What you need is a distraction from the drip of bad economic news. (Just remember: the stock market is a random walk that, over the long-term, has an upward slope. Besides, investors who do nothing to their stock portfolio - they don't buy or sell a single stock - outperform the average "active" investor by nearly 10 percent.) So, instead of trying to get your broker on the phone, browse through these exquisite satellite photos, courtesy of NASA:
via kottke
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I find the epic Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff morbidly fascinating. He managed to lose 50 billion dollars, which can't be easy:
A busy stock-trading operation occupied the 19th floor, and the computers and paperwork of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities filled the 18th floor.
But the 17th…
I've got a short column in the Wall Street Journal today where I recommend five books on human irrationality. I wanted to work in a novel too, but I soon realized that every novel is about irrational people.
1. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
By Charles Mackay
1841
There…
Contrary to what some might think, I'm not opposed to investment bank and bankers, I'm just opposed to the current crop of banks and bankers. But even more than usurious middle men, the guys who really make my head explode are the flat-out speculators--they serve, even on their best days, no…
The power of Warren Buffett is impressive. He decides to invest a few billion in Goldman Sachs and panicked investors calm down. And why not? Nobody has an investing record that can even come close to comparing with Buffett's record: he is the lone outlier of Wall Street. According to most…
Lovely image. You just made me wonder - as I am sitting 10" underneath a battered copy of Howard Berg's "Random Walks in Biology" text - whether anyone has analyzed the stock market with multidimensional diffusion tensor or finite element analysis. (Now say that ten times fast.) I'm sure someone's done it.
Thanks for the photo!
And you brought back memories of my finance undergrad and our bible, "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Malkiel. I was told then to imagine the market as a man with a yo-yo walking up a hill with the advice that investors should focus on the steady rise of the hill, not the daily ups and downs of the yo-yo.
Jonah, its interesting you refer to the Random Walk of markets (based on the Efficient Market HYPOTHESIS), financial bubbles, and Sir Popper all within a few posts. Not easy to reconcile my friend. Science is best left to scientists and finance to alchemists.