Can’t be real, can it?

Audio

There’s a world-famous value manager who stopped buying stocks in 2007 and started to hoard more and more cash. He was not predicting the Financial Crisis or the Credit Crash that would lead to a 60% drop for the S&P over the next two years. He simply couldn’t find enough stocks to buy that fit…

This comes from the Dep’t of Unsolved Problems – one of the dumbest f*cking business models in the history of the world and in all the annals of global finance is the user-pays situation we have with the credit ratings agencies. And unlike other perverse compensation arrangements we’ve been regulating out of existence on Wall…

Above, you’re looking at a 10th century hermitage on an island off the coast of Spain called Gaztelugatxe. It can be reached by the Stairs Above the Sea, which is one of those magical combinations of nature and man-made artifice that looks like it belongs in a storybook, not in the real world. Click over or…

A quote from Jason Zweig’s piece on “High Pressure Hedge Fund Culture”: “You should pay hedge-fund managers all that extra money so they don’t lose you a lot of your capital in bad markets,” says Elizabeth Hilpman, chief investment officer at Barlow Partners, which invests exclusively in hedge funds. “But many institutional investors want it…

The first Iron Man film from 2008 made $15 million at the Chinese box office. The new Iron Man 3, released this summer, did about $115 million. Clearly, Hollywood wants (needs) growth like that to continue. But it has to play by China’s censorship rules in order for that to happen. Brad Pitt’s latest big-budget…

Video

There are those who would convince you that it is somehow smart or in your best interest to be manically switching your investments around, back and forth, long and short, on a daily basis. To pay attention to this kind of overstimulation is the height of madness, even for professional traders. The most storied and…

Here were the most read posts on TRB this week, in case you missed them: