Tag Archives: Finance

“The Wall Street Math Hustle”

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Run immediately over to Institutional Investor and read this excellent piece on all of the fake number crunching investment firms use into making decisions and buying products that are not in your best interest.

The yes blunt but 100% accurate conclusion:

These strategies carry the stamp of scientific certitude, but Wall Street’s researchers, like all scientists, have an ethical responsibility to communicate the limitations of these supposedly systematically proven models to an aroused but insufficiently skeptical, public.

Yet much of their world is bullshit. And yes, maybe we’re a bit too blunt. But we don’t want them to sell you more of what isn’t working.

Read it and don’t be the lower-case fool.

Wall Street today

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You have to admit, this is a terrible, ugly, no-good chart of S&P movement.

SP

 

It’s worth noting, though, that this is not a chart of this week’s declines, the ones currently causing people to scream at each other on TV. Rather it is a chart of the declines that occurred back in February.

Remember those? Yeah no one else does either.

The lesson? Don’t panic over stock movement. Buy good companies and hold them. And don’t watch much CNBC.

Sink the Jones Act!

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Hear hear!

First, grant at least a five-year waiver of the act to Puerto Rico. This would speed the island’s recovery. It would also test how best to regulate foreign-flag carriers, and provide data to show exactly what the act is costing.

Next, scrap the act’s “build-in-America” provision, as Senator John McCainand others have proposed. The global glut in container ships makes now a good time to replace the aging Jones Act cargo fleet with cheaper, cleaner vessels. Many components in “American-built” ships are already imported; some “American” shipbuilders and shipping lines are foreign subsidiaries.

Allow foreign-flag ships sailing from and then onward to foreign ports to deliver cargo to more than one U.S. port on a given coast. This would stimulate coastal commerce overall.

via Maritime Commerce Can Thrive Without the Jones Act