise.

Gold belongs only in the portfolios of fearmongers and speculators. If you own gold in your portfolio, expect to not get paid an income, pay higher taxes on your returns, take a more volatile ride than the stock market, and get a long-term return lower than bonds.

There is ample evidence that confirmation bias permeates throughout investors' decisions. For example, once an investor likes a stock, he is likely to seek out information that validates that stock. In a 2010 study, researchers showed that investors used message boards to seek out information that validated rather than challenged, stocks they owned (Park et al. 2010). If we own a stock, we tend to look for anything that validates our decision to buy it, and to reinforce why we should keep holding it.

Chapter 51 In Atlanta, the day had gone mostly as Elliott had expected. The stock market crash had rattled everyone. It was a cloud that hung over the euphoria of Black Friday. The most difficult part of his plan had been convincing the other five families to pool their money with his for the purchases, which together added up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. They had begun by renting two twenty-six-foot U-Haul trucks. They drove them to Costco and filled them with survival necessities. It was mostly food; Elliott planned to be near a freshwater source if worst came to worst. Next, they purchased two high-end RVs. The price was exorbitant, but they carried a thirty-day money-back guarantee, and they only had to make a down payment—the remainder was financed. Elliott had assured his neighbors that within thirty days, they would either be incredibly glad to have the two homes on wheels—or they’d have their money back. Now he sat in his study, watching the news, waiting for the event he believed would come. He hoped he was wrong. DAY 7 900,000,000 Infected 180,000 Dead

map out all the activities in that group’s typical customer value chain. Decouplers often trip up on this step in two ways. First, they are overly generic in articulating the CVC. When mapping the process of buying a car, auto executives tend to describe it as: feel the need to buy car > become aware of a car brand > develop an interest in the brand > visit the dealer > purchase the car. This is a start, but it is not specific enough. Decouplers must ask: When do people actually need a new car? How exactly do people become aware of car brands? How do people become interested in a make or model? And so on. The generic process of awareness, interest, desire, and purchase isn’t specific enough to help. Decouplers also flounder by failing to identify all the relevant stages in the value chain. For the car-buying process, a better description of the CVC might be: become aware that your car lease will expire in one month > feel the need to purchase a new car > develop a heightened interest in car ads > visit car manufacturers’ websites > create a set of two or three brands of interest > visit third-party auto websites > compare options of cars in the same category > choose a model > shop online for the best price > visit the nearest dealer to see if they have the model in stock > see if they can beat the best online price > test-drive the cars > decide about financing, warranty, and other add-ons > negotiate a final price > sign the contract > pick up the car > use it > wait for the lease to expire again. With this far more detailed CVC, we can fully appreciate the complexity of the car-buying

Over the next three weeks Yeltsin’s approval ratings jumped from 22 to 28 percent. For the first time since his campaign began, people started to factor in a real possibility that Yeltsin would win. New buyers entered the stock market, pushing my fund up 15 percent.

An equity token – not to be confused with equities or stocks in the traditional finance sense – represents ownership of an underlying asset or pool of assets.

the next two months, and in the end he sold billions of dollars’ worth of Russian stocks for us without any leaks. This virtuoso performance transformed his little operation from total obscurity into his bank’s most successful European trading desk. Most importantly, Hermitage had successfully removed its money from Russia without our enemies ever knowing. With our people and money safe, we had eliminated the main levers that the Russian government could use to harm us.

The government telling people that money is tied to gold is a bunch of baloney!

After twelve months of going nowhere, the investment committee loses patience and takes over the deal more directly. Organic is sold to a special-purpose acquisition company (or SPAC) listed on local stock exchanges. A SPAC is a cash box with a blank check raised from investors to buy a business within a set timeframe as determined by the executives who run the vehicle. Often, as the vehicle is publicly listed, a SPAC can strike a deal at a higher purchase price than a private equity firm would be willing to pay. Its investors will accept a lower return than they would from a private equity fund, often because the investment is marketed to them as a safer or more straightforward bet. In this case, the SPAC is run by a former senior executive of a French food retail chain and a major hedge fund seeking to expand into the private equity industry. Their joint sector and finance experience is convincing enough for the SPAC’s investors to agree that the transaction is likely to be worthwhile. The

The motives to sell during a market capitulation are rarely rooted in a long-term plan. If they were, the market would never be oversold.

Stocks aren't like a pair of shoes that go on sale but keep the same useful value. The value of stocks are based on their economic prospects, which change constantly.

2. Planning is important, but the most important part of every plan is to plan on the plan not going according to plan. What’s the saying? You plan, God laughs. Financial and investment planning are critical, because they let you know whether your current actions are within the realm of reasonable. But few plans of any kind survive their first encounter with the real world. If you’re projecting your income, savings rate, and market returns over the next 20 years, think about all the big stuff that’s happened in the last 20 years that no one could have foreseen: September 11th, a housing boom and bust that caused nearly 10 million Americans to lose their homes, a financial crisis that caused almost nine million to lose their jobs, a record-breaking stock-market rally that ensued, and a coronavirus that shakes the world as I write this. A plan is only useful if it can survive reality. And a future filled with unknowns is everyone’s reality. A good plan doesn’t pretend this weren’t true; it embraces it and emphasizes room for error. The more you need specific elements of a plan to be true, the more fragile your financial life becomes. If there’s enough room for error in your savings rate that you can say, “It’d be great if the market returns 8% a year over the next 30 years, but if it only does 4% a year I’ll still be OK,” the more valuable your plan becomes. Many bets fail not because they were wrong, but because they were mostly right in a situation that required things to be exactly right. Room for error—often called margin of safety—is one of the most underappreciated forces in finance. It comes in many forms: A frugal budget, flexible thinking, and a loose timeline—anything that lets you live happily with a range of outcomes. It’s different from being conservative. Conservative is avoiding a certain level of risk. Margin of safety is raising the odds of success at a given level of risk by increasing your chances of survival. Its magic is that the higher your margin of safety, the smaller your edge needs to be to have a favorable outcome.

In a case where both the buyer and seller believe they are correct, the most apparent reason for excess trading is overconfidence.

Not only did this gain Sharpe his PhD, but it eventually evolved into a seminal paper on what he called the “capital asset pricing model” (CAPM), a formula that investors could use to calculate the value of financial securities. The broader, groundbreaking implication of CAPM was introducing the concept of risk-adjusted returns—one had to measure the performance of a stock or a fund manager versus the volatility of its returns—and indicated that the best overall investment for most investors is the entire market, as it reflects the optimal tradeoff between risks and returns.

It was a hugely significant moment: with one stroke of the pen, in return for a relatively modest payment of Rs2.6 million,* and Clive’s cynical promise on behalf of the Company to govern ‘agreeably to the rules of Mahomed and the law of the Empire’, the Emperor agreed to recognise all the Company’s conquests and hand over to it financial control of all north-eastern India. Henceforth, 250 East India Company clerks backed by the military force of 20,000 Indian sepoys would now run the finances of India’s three richest provinces, effectively ending independent government in Bengal for 200 years. For a stock market-listed company with profit as its main raison d’être, this was a transformative, revolutionary moment.

Income Tax (IT) Commissioner S K Srivastava’s attempts to act against NDTV over its serial illegalities were curtailed by the Finance Minister P Chidambaram. The officer was hounded by the system which made him collapse physically and mentally for a while.

After Sonia Gandhi-led UPA came to power with the support of Left parties in 2004, NDTV’s golden days started. NDTV became a go between Congress leadership and its Left partners. Money started pumping in NDTV from tax havens, violating all norms of Finance Ministry during P Chidambaram’s tenure. Padma Shri awards were granted to Barkha Dutt and Rajdeep Sardesai though NDTV was one of the originators of paid journalism; especially during the 10-year long Congress regime and was at last exposed in the Niira Radia tapes.

General Electric was the largest company in the world in 2004, worth a third of a trillion dollars. It had either been first or second each year for the previous decade, capitalism’s shining example of corporate aristocracy. Then everything fell to pieces. The 2008 financial crisis sent GE’s financing division—which supplied more than half the company’s profits—into chaos. It was eventually sold for scrap. Subsequent bets in oil and energy were disasters, resulting in billions in writeoffs. GE stock fell from $40 in 2007 to $7 by 2018. Blame placed on CEO Jeff Immelt—who ran the company since 2001—was immediate and harsh. He was criticized for his leadership, his acquisitions, cutting the dividend, laying off workers and—of course—the plunging stock price. Rightly so: those rewarded with dynastic wealth when times are good hold the burden of responsibility when the tide goes out. He stepped down in 2017. But Immelt said something insightful on his way out. Responding to critics who said his actions were wrong and what he should have done was obvious, Immelt told his successor, “Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it.

An even earlier example was the rise of dark pool stock trading. In 1979, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) instituted Rule 19c3, which allowed stocks listed on one exchange, such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), to be traded off-exchange. Many large institutions moved their trading large blocks to these dark pools, where they traded peer to peer with far lower costs than traditional exchange-based trading.

They can even be used to provide on-chain exposure to the returns of an off-chain asset if the target asset is not native to the underlying blockchain (e.g., gold, stocks, exchange-traded funds [ETFs]).

You should welcome a bear market, since it puts stocks back on sale.

Do you invest? Does the hotel? The stock market, I mean.” Nika’s eyebrows knit together. “We have a man who manages the finances. Marco usually speaks to him, but I do, too. That’s how I know we need Adam.” “This is going to sound crazy,” I tell her. “But just trust me, all right? Can you do that?” She nods. “Invest in Apple. Starbucks, too. But next year, around the summertime.” “Starbucks?” “I’m going to write it down, okay?” I take out a pen and paper. I make the notes. “Promise me.” She nods. “I will.

The few people who know the details of our finances ask, “What are you saving for? A house? A boat? A new car?” No, none of those. I’m saving for a world where curveballs are more common than we expect. Not being forced to sell stocks to cover an expense also means we’re increasing the odds of letting the stocks we own compound for the longest period of time. Charlie Munger put it well: “The first rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily.