Fresh informations

The world’s biggest financial services firm last week dismissed its entire stock market technical analysis team, including longtime analyst Louise Yamada, group leader who had been with the bank for nearly a quarter of a century.
Citigroup stated that the firing of Yamada and her team is part of an effort to control expenses, and the company is planning to eliminate up to 1,000 jobs from its global corporate and investment banking division:
Citigroup Eliminates Stock Technical Analysis Group
Naturally this released yet another barage of the customary anti-technical analysis invective which seems to emerge at every opportunity:
Technical analysis–you’re fired! Is there any value to this controversial stock picking method?
I’m sure TA techniques could be used to spot just such denigrating opportunities!
However, I think it important to highlight the fact that Citigroup never claimed that TA doesn’t work. The action simply implies that their customers just aren’t buying the analysis that the company […]

BBC News Online examines what we can do about MRSA, the so-called “superbug” scourge of the wards.

So, the price of crude is again on the ascendant, and, guess what? - that’s right! - the dollar’s falling back from its recent highs. Nothing new there. And as active market traders, don’t we just love this level of volatility!
In a former (one of several) life, I worked in the petroleum industry - and there was nothing better than to see a rise in the price of crude. It meant more exploration, more drilling … more, yes - a word we don’t here too often these days … INVESTMENT.
And all of this was great too for the then ailing UK economy, which still relies heavily upon North Sea oil revenues - a huge proportion of the price of petrol (gasoline) at the pumps is actually tax. It also meant more jobs in the (also ailing, and indeed disappearing) construction and fabrication industries. So, all in all, oil price rises, […]

People who constantly change their minds are often thought of as flighty, inconsistent, even unreliable.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in a recent article published in The Daily Reckoning, wants to prove that theory wrong and show that those who start each day with a clean slate and new ideas make the most rational investors.
He claims that in today’s world, self-contradiction is considered culturally to be shameful, and goes on to quote from Proust, whose novel A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (”In Search of Lost Time”) features a semi-retired diplomat, the Marquis de Norpois, who, like all diplomats before the advent of the fax machine, was a socialite who spent considerable time in salons. The narrator of the novel sees the Marquis openly contradicting himself on some issue (a pre-war rapprochement between France and Germany). But when reminded of his previous position, he did not seem to recall it. Proust reviles him: […]

Every day, you hear that “high energy prices are bad for the stock market.” You may be shocked to learn, however, that financial “experts” were saying exactly the opposite five years ago.
So which is it – are high oil prices good or bad for stocks?
I recently came across a research paper which appeared in the Special Section of the August 2004 Elliott Wave Theorist, Robert Prechter’s monthly market analysis publication:
OIL AND STOCKS: A CRUDE CONNECTION
by Tom Denham
For decades, people have fixated on some economic indicator du jour as the key driver of stock prices. This idea is seductive because, as Robert Prechter has noted many times, it helps investors “explain” otherwise mysterious market phenomena. In the 1980s, it was the weekly money supply report. Then it was the bond market and, off and on, inflation. Later it was the near-term trend of the U.S. dollar, and for a while, […]

Every day, you hear that “high energy prices are bad for the stock market.” You may be shocked to learn, however, that financial “experts” were saying exactly the opposite five years ago.
So which is it – are high oil prices good or bad for stocks?
I recently came across a research paper which appeared in the Special Section of the August 2004 Elliott Wave Theorist, Robert Prechter’s monthly market analysis publication:
OIL AND STOCKS: A CRUDE CONNECTION
by Tom Denham
For decades, people have fixated on some economic indicator du jour as the key driver of stock prices. This idea is seductive because, as Robert Prechter has noted many times, it helps investors “explain” otherwise mysterious market phenomena. In the 1980s, it was the weekly money supply report. Then it was the bond market and, off and on, inflation. Later it was the near-term trend of the U.S. dollar, and for a while, […]

Looking to invest globally? Let the Big Mac be your guide.
The Big Mac index is an informal way of measuring whether one currency is at the theoretically correct exchange rate with another currency. The measure assumes that the theory of purchasing power parity (PPP) holds.
The main tenet of PPP is that the exchange rate between two currencies should naturally adjust so that the cost of a sample basket of goods should cost the same in one currency. In the Big Mac index, the “basket” in question is considered to be a single Big Mac as sold by McDonald’s. The Big Mac was chosen because it is available to a common specification in many countries around the world, with local McDonald’s franchisees having significant responsibility for negotiating input prices. For these reasons, the index allows for meaningful comparison between many countries’ currencies.
The Big Mac PPP exchange rate between two countries is […]

Fibromyalgia is a condition which causes widespread pain and severe fatigue.

Article about the different types of muscular dystrophy

I was going to make an “educational” post today on the subject of the “Big Mac Index” — everyone knows what that is don’t they! — but the following article just came onto my desk. It’s a follow-on from a previous article on oil demand. This article, again from the Rude Awakening newsletter, takes a look at the other side of the equation, oil supply:
By Eric J. Fry
Curves, Peaks and Dips
“Hubbert’s Curve” is NOT part of the female anatomy…
But it is, nevertheless, a thing of beauty to long-term
crude oil investors.
Back in the 1950s, Shell Oil geophysicist, M. King Hubbert,
discovered a phenomenon he dubbed, “Hubbert’s Curve.”
The Shell geophysicist theorized that oil production from a
new field would tend to rise until about half the
recoverable oil had been produced, then peak and fall off
sharply, all along a classic bell-shaped curve.
Furthermore, Hubbert understood that in the real world of […]