Market Insider Stock Quotes

Fifteen years ago, this would have been insider trading, but that quaint concept had disappeared a decade or two ago when so many brokers were doing it that it was impossible to jail them all. Now it was called smart trading.

The U.S. stock market now trades inside black boxes, in heavily guarded buildings in New Jersey and Chicago.

Dark pools were another rogue spawn of the new financial marketplace. Private stock exchanges, run by the big brokers, they were not required to reveal to the public what happened inside them. They reported any trade they executed, but they did so with sufficient delay that it was impossible to know exactly what was happening in the broader market at the moment the trade occurred.

Reg NMS was intended to create equality of opportunity in the U.S. stock market. Instead it institutionalized a more pernicious inequality. A small class of insiders with the resources to create speed were now allowed to preview the market and trade on what they had seen.

An investor who went from the stock market to the bond market was like a small, furry creature raised on an island without predators removed to a pit full of pythons.

Two of the things to look out for are that operational cash flows should match or be close to profit levels, and current assets should exceed current liabilities.

March 2008 the stock market had finally grasped what every mortgage bond salesman had long known: Someone had lost at least $240 billion. But who? Morgan Stanley still owned $13 billion or so in CDOs, courtesy of Howie Hubler. The idiots in Germany owned some, Wing Chau and CDO managers like him owned some

There was a small mini-market serving the area. It was sparsely stocked, a few bags of crisps and boxes of cereal displayed under harsh strip lights that spat and fizzed. Alcohol and cigarettes, however, were well provided for, secured behind the Perspex screen from behind which the owner surveyed his business with suspicious eyes. Milton nodded to the man as he made his way inside and received nothing but a wary tip of the head in return. He made his way through the shop, picking out cleaning products, a carton of orange juice and a bag of ice. He took his goods to the owner and arranged them on the lip of counter ahead of the screen. As the man rang his purchases up, Milton looked behind him to shelves that were loaded with alcohol: gin, vodka, whiskey.

This kind of speculation reached a high point with the Pentagon's initiative of creating a 'futures market in events', a stock market of prices for terrorist attacks or catastrophes. You bet on the probable occurrence of such events against those who don't believe they'll happen. This speculative market is intended to operate like the market in soya or sugar. You might speculate on the number of AIDS victims in Africa or on the probability that the San Andreas Fault will give way (the Pentagon's initiative is said to derive from the fact that they credit the free market in speculation with better forecasting powers than the secret services). Of course it is merely a step from here to insider trading: betting on the event before you cause it is still the surest way (they say Bin Laden did this, speculating on TWA shares before 11 September). It's like taking out life insurance on your wife before you murder her. There's a great difference between the event that happens (happened) in historical time and the event that happens in the real time of information. To the pure management of flows and markets under the banner of planetary deregulation, there corresponds the 'global' event- or rather the globalized non-event: the French victory in the World Cup, the year 2000, the death of Diana, The Matrix, etc. Whether or not these events are manufactured, they are orchestrated by the silent epidemic of the information networks. Fake events.

Cohen continued to struggle with his own well-being. Even though he had achieved his life’s dream of running his own firm, he was still unhappy, and he had become dependent on a psychiatrist named Ari Kiev to help him manage his moods. In addition to treating depression, Kiev’s other area of expertise was success and how to achieve it. He had worked as a psychiatrist and coach with Olympic basketball players and rowers trying to improve their performance and overcome their fear of failure. His background building athletic champions appealed to Cohen’s unrelenting need to dominate in every transaction he entered into, and he started asking Kiev to spend entire days at SAC’s offices, tending to his staff. Kiev was tall, with a bushy mustache and a portly midsection, and he would often appear silently at a trader’s side and ask him how he was feeling. Sometimes the trader would be so startled to see Kiev there he’d practically jump out of his seat. Cohen asked Kiev to give motivational speeches to his employees, to help them get over their anxieties about losing money. Basically, Kiev was there to teach them to be ruthless. Once a week, after the market closed, Cohen’s traders would gather in a conference room and Kiev would lead them through group therapy sessions focused on how to make them more comfortable with risk. Kiev had them talk about their trades and try to understand why some had gone well and others hadn’t. “Are you really motivated to make as much money as you can? This guy’s going to help you become a real killer at it,” was how one skeptical staff member remembered Kiev being pitched to them. Kiev’s work with Olympians had led him to believe that the thing that blocked most people was fear. You might have two investors with the same amount of money: One was prepared to buy 250,000 shares of a stock they liked, while the other wasn’t. Why? Kiev believed that the reluctance was a form of anxiety—and that it could be overcome with proper treatment. Kiev would ask the traders to close their eyes and visualize themselves making trades and generating profits. “Surrendering to the moment” and “speaking the truth” were some of his favorite phrases. “Why weren’t you bigger in the trades that worked? What did you do right?” he’d ask. “Being preoccupied with not losing interferes with winning,” he would say. “Trading not to lose is not a good strategy. You need to trade to win.” Many of the traders hated the group therapy sessions. Some considered Kiev a fraud. “Ari was very aggressive,” said one. “He liked money.” Patricia, Cohen’s first wife, was suspicious of Kiev’s motives and believed that he was using his sessions with Cohen to find stock tips. From Kiev’s perspective, he found the perfect client in Cohen, a patient with unlimited resources who could pay enormous fees and whose reputation as one of the best traders on Wall Street could help Kiev realize his own goal of becoming a bestselling author. Being able to say that you were the

Every day, the markets were driven less directly by human beings and more directly by machines. The machines were overseen by people, of course, but few of them knew how the machines worked. He knew that RBC’s machines—not the computers themselves, but the instructions to run them—were third-rate, but he had assumed it was because the company’s new electronic trading unit was bumbling and inept. As he interviewed people from the major banks on Wall Street, he came to realize that they had more in common with RBC than he had supposed. “I’d always been a trader,” he said. “And as a trader you’re kind of inside a bubble. You’re just watching your screens all day. Now I stepped back and for the first time started to watch other traders.” He had a good friend who traded stocks at a big-time hedge fund in Stamford, Connecticut, called SAC Capital. SAC Capital was famous (and soon to be infamous) for being one step ahead of the U.S. stock market. If anyone was going to know something about the market that Brad didn’t know, he figured, it would be them. One spring morning he took the train up to Stamford and spent the day watching his friend trade. Right away he saw that, even though his friend was using technology given to him by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other big firms, he was experiencing exactly the same problem as RBC: The market on his screens was no longer the market. His friend would hit a button to buy or sell a stock and the market would move away from him. “When I see this guy trading and he was getting screwed—I now see that it isn’t just me. My frustration is the market’s frustration. And I was like, Whoa, this is serious.” Brad’s problem wasn’t just Brad’s problem. What people saw when they looked at the U.S. stock market—the numbers on the screens of the professional traders, the ticker tape running across the bottom of the CNBC screen—was an illusion. “That’s when I realized the markets are rigged. And I knew it had to do with the technology. That the answer lay beneath the surface of the technology. I had absolutely no idea where. But that’s when the lightbulb went off that the only way I’m going to find out what’s going on is if I go beneath the surface.

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.

Dear KDP Author, Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year. With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion. Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive. Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers. The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books. Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive. Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.

Randomness, the great muse of all market players, is one tough cookie to deal with.

you must shed the belief that there is something missing inside of you—some intelligence, aptitude, or special talent—that keeps you from “getting it.

Here are a few different types of emails you can send: Common FAQs – An email that answers repeat questions you get from readers and subscribers Affiliate case study – An email that details the results from taking a course or using a tool that you’re an affiliate for Teaser to an existing post – An email that links to pillar or cornerstone pieces on your blog Tools and resources – An email that shares your favorite tool collection The Start Here – An email that links to your most important resources Break the myths – An email that lays out myths that your subscribers may think are true Behind the scenes – An email that gives an insiders’ peek into what’s going on with your business Personal story – An email that gives an insiders’ peek into your struggles or backstory One-click survey – An email that asks a simple question to segment subscribers or allows them to choose their own email journey Survey or How can I help you? – An email asking for responses or providing an offer to help Postpurchase welcome email – An email sent immediately after purchase to buyers of your offer Unexpected incentive email – A simple cheat sheet, guide, or PDF that subscribers were not expecting Favorite thing – A collection of your favorite books/blogs/stock photo sites, etc. I have used every one of these emails in my email marketing mix. Doing so breaks up the monotony of sending the same style of email each week, and each of these emails feeds your marketing goals differently as well.

The fact that we entered as total beginners and emerged as industry leaders is in no small part a result of our adherence to being Amazonian in our principles and our way of thinking, including thinking big, thinking long-term, being obsessed with customers, being willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time, and being frugal—principles that few companies are capable of maintaining in the face of quarterly reporting requirements and the daily gyrations of the stock market.

The irony is that Wall Street, the model of corrupted speculation and inside-trading, always by definition resisting state intervention and regulation, now opposes unfair competition and calls for state regulation . . . As for the accusation from Wall Street that Robinhood is a platform for gambling, suffice it to recall that Elizabeth Warren repeatedly accused hedge funds of using the stock market “like their personal casino.” In short, WSB is doing openly and legally what Wall Street does in secret and illegally.

Over our long march to building Amazon’s digital business, we proved a powerful lesson: it takes exceptionally patient and unwavering leadership to persevere through the prolonged process of building a new business and navigating through transformative times in an established industry with entrenched interests. The fact that we entered as total beginners and emerged as industry leaders is in no small part a result of our adherence to being Amazonian in our principles and our way of thinking, including thinking big, thinking long-term, being obsessed with customers, being willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time, and being frugal—principles that few companies are capable of maintaining in the face of quarterly reporting requirements and the daily gyrations of the stock market.

2. Don’t trade penny stocks. A penny stock is any stock that trades under $5. Unless you are an advanced trader, you should avoid all penny stocks. I would extend this by encouraging you to also avoid all stocks priced under $10. Even if you have a small trading account ($5,000) or less, you are better off buying fewer shares of a higher-priced stock than a lot of shares of a penny stock. That is because low-priced stocks are most often associated with lower quality companies. As a result, they are not usually allowed to trade on the NYSE or the Nasdaq. Instead, they trade on the OTCBB ("over the counter bulletin board") or Pink Sheets, both of which have much less stringent financial reporting requirements than the major exchanges do. Many of these companies have never made a profit. They may be frauds or shell companies that are designed solely to enrich management and other insiders. They may also include former “blue chips” that have fallen on hard times like Eastman Kodak or Lehman Brothers. In addition, penny stocks are inherently more volatile than higher-priced stocks. Think of it this way: if a $100 stock moves $1, that is a 1% move. If a $5 stock moves $1, that is a 20% move. Many new traders underestimate the kind of emotional and financial damage that this kind of volatility can cause. In my experience, penny stocks do not trend nearly as well as higher-priced stocks. They tend to be more mean-reverting (Mean reversion occurs when a stock moves up sharply from its average trading price, only to fall right back down again to its average trading price). Many of them are eventually headed to zero, but they are still not good short candidates. Most brokers will not let you short them. And even if you do find a broker who will let you short a penny stock, how would you like to wake up to see your penny stock trading at $10 when you just shorted it at $2 a few days before? I learned that lesson the hard way. It turned out that I was risking $8 to make $2, which is not a good way to make money over the long term. To add injury to insult, a penny stock might appear to be liquid one day, and the next day, the liquidity dries up and you are confronted by a $2 bid/ask spread. Or the bid might completely disappear. Imagine owning

On Monday, Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy, and Merrill Lynch, having announced $55.2 billion in losses on subprime bond–backed CDOs, had sold itself to Bank of America. The U.S. stock market had fallen by more than it had since the first day of trading after the attack on the World Trade Center. On Tuesday the U.S. Federal Reserve announced that it had lent $85 billion to the insurance company AIG, to pay off the losses on the subprime credit default swaps AIG had sold to Wall Street banks—the biggest of which was the $13.9 billion AIG owed to Goldman Sachs. When you added in the $8.4 billion in cash AIG had already forked over to Goldman in collateral, you saw that Goldman had transferred more than $20 billion in subprime mortgage bond risk into the insurance company, which was in one way or another being covered by the U.S. taxpayer.

In his chapter on the SEC Mr Ney demonstrates an understanding of the esoteric operations of the Stock Exchange. Operations are controlled for the benefits of the insiders who have the special information and the clout to profit from all sorts of transactions, regardless of the actual value of the stock traded. The investor is left out or is an extraneous factor. The actual value of the listed stock is irrelevant. The name of the game is manipulation

Back then, Ron Howell’s job might have seemed easy enough: he sold the gasoline and other fuels that Koch Industries produced at its refineries. As the senior vice president of supply and trading at Koch, Howell made sure that Koch’s fuel went straight from the refineries to the highest-paying customer. Gasoline was the kind of product that seemed to sell itself—there was always demand for fuel. People at Koch referred to Howell’s job as the “dispossession of molecules,” meaning that he simply had to find a home for the various fuels that Koch produced. This seemed straightforward. But Howell’s job was the kind of job that produced insomnia and ulcers. It forced him to retire when he was in his thirties before the job killed him. When he talked about oil trading, even decades later, Howell often used words like whippin’ and savage. The savagery of Howell’s average workday began when he walked into the office in Houston every morning and picked up the phone to sell the first barrel of gasoline or diesel fuel. The stomach acids started to boil the instant Howell tried to establish what might seem like a basic, simple fact: the price of oil that day. Determining the price of oil at any given minute was an arcane art practiced by a network of traders around the world. They spent their days on the phone with one another, arguing, cajoling, bluffing, and bullying. The fact is that nobody really knew the price of a barrel of oil, or gasoline, or diesel fuel. Everybody had to guess, and the person who could guess with the most precision walked away with profits that were almost limitless. The person who guessed wrong faced instant, brutal downsides in the market. There was a common misperception that the price of oil floats up and down on a global market. Every day, business commentators and journalists talked about the “price of oil” as if it were like the price of General Electric stock—a price that was determined by millions of buyers and sellers who traded on large, open exchanges. In fact, there was no global market for oil. Oil was bought and sold inside a constellation of thousands of tiny nodes where transactions and prices were totally hidden to outsiders.

In the stock market, it is illegal to trade on inside information. If a CEO knows that her firm is about to buy a smaller competitor, she cannot go buy shares of that smaller firm before the news is publicly announced and the shares jump in value. The idea behind the ban on insider trading is that it makes the markets an even playing field for ordinary investors. Futures markets are different. When regulators built the modern futures markets during the 1930s, in fact, they wanted traders to use inside information when they bought and sold futures. This way, the thinking went, the markets would quickly reflect the most accurate price possible. When traders used inside information to buy or sell contracts, their actions would quickly send price signals to everyone else. While it was legal to use inside information in the futures markets, the power to do so was concentrating into fewer and fewer hands during the 1980s. Koch Industries was one of relatively few firms in the world that was able to ship oil by the barge load while simultaneously making bets in the futures market about what would happen when that barge load of oil arrived on shore. Koch exploited this advantage to the fullest extent.

reciprocal purchase agreements” to generate more than one-fifth of its revenues. These agreements, also referred to commonly as “swaps,” were the ultimate addiction of many of the companies that flamed out so spectacularly in 2001 and 2002. Basically, a swap was an agreement by two companies to purchase goods or services from each other at the same time, inflating both companies’ revenues without any true economic purpose being fulfilled.

Drew was the market's first major speculator to venture inside business. Instead of just buying and selling stock as a speculator, he was the first of what we today would see as takeover artists, using the stock market as a way to acquire controlling interests in businesses, then get inside them and alter their destiny.

In response to current events, people often reach for historical analogies, and this occasion was no exception. The trick is to choose the right analogy. In August 2007, the analogies that came to mind—both inside and outside the Fed—were October 1987, when the Dow Jones industrial average had plummeted nearly 23 percent in a single day, and August 1998, when the Dow had fallen 11.5 percent over three days after Russia defaulted on its foreign debts. With help from the Fed, markets had rebounded each time with little evident damage to the economy. Not everyone viewed these interventions as successful, though. In fact, some viewed the Fed’s actions in the fall of 1998—three quarter-point reductions in the federal funds rate—as an overreaction that helped fuel the growing dot-com bubble. Others derided what they perceived to be a tendency of the Fed to respond too strongly to price declines in stocks and other financial assets, which they dubbed the “Greenspan put.” (A put is an options contract that protects the buyer against loss if the price of a stock or other security declines.) Newspaper opinion columns in August 2007 were rife with speculation that Helicopter Ben would provide a similar put soon. In arguing against Fed intervention, many commentators asserted that investors had grown complacent and needed to be taught a lesson. The cure to the current mess, this line of thinking went, was a repricing of risk, meaning a painful reduction in asset prices—from stocks to bonds to mortgage-linked securities. “Credit panics are never pretty, but their virtue is that they restore some fear and humility to the marketplace,” the Wall Street Journal had editorialized, in arguing for no rate cut at the August 7 FOMC meeting.

A broker was expected to find the best possible price in the market for his customer. The Goldman Sachs dark pool—to take one example—was less than 2 percent of the entire stock market. So why did nearly 50 percent of the customer orders routed into Goldman’s dark pool end up being executed inside that pool—rather than out in the wider market? Most of the brokers’ dark pools constituted less than 1 percent of the entire market, and yet somehow those brokers found the best price for their customers between 15 and 60 percent of the time.

A call is an option to buy a stated amount of a certain stock at a fixed price—generally near the current market price—at any time during a stated period. Calls on most listed stocks are always on sale by dealers who specialize in them. The purchaser pays a generally rather moderate sum for his option; if the stock then goes up during the stated period, the rise can easily be converted into almost pure profit for him, while if the stock stays put or goes down, he simply tears up his call the way a horseplayer tears up a losing ticket, and loses nothing but the cost of the call. Therefore calls provide the cheapest possible way of gambling on the stock market, and the most convenient way of converting inside information into cash.

Wall Street: I’d start carrying guns if I were you.      Your annual reports are worse fiction than the screenplay for Dude, Where’s My Car?, which you further inflate by downsizing and laying off the very people whose life savings you’re pillaging. How long do you think you can do that to people? There are consequences. Maybe not today. Or tomorrow. But inevitably. Just ask the Romanovs. They had a nice little setup, too, until that knock at the door.      Second, Congress: We’re on to your act.      In the middle of the meltdown, CSPAN showed you pacing the Capitol floor yapping about “under God” staying in the Pledge of Allegiance and attacking the producers of Sesame Street for introducing an HIV-positive Muppet. Then you passed some mealy-mouthed reforms and crowded to get inside the crop marks at the photo op like a frat-house phone-booth stunt.      News flash: We out here in the Heartland care infinitely more about God-and-Country issues because we have internal moral-guidance systems that make you guys look like a squadron of gooney birds landing facedown on an icecap and tumbling ass over kettle. But unlike you, we have to earn a living and can’t just chuck our job responsibilities to march around the office ranting all day that the less-righteous offend us. Jeez, you’re like autistic schoolchildren who keep getting up from your desks and wandering to the window to see if there’s a new demagoguery jungle gym out on the playground. So sit back down, face forward and pay attention!      In summary, what’s the answer?      The reforms laws were so toothless they were like me saying that I passed some laws, and the president and vice president have forgotten more about insider trading than Martha Stewart will ever know.      Yet the powers that be say they’re doing everything they can. But they’re conveniently forgetting a little constitutional sitcom from the nineties that showed us what the government can really do when it wants to go Starr Chamber. That’s with two rs.      Does it make any sense to pursue Wall Street miscreants any less vigorously than Ken Starr sniffed down Clinton’s sex life? And remember, a sitting president actually got impeached over that—something incredibly icky but in the end free of charge to taxpayers, except for the $40 million the independent posse spent dragging citizens into motel rooms and staring at jism through magnifying glasses. But where’s that kind of government excess now? Where’s a coffee-cranked little prosecutor when you really need him?      I say, bring back the independent counsel. And when we finally nail you stock-market cheats, it’s off to a real prison, not the rich guys’ jail. Then, in a few years, when the first of you start walking back out the gates with that new look in your eyes, the rest of the herd will get the message pretty fast.

The competitiveness of the world economy is such that mean reversion reigns, so you should buy the guys who are underperforming. Some of them will go bankrupt but many of them will come back up to the mean. Many of the growth stocks will also pull back to the mean as those who are great will become mediocre and those who are mediocre will become better.

South-east Asia’s high savings rates, most of which flowed into bank deposits, lent themselves to outsize banking systems, which invited godfather abuse. There is, in turn, a pretty direct line from the insider manipulation of regional banks to the Asian financial crisis. The ‘over-banked’ nature of south-east Asia also helps explain a conundrum that has occupied some of the region’s equity investors: why, despite heady economic growth, have long-term stock market returns in south-east Asia been so poor? Since 1993, when a flood of foreign money increased capitalisation in regional markets by around 2.5 times in one calendar year,37 dollar-denominated returns with dividends reinvested (what investors call ‘total’ returns) in every regional market have been lower than those in the mature markets of New York and London, and a fraction of those in other emerging markets in eastern Europe and Latin America.38

The U.S. stock market now trades inside black boxes, in heavily guarded buildings in New Jersey and Chicago. What goes on inside those black boxes is hard to say—the ticker tape that runs across the bottom of cable TV screens captures only the tiniest fraction of what occurs in the stock markets. The public reports of what happens inside the black boxes are fuzzy and unreliable—even an expert cannot say what exactly happens inside them, or when it happens, or why.

You Can Be a Stock Market Genius,

Senior managers at the Royal Bank of Canada were now arguing that the bank should create a Canadian dark pool, route their Canadian customers’ stock market orders into it, and then sell to high-frequency traders the right to operate inside the dark pool. Brad thought that it made a lot more sense for RBC simply to expose the new game for what it was, and perhaps establish themselves as the only broker on Wall Street not conspiring to screw investors. “The only card left to play was honesty,” as Rob Park put it.

AlphaPoint Completes Blockchain Trial Together with Scotiabank AlphaPoint, a fintech company, devoted to blockchain technological innovation, has accomplished a successful proof technology together with Scotiabank, a major international bank based in Barcelone, Canada. From the trial, Scotiabank sought to learn and examine how the AlphaPoint Distributed Journal Platform could be leveraged inside across a selection of use situations. When questioned if AlphaPoint and Scotiabank intended to further build this job, Igor Telyatnikov, president and also COO regarding AlphaPoint, advised Bitcoin Journal that he was not able to comment especially on the subsequent steps in the particular Scotiabank-AlphaPoint effort. He performed, however, suggest that AlphaPoint is about to reveal several additional media shortly. “We have a couple of other significant announcements that is to be announced inside the coming calendar month, including a generation launch using a systemically crucial financial institution, ” said Telyatnikov. “2017 will be shaping around be an unbelievable year for that distributed journal technology market as a whole and then for AlphaPoint also. ” Within the multi-month venture, trade studies were published upon deployment of the AlphaPoint Distributed Journal Platform, which usually ran concurrently on Microsoft’s Azure impair and AlphaPoint hardware. Inside real-time, typically the blockchain community converted FIXML messages to be able to smart deals and produced an immutable “single truth” across the complete network. The particular Financial Details eXchange (FIX) is a sector protocol used for communicating stock options information inside specific digital messages. Including information about getting rates, market info and buy and sell orders. Using trillions involving dollars bought and sold annually around the Nasdaq only, financial providers entities are usually investing seriously in maximizing electronic buying and selling to increase their particular speed monetary markets and decrease costs. Blockchain technology may help them help save $8-12 million per annum, which includes savings up to 70 percent throughout reporting, 50 % in post-trade and 50 % in consent, according to a report by Accenture and McLagan.

A FEW WEEKS before the first presidential debate at Hofstra University on Long Island, Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks who appears on Shark Tank, went on Fox Business and said that a Trump victory in November would cause the stock market to crash.

Graham developed his core principles, which are at least as valid today as they were during his lifetime: A stock is not just a ticker symbol or an electronic blip; it is an ownership interest in an actual business, with an underlying value that does not depend on its share price. The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists. The future value of every investment is a function of its present price. The higher the price you pay, the lower your return will be. No matter how careful you are, the one risk no investor can ever eliminate is the risk of being wrong. Only by insisting on what Graham called the “margin of safety”—never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be—can you minimize your odds of error. The secret to your financial success is inside yourself. If you become a critical thinker who takes no Wall Street “fact” on faith, and you invest with patient confidence, you can take steady advantage of even the worst bear markets. By developing your discipline and courage, you can refuse to let other people’s mood swings govern your financial destiny. In the end, how your investments behave is much less important than how you behave.

Usually an upbeat affair, the BCA conference in 2006 proved disturbing. Harvard professor Niall Ferguson asked a strange question: Why hadn’t the recent assassination of a Russian central banker, a Thai coup d’état, and a North Korean nuclear bomb test triggered a stock market rout?

A stock is not just a ticker symbol or an electronic blip; it is an ownership interest in an actual business, with an underlying value that does not depend on its share price. The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists. The future value of every investment is a function of its present price. The higher the price you pay, the lower your return will be. No matter how careful you are, the one risk no investor can ever eliminate is the risk of being wrong. Only by insisting on what Graham called the “margin of safety”—never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be—can you minimize your odds of error. The secret to your financial success is inside yourself. If you become a critical thinker who takes no Wall Street “fact” on faith, and you invest with patient confidence, you can take steady advantage of even the worst bear markets. By developing your discipline and courage, you can refuse to let other people’s mood swings govern your financial destiny. In the end, how your investments behave is much less important than how you behave.

life on the Street, with its uneven information flows, often rewarded the powerful and connected over the merely smart. It distorted the entire market in the process.

inscrutable.

If it had been a bad quarter, we needed to leak that information slowly and quietly, so that the stock would drop during the week or two before the earnings announcement,

Positive news would also be leaked but downplayed a bit, so that the stock would still see a decent bounce when the better-than-expected news hit. It

But, sir, I have greater news than that,” said the messenger. “General Burgoyne and his whole army are prisoners!” Burgoyne had been defeated at the Battle of Saratoga, and now Howe was indeed isolated.26 The very dramatic dramatist Beaumarchais, who happened to be at Passy at the time, was eager to use the inside news to speculate in the stock markets; he raced back to Paris at such a high speed that his cabriolet overturned, fracturing his arm. Bancroft also immediately scurried off, heading for London to consult with his spymasters (he would also have speculated, but the news reached London before he did). Franklin, far calmer than his odd friends, wrote up a news release filled with little details and large exaggerations: “Mail arrived from Philadelphia at Dr. Franklin’s house in Passy after 34 days. On October 14th General Burgoyne was forced to lay down his arms, 9200 men killed or taken prisoner . . . General Howe is in Philadelphia, where he is imprisoned. All communication with his fleet is cut off.

we do not make negative or controversial comments about our clients as a matter of sound business practice.”3

first, I was covering slow-moving stocks that didn’t fluctuate a lot; second, I was brand-new and no one was going to invest money on my recommendations yet; and third, I had presented an entirely well-reasoned but entirely unsexy report. It didn’t have any juice, any pop, any emotion, any insider-type info.

accounting firms can be trusted to stand up for the investor and resign when a client insists on using improper accounting.

From his headquarters in Los Angeles, Bob Lorsch had entered the prepaid calling card space and built SmarTalk into a success. I was a VP at Salomon at the time and had heard stories about how crazy and fascinating Lorsch was, so I agreed to work with my colleague Mark Davis on a SmarTalk equity offering a year or so after the company’s IPO. We met at their Los Angeles offices at lunchtime. Lorsch burst into the room like a bad caricature of Danny DeVito, and even though I’d been warned that he was an unconventional CEO, I still wasn’t prepared for the encounter. We had put together the standard detailed presentation that analyzed the state of the public equity markets, how the SmarTalk stock had been performing, who owned it, et cetera. A young Salomon analyst who had been pulling all-nighters to assemble the books sat in a chair near the door. Mark and I passed around the presentation books. “So we’ve prepared a—” I started. “Just tell me,” Lorsch interjected. “Do we have Grubman or not?” Jack Grubman, Salomon’s famed equity analyst, had previously endorsed the SmarTalk IPO with a buy rating. “Yes,” Mark said. “We have Jack. We talked to him prior to the meeting and confirmed that he’ll continue to cover the company and support the offering.” “Then you’re hired,” Lorsch said with a smile, pushing his unopened book to the center of the table. “Let’s eat.” It seemed reckless to have made his decision on so little information, and I could only imagine how the analyst kid near the door felt, sleep-deprived and probably proud of his hard work, only to see the book tossed aside without so much as a cracking of the spine. While we ate the catered lunch that was delivered to the conference room, Mark mentioned that I was in the midst of planning my wedding for that summer. “Don’t get married!” Lorsch advised me. “Terrible, terrible idea.” He described a few of his own ill-fated unions, dropping in crude one-liners to punctuate the stories: “Why buy when you can rent? . . . If it flies, floats, or fucks, don’t buy it! . . .” Despite

Financial strength and capital structure. The most basic possible definition of a good business is this: It generates more cash than it consumes. Good managers keep finding ways of putting that cash to productive use. In the long run, companies that meet this definition are virtually certain to grow in value, no matter what the stock market does. Start by reading the statement of cash flows in the company’s annual report. See whether cash from operations has grown steadily throughout the past 10 years. Then you can go further. Warren Buffett has popularized the concept of owner earnings, or net income plus amortization and depreciation, minus normal capital expenditures. As portfolio manager Christopher Davis of Davis Selected Advisors puts it, “If you owned 100% of this business, how much cash would you have in your pocket at the end of the year?” Because it adjusts for accounting entries like amortization and depreciation that do not affect the company’s cash balances, owner earnings can be a better measure than reported net income. To fine-tune the definition of owner earnings, you should also subtract from reported net income: any costs of granting stock options, which divert earnings away from existing shareholders into the hands of new inside owners any “unusual,” “nonrecurring,” or “extraordinary” charges any “income” from the company’s pension fund. If owner earnings per share have grown at a steady average of at least 6% or 7% over the past 10 years, the company is a stable generator of cash, and its prospects for growth are good.

By 1928, with only $20 million in partnership capital and either sole or joint control over funds worth $500 million, this created a devastating level of exposure on the eve of the October 1929 stock market crash. John Kenneth Galbraith used phrases such as “gargantuan insanity” and “madness … on a heroic scale” to describe GTSC’s strategy.21 When the crash came, GTSC shares fell from their high of $326 to less than $2 per share. The ensuing debacle and damage to Goldman’s reputation, leadership, and clients caused Goldman to stay away from the asset management business.

With the markets and Goldman’s earnings recovering, Goldman went public on May 3, 1999, pricing the stock at $53 per share, implying an equity market valuation of over $30 billion. In the end, Goldman decided to offer only a small portion of the company to the public, with some 48 percent still held by the partnership pool, 22 percent of the company held by nonpartner employees, and 18 percent held by retired Goldman partners and Sumitomo Bank and the investing arm of Kamehameha Schools in Hawaii. This left approximately 12 percent of the company held by the public.

Value at risk (VaR) is a widely used measure of the risk of loss on a specific portfolio of financial assets, expressed in terms of a probability of losing a given percentage of the value of a portfolio—in mark-to-market value—over a certain time. For example, if a portfolio of stocks has a one-day 5 percent VaR of $1 million, there is a 0.05 probability that the portfolio will fall in value by more than $1 million over a one-day period. Informally, a loss of $1 million or more on this portfolio is expected on one day in twenty. Typically, banks report the VaR by risk type (e.g., interest rates, equity prices, currency rates, and commodity prices).

In his chapter on the SEC Mr Ney demonstrates an understanding of the esoteric operations of the Stock Exchange. Operations are controlled for the benefits of the insiders who have the special information and the clout to profit from all sorts of transactions, regardless of the actual value of the stock traded. The investor is left out or is an extraneous factor. The actual value of the listed stock is irrelevant. The name of the game is manipulation.

STRUCTURAL CHANGE: NETWORK EFFECTS TURN FIRMS INSIDE OUT As we’ve seen, in the industrial era, giant companies relied on supply-side economies of scale. By contrast, most Internet era giants rely on demand-side economies of scale. Firms such as Airbnb, Uber, Dropbox, Threadless, Upwork, Google, and Facebook are not valuable because of their cost structures: the capital they employ, the machinery they run, or the human resources they command. They are valuable because of the communities that participate in their platforms. The reason Instagram sold for $1 billion is not its thirteen employees; the reason WhatsApp sold for $19 billion wasn’t its fifty employees. The reasons were the same: the network effects both organizations had created. Standard accounting practices might not factor the value of communities into the value of a firm, but stock markets do.

It was so complex. The number of destinations for trading stocks was maddening. There were four public exchanges: the NYSE, Nasdaq, Direct Edge, and BATS (the latter two, which specialized in high-speed trading, appeared on the scene in 2005 and 2006, respectively). Inside each of those exchanges were various other destinations. The NYSE had NYSE Arca, NYSE Amex, NYSE Euronext, and NYSE Alternext. Nasdaq had three markets. BATS had two. Direct Edge had EDGA, which had no “maker-taker” system, and EDGX, which did.

Financial options were systematically mispriced. The market often underestimated the likelihood of extreme moves in prices. The options market also tended to presuppose that the distant future would look more like the present than it usually did. Finally, the price of an option was a function of the volatility of the underlying stock or currency or commodity, and the options market tended to rely on the recent past to determine how volatile a stock or currency or commodity might be. When IBM stock was trading at $34 a share and had been hopping around madly for the past year, an option to buy it for $35 a share anytime soon was seldom underpriced. When gold had been trading around $650 an ounce for the past two years, an option to buy it for $2,000 an ounce anytime during the next ten years might well be badly underpriced. The longer-term the option, the sillier the results generated by the Black-Scholes option pricing model, and the greater the opportunity for people who didn’t use it.

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A low price and the prospect for imminent change are the two key components. Beyond that, it also helps if there is insider buying by management,