Full disclosure: Our client portfolios have been riding the Japanese stock trade since the second week in January. When the leadership of one of the largest economies in the world decides to explicitly set out upside targets for their stock market, I don’t argue. Last night the Nikkei exploded yet again – another 2.8% gain…

Over at the Mutual Fund Observer’s April monthly issue, David Snowball annotates and adds to a semi-complete list of Forbes billionaire listees who’ve made their bones in mutual funds… *** Forbes magazine published their annual list of “The Richest People on the Planet” (03/04/2013), tracking down almost 1500 billionaires in the process. (None, oddly, teachers…

Cartoon.

My friends Greg Harmon, John Boorman, Ryan Detrick and others in the technical analysis community descended upon New York City this week for the Market Technician’s Association’s 40th anniversary and annual symposium. A laundry list of legendary technicians – Ralph Acampora, MaryAnn Bartels, Bob Prechter, Andrew Lo – spoke and panels and gave presentations to…

This week’s WTF?!? statistic comes to us via Bloomberg News: The U.S. government paid almost $80 million in unemployment benefits during the worst of the economic downturn to households that made more than $1 million, including a record $29.9 million in 2010, tax records show. Almost 3,200 households — about 20 percent of them from…

“Real wisdom is not the knowledge of everything, but the knowledge of which things in life are necessary, which are less necessary, and which are completely unnecessary to know. Among the most necessary knowledge is the knowledge of how to live well, that is, how to produce the least possible evil and the greatest goodness…

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You can’t have thousands of hedge funders running around – most of them cordial enough with each other and with a similar enough background – and still keep outsized returns across the industry. Come on, you know better. Every gold rush in history ends with too many wannabes plunging their pans into the same stream,…

I knew this would happen eventually, there was way too much curiosity and unofficial use for the wall to have remained standing forever.