9. Oil gets lively

   Friday 13 Jan

   Oil

   Oil prices have been trending down for half a year. Given the number of times that ‘high energy prices’ have been used as an excuse for things getting more expensive, you may be surprised to read this, but it’s true!

   All the factors that made …

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   There are comments.

10. Equity review

    2023-01-12

    Equity markets and their headwinds

    This calendar year has started with a burst of gloom:

    • Rising interest rates, driven by central banks trying to fight labour shortages by making capital more expensive,

    • central banks promising to double down on their fight against inflation, in spite of the pain being …

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    There are comments.

11. Sources of capital

    2023-01-11

    My brush with private equity

    A very long time ago, I wanted to get funding for a software startup. This was in the 1980s. I was young and naive, and so was my business partner. The PC was a new thing, and very little software was available for it …

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    There are comments.

12. Has gold’s time come?

    2023-01-10

    The barbarous relic at the gate

    All right-thinking economists dismiss gold as money. Keynes famously declared it a ‘barbarous relic’. But even after all these years, the yellow rock still gets investors and journalists excited (e.g. in today’s FT)

    Part of the appeal of gold is its …

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    There are comments.

13. The Fed wants you to lose your job

    Bonds

    

    Bonds have had a good run, but maybe now is not the time to own them. ($BOND is a PIMCO ETF, but I’d be very surprised if its performance was not representative of an investment-grade bond index).

    

    People imagine that the Left don’t worry about balancing the …

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    There are comments.

14. Cults, the mean voter theorem and the disaffected

    I am not the first blogger to comment that today’s politics is broken. I’m probably not even in the first few thousand. We have seen the rise of demagogues like Nigel Farage and Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, something that has both terrified and mystified mainstream politicians …

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    There are comments.

15. Is technical analysis the triumph of the efficient market hypothesis?

    2023-01-07

    Technical analysis

    Technical analysis, the studying of price history charts, like the Ancient Romans studied the entrails of animals or palmists study lines on one’s palm, has an ancient pedigree.

    Like fortune tellers, the best chartists study fundamentals and the macroeconomic environment as deeply as any market participant …

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    There are comments.

16. The milkshake is curdled

    2023-01-06

    Currency commentary

    Money is a complicated thing. Ratios of values of complicated things are … doubly complicated. There is no shortage of economic literature on what FX rates should be, but no economist ever got rich by using economic theory to position his FX exposure.

    Well, possibly Keynes actually did …

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    There are comments.

17. Equity focus

    2023-01-05

    Where are we with equities

    For me, equity prices are dependent on so many factors, it’s hard to know what is driving them over any given timescale. With forex, there are a variety of simple models, such as covered interest rate parity, which help one think about why …

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    There are comments.

18. Alternative Investments Edition

    2023-01-04

    What’s a down round?

    I’ve recently got interested in venture capital. I just finished “The Power Law” by Sebastian Mallaby, which is all about the history of venture capital, and why it worked so well in Silicon Valley and why it has been so hard to transplant …

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    There are comments.

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