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Is Africa the Next Big Thing?

Controlled Greed is wondering about Africa:
Africa could be — note the words “could be” — the perfect contrarian emerging markets play. That is, everyone is raving about Mainland China and India (and even Asia). Yet a few years from now we all wake up and start reading — after the fact — that pan-African investments [...]

Would football pundits make better stock tipsters?

As a group, stockmarket tipsters don’t make particularly good forecasters. Neither do football pundits. Perhaps the football pundits should made stock recommendations.
Yesterday, in thelondonpaper (if you’re not familiar with London’s free sheets this is the one you can use as toilet paper because the print doesn’t come off), Gavin Peacock showed potential.
The former QPR, Chelsea [...]

Keeping up with the jargon

If, like me, you find yourself clicking about for Graeme Pietersz’s Moneyterms super-glossary whenever the financial press throws out a new piece of half-explained jargon…
…Then you’ll welcome a new feature. It’s an RSS feed. Now every time Graeme defines a new term, you can receive an update, as you can whenever I, or any other [...]

The finance book nobody wants

The world is awash with finance books. Do we really need one about Black Swans?
I received a book in the post today. It’s from Robin, a reader of this blog, who also contributes by way of the comments he leaves.
More interesting than the book, perhaps, is the reason it’s ended up on my desk, [...]

Efficient markets and sub-prime exposed :-)

Edmond sent me this link:

Go on. It’s Friday, the market’s not tanking.
Sit back and have a laugh

What were you doing on 19 October 1987?

Friday is the 20th anniversary of ‘Black Monday’, when the Dow Jones fell 22.6%. The FTSE All-Share fell 20% in two days. Most investors can remember what they were doing then and, for some, it changed their lives.
Peter Lynch starts my favourite investing book, ‘One Up on Wall Street’, reminding readers:
You can’t bring up [...]

Investors behaving badly

Some views from around the Internet:
Although I’ve yet to start reading his book, instinctively I’m a fan of James Montier. He’s a behavioural investing expert who enjoys trashing conventional investment theory. Perhaps that’s because it’s a mathematical construct which tends to overlook the human factor.
Back in the real world everyone knows psychology drives markets.
Recently Mr [...]

Measuring your return (again)

There’s more than one way to crack a nut. And deciding the right method of performance measurement is proving a hard nut to crack.
Graeme’s shared a spreadsheet showing how he calculates time-weighted performance.
If you’re new to this discussion, it follows Monday’s post, How are you doing? In which I explained the money-weighted method I [...]

Creative analysis

It’s not just accountants that are creative, investors can be too. A not so new book shows you how.
Having read a few, I’ve come to the conclusion books on financial accounts aren’t meant to be read through, unless you’re the sort of person that likes reading dictionaries, telephone directories and parts-lists.
Sadly, another thing I can’t [...]

How are you doing?

Most investors grossly overestimate their abilities, which is one of the reasons they do so badly. Although the maths can be complicated, the individual investor can, and should, measure his performance.
No, seriously. How are you doing? Or, more specifically, how are your shares doing?
If you can tell me, you’re in the minority according to an [...]

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