There’s ALWAYS a divergence

“There’s no science behind that, people look at that kind of thing and they point out what they want to see.” In the above image, you’ll see the photograph that became the cover shot for the Beatle’s final album, Abbey Road. The photo contains one of the most talked about divergences of all time – Paul…

The Idea of Prediction is an Aphrodisiac

Look at the below table of Assets Under Management for the hedge fund industry (via Barclays), a figure which now approaches $3 trillion. You will often hear people ask “How can this be the case?” If markets are efficient, the logic goes, shouldn’t market participants themselves be efficient? If markets are rational, should not the…

Memo to CAPE Slaves

You don’t hear much out of the adherents of CAPE these days, as even its most ardent fans have given up on it as a timing tool. Earlier this year and during much of last year, I’d taken the Cyclically Adjusted Price-Earnings ratio to task for various reasons, most notably the fact that it didn’t…

The Death of Twitter Had Been Greatly Exaggerated

By now, you’ve no doubt heard about Twitter’s coming-out party last night, in which the company finally reported the game-changing quarter that Wall Street’s been waiting for. In its third-ever report as a public company, Twitter blew away the analysts expectations on just about every front, reporting a profit of 2 cents per share versus an…

The Recovery (finally) Trickling Down

My pal Peter Boockvar spotted an interesting and positive nugget in today’s Consumer Confidence report for the month of July, emphasis mine… The Conference Board’s measure of consumer confidence for July rose to 90.9 from 86.4, well above expectations of 85.4 and is at the best level since October ’07. The Present Situation rose 2…

Don’t worry, Wall Street Johns…

…the hookers will never rat you out. At least not according to this Wall Street Journal story about the SEC’s new wildly successful whistleblower program: The adult-entertainment industry, however, operates under an entirely different code. Among prostitutes, secrecy is sacrosanct, said Dennis Hof, proprietor of the Moonlight Bunny Ranch and other legal brothels in Nevada….

Paul’s Boutique 25th Anniversary

Totally off-topic but I can’t let the 25th anniversary of the Beastie Boys’ ‘Paul’s Boutique’ pass without a mention. I’ll leave you with some links and stories commemorating the milestone and simply say this: If, like me, you were born between 1965 and 1985 and you were cool, there’s a good chance that this was…