Great post about investing in gold on The Business Insider

It's always usefull to know about the alternatives to futures, options and etf's when investing in gold.
 
http://www.businessinsider.com/11-ways-to-get-into-gold-2009-10
 

Self fulfilling profecy?

Great piece by James Saft from Reuters, according to this the markets will go up because managers need the markets to go up.
 
"With just a few short weeks until the end of the year, look for many fund managers to take on more risk in an effort to salvage their annual return figures.
This is not about fundamentals, this is about something far more important: career risk.
Hedge Fund Research's Global Hedge Fund index, which is broadly representative of the industry, is up just 11.9 percent year to date, while its Equity Hedge index is scarcely doing better, up 12.6 percent. The HFR Macro Fund index is actually down 8 percent, indicating the best paid minds in the business did not see the astounding emerging markets rally and dollar fall coming.
Given that global emerging markets are up something on the order of 60 percent this year, that all global shares are up 30 percent and even the S&P 500 is up 22 percent, we can conclude that a lot of managers are heading into the year-end reporting season with a lot of ground to make up."
 
...
 
 
"The authorities, in their wisdom, have broken the circuit of a crash by flooding the market with enough money to drive up asset prices. This is intended to bring money out from under mattresses and force people to take risks again, to make them dance even if they feel like a fool.
That is unlikely to last forever or to work forever, but a reversal is less likely before January 1 than after."
 
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2009/11/17/while-the-music-plays-funds-gotta-dance/
 

Currency evolution graph

From FT:
 
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9a2fdf12-b725-11de-96f2-00144feab49a.html
 

Derivatives have been around for a while

"The ledger of the financial broker Charles Blunt contains the details of some 1,500 transactions realized between 1692 and 1695, about a third of which regard the then novel trade in equity options (p.9). The technique had arisen in the 1620s in the commodity market and was proving very useful in the decade following the Glorious Revolution, when some 100 joint-stock companies were floated in London (p.10). During the boom of the early 1690s, it is likely that “several thousand derivatives were transacted each year”."

From Economic History Blog via FT Alphaville

http://premodeconhist.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/murphy-a-2009-the-smartest-boys-in-the-alley-early-derivatives-on-the-london-stock-market

Yes we bottle

" 63-year-old homeless Russian man has gone from street life to stock market trader after collecting thousands of empty booze bottles for cash, a popular Russian tabloid reported on Tuesday."
 
From Reuters:
 
http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSTRE59C1Z420091013
 

M&A Potential Targets and Acquires from Credit Suisse

Via FT Alphaville
 
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2009/09/17/72336/an-ma-cheat-sheet/
 
You can get the full document here:
 
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/lib/data/filecache/attachment/C/S/CS-MA.pdf
 

The Rich Have Feelings, Too

Funny article:
 
"Losing billions is stressful, and the brave financiers who risk other people's money need a way to cool out—hopping on the GV, say, for a bimbo-boffing weekend in the Bahamas. Thanks to the bailout, that's history. The author imagines one fictional highflier's shock as he rejoins the commercial-aviation herd."
 
From Vanity Fair:
 
http://www.vanityfair.com/style/features/2009/09/tom-wolfe200909?currentPage=1