Entries by Stephen

Walls

The Great Wall of China took several thousand years to build and was primarily a method for stopping Mongolian invaders from expanding into China. As a piece of military technology it dominated all-comers however it was rendered entirely useless with the advent of the flying machine. The 20th Century was not a good one for […]

Private v Public is the new Active v Passive …plus Our US Election Prediction Special

One of the early contributions of Modern Finance was questioning the wisdom of active investment management. The empirical evidence indicated that active managers underperform passive strategies.  While a finer analysis of the data subsequently demonstrated that some active managers are able to consistently outperform static benchmarks, the general principle that passive outperforms active remains, particularly […]

Brexit: non-market breakdown…

Here’s a riddle.  If the solution to market-breakdown is regulation, what is the solution to non-market breakdown? If ever there was a demonstration of the inability of Government to plan, decide and execute a simple instruction it is Brexit. The UK referendum instructed the Government to leave the EU cartel.  The rights and obligations that […]

PoW, PoS or what for the Blockchain?

“You can’t always get what you want, but if you try real hard, you can get what you need.” The Rolling Stones   The Blockchain might want to be able to function autonomously and anonymously, but it can’t always get what it wants. The distributed ledger Blockchain technology is a decentralised method for recording ownership […]

The US-China trade war ‘Punch and Judy show’ is about to end

The US- China trade war is a short-term phenomena that will correct itself despite the warnings of some.  The pessimists cite the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma model  as the reason a trade war will have long-term consequences.  This is wrong… In the Prisoners Dilemma, two felons are confined separately and interrogated.  They are offered the choice […]

Pragmatism and compromise in Brexit

“In the referendum on 23 June 2016 – the largest ever democratic exercise in the United Kingdom – the British people voted to leave the European Union… …But to do so requires pragmatism and compromise on both sides.” UK PM Theresa May in the foreword to the White Paper on the Future of the UK’s […]

Surviving the Value Quicksand

Value investing refers to buying stocks at less than their intrinsic value. Warren Buffett is considered an extremely successful value investor. While Buffett continues to perform well, many of his value investing counterparts have struggled over the last five years as technology stocks, in particular, have attracted investment capital. Value Guru David Einhorn, for instance, […]