Institutional Investor (January 31)
“Bitcoin’s wild price swings have investors wondering how to short the digital currency, as there would be a lot of money to be made in the latest craze in investing.” Alas, this isn’t so easy. Though Bitcoin futures trade openly, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is charging “an initial margin of 47 percent of the futures’ value owing to the volatile nature of Bitcoin.”
Tags: Bitcoin, CME, Craze, Digital currency, Futures, Investing, Investors, Margin, Price Swings, Short, Volatile, Wild
Institutional Investor (May 15)
“The Cambrian explosion has nothing on institutional investing.” Rather than millions of years, institutional investing’s journey from small and simple to enormously complex took only half a century…. The unfortunate and ironic part is that all this innovation has done little to quell crises…. Underlying every instance of disaster is the same root: We simply do not know what we think we know.”
Tags: Cambrian, Complex, Crises, Disaster, Innovation, Institutional, Investing, Simple
Institutional Investor (May 30)
Firms “are doubling down on machine learning and other quantitative investing efforts.” More advanced than rule-based algorithms, “with machine learning, a computer sifts through billions of data points, picking up patterns. Armed with this knowledge, it learns trading behaviors such as buying dips or selling high over time, based on what it has gleaned about the market from past and present data.” Despite the inroads, however, human ingenuity remains essential.
Tags: Algorithms, Computer, Data points, Dip, Firms, Ingenuity, Investing, Machine learning, Market, Patterns, Quantitative, Trading
New York Times (May 6)
“French officials should not seek to block G.E. simply because it’s based in Connecticut.” The protectionist arguments being used to thwart the sale of Alstom’s energy business “can only discourage non-European businesses from investing in France, further damaging a sluggish economy that already suffers from a 10.4 percent unemployment rate.”
Tags: Alstom, Economy, Energy business, France, G.E., Investing, Officials, Protectionist, Unemployment
Wall Street Journal (November 18)
Burton G. Malkiel author of the investing classic A Random Walk Down Wall Street says traditional methods of investing are even more important today. Buying and holding beats skillful timing. Diversification is still essential. Those who invested according to these principles between 2000 and 2009 would have seen their portfolios nearly double. Those who didn’t would have seen their initial investment shrink. Mr. Malkiel urges investors to follow “time-tested techniques” so they come out ahead, “even during the toughest of times.”
