Crumbs

FT Companies section was good today:

• low vol factor was original inspiration for index fund, but has underperformed almost ever since,
• Greensill really looks like a tar pit for Cameron. How can the guy argue he has good judgement?
• Wall Street changes its tune on BTC now it’s a big enough ‘asset class’ to attract investor interest and the fees that come with that interest,
• BlackRock should be renamed WhiteRock, because ethnic minorities are hired purely to meet diversity quotas,
• Steel is not worth saving, but probably will be, but nothing will be done to change the corporate and economic environment in the UK that makes steelmaking uneconomic (not least energy prices),
• The LSE has a huge market cap, £40bln, now it owns Refinitiv, which will supposedly provide a stable stream of income, relative to trading (& settlement) fees,
• Turkish Lira implodes, understandably. ZAR and BRE to be next?
• Oil sector issues a lot of junk debt because … it can!

Elsewhere:

• dollar strength seems to be clear, even in the face of so much debt issuance by public and private borrowers. The dollar remains a risk-off asset, and the Turkish Lira has presumably affected the risk perception in EM markets,
• Beeple (Mike Winklemann) agrees that NFTs are in a bubble. He recently sold a digital image for $69M. Probably explains why he didn’t express this opinion publicly earlier.
• this is a bumper year for stock fraud. The latest issue of the Bear Cave newletter lists a ton.

Where to blog

I have been thinking of moving off a static blogging platform, mainly to have an email newsletter. I was kinda thinking of substack, mainly because Kevin Muir moved to it. But this post put me off. If what it says can be taken at face value, the extra control you have with Ghost makes it the top choice. Medium is worse (although if they feature you, they can drive subscribers up) and substack is intermediate, but are still annoyingly restrictive. Ghost seems to score, because 100% of their revenue comes from the author, and so they make their product to please him. With the others, the readers are also their customers, so they are not 100% focussed on the blog author.

I might just organize a mailchimp list and cut and paste my content. Less than ideal, but good enough for my needs, I think.

I do like Pelican, because I can just write in Markdown, in vi if I like, and just run make, like the programmer I was, and a new post is published. I can’t see it getting easier than this. I can be entirely offline while creating content.

Wrap

The disaster of the vaccine rollout in Europe seems to be infecting global markets, leading to a risk off but deflationary day:

• energy commodities severely impacted: gasoline futures down 4.3%,
• most equity markets down: practically every global market. VIX now up to 21, nearly,
• curves flattening: 10-2s down to about 1.52% from a high of 1.65% last week,
• even BTC down a bit $54.5K,
• currencies mainly flat, NZD falling a bit more, but from a high point (like the AUD),
• USD rising against EM currencies: up against the TRY by 6%, but this is highly volatile.

Thoughts

I was wondering why the radical left, and right are so terrible at winning elections, when their policies seem generally very popular. Part of this is the Median Voter Theorem, which says that in a two party system you can afford to ignore the political wishes of your fringe (and activist) supporters, because there is no where for them to go. This theorem makes a lot of heroic assumptions, and UKIP and the Lib Dems very existence invalidates it as a reliable guide in the UK. I think that partly its because parties end up getting run by people who are interested in getting elected and getting re-elected. People who feel passionate about something, whether freedom, fighting inequality or protecting our cultural heritage are useful as supporters, but I feel they never really rise to positions of great influence in political parties. It may be that a few individuals test that hypothesis: Clem Atlee, Margaret Thatcher are the two that come to mind, but even they are seen as anomalies by their parties.

Chart

What will crude do next?