Agregador de canales de noticias

The revelations confirm what many indigenous groups have long suspected

Statues are being toppled in Colombia, while Mexico has apologised to the Mayans

A selection of correspondence

But far too little to meet its promises and fight covid-19

Why football can never escape politics at the European Championship

How he tackles a crisis in social care will determine his legacy

The dictator is cracking down on North Korea’s small market economy

What M.K. Stalin lacks in charisma he compensates for with pragmatism

Originalmente publicado en: Todo, siempre depende. – Depende

En este espacio hablaré y se debatirá acerca de muchas cosas, pero, intentaré mostrarlas desde diferentes ángulos y puntos de vista, para así ser fiel al título de este Blog <<Depende>> y enseñar así las dos caras de la moneda que tiene en general, la vida.

Las verdades y certezas absolutas no existen. Por eso como todo en la vida, siempre depende.

En ocasiones hablaré acerca de una empresa que resulte interesante. En otras, hablaré sobre cosas relacionadas con la inversión: fondos, estrategias, cálculos, valoraciones… que espero que sean de interés para el lector/ inversor. Pero lo más importante de lo que hablaré, será de los grises que tiene todo lo que contaré en este lugar.

Si estaban esperando certezas aplastantes o afirmaciones rotundas, probablemente este no sea el lugar adecuado.

Lo que sí que les prometo es que este Blog será un lugar para compartir, ayudarnos, debatir, pensar y aprender juntos.

Les animo a que se suscriban al Blog, para comenzar a recibir las próximas entradas que tendrá el mismo.

4 publicaciones - 4 participantes

Leer todo el tema

 Leer

Hello,
I have just acquired a little 2nd hand CNC 3018 Pro CNC/Engraving machine.
Got it home, installed driver plus UGS Universal Gcode Sender and machine seems to work on all axis just fine.
So now i need some hopefully freeware to generate gcode for this little machine from STL files I have created with Alibre Design.
What i want to do mostly cutout Perspex/Wood sheet and maybe a little 3 axis surface machining on Perspex/Wood.
Many thanks IMK

If you dig into the components of the consumer price index, you’ll notice housing makes up a big part of the government’s inflation calculation. The latest data from the BLS shows owners’ equivalent rent makes up nearly 25% of the CPI calculation (food and energy currently make up 14% and 7%, respectively, for comparison purposes). With housing prices rising at a rapid clip, many people share the sentime...

There are a lot of stories about people who become financially independent these days in their 30s or 40s. While these are isolated instances in the grand scheme of things, they are part of a broader movement online, where people want to take ownership of their time and retire to something more meaningful in their lives. Some call it retirement, others call it financial independence, and a lot of...

To read the whole article, please click on the article title above.

 Leer

 Leer

 Leer

 

What’s the job of a financial planner? While there is probably no consensus of the job of a financial planner in general, one part of the job, I think most people could agree on, is to help investors achieve their retirement goals.

Saving for retirement is one of the most important financial planning exercises we all have to do, and it gains in importance as government and corporate pension funds become increasingly thinly stretched. Even more so, we live in a world where employees of a company no longer have access to defined benefit plans but have to make do with defined contribution plans, which means that the employee bears the investment risk of the pension plan. Making the right decisions with your pension fund investments is crucial as is the effort to make the right decision in how much to save etc.

Unfortunately, I know too many financial advisers who define their job as helping people achieve their retirement goals and then translate this as helping them to pick outperforming funds or stocks. And that is not going well, as a study by researchers from the University of Missouri has shown. They looked at 2,000 pension plans in the United States and the performance of the funds and the plans overall between 2013 and 2015. Crucially, they split the plans between the c80% plans that provided advisory services to the investors and the 20% of plans that provided no such advisory assistance. 

Their results show that when it comes to picking outperforming funds within a retirement plan, the advisors are no better than chance. While the average return of employees in plans with advisers was about the same as the return for employees in plans without advisers, the volatility and downside risks of the portfolios of employees in advisor-supported plans was somewhat higher. Thus, advisers moved investors into funds with higher risk but no compensation for that extra risk.

We could all chime into the usual song and dance how advisers are useless and unable to pick stocks or funds, but that’s not the point. The point is that achieving your retirement goals has nothing to do with picking stocks or funds. The true value add of an adviser lies in the actual planning process, not the selection of investments.

Already a decade ago, Annamaria Lusardi and Olivia Mitchel published what I consider to be one of the most important papers on financial planning of all time. They looked at the type of planning individuals engaged in and how that influenced their net worth at retirement. They distinguished between non-planners, simple planners (people who roughly knew how much of their income to save each month or each year), serious planners (people who have a proper financial plan) and successful planners (people who have a financial plan in place and managed to stick to it throughout their career, aka fairies, unicorns and otherwise unimaginably disciplined investors). The chart below shows that just moving from non-planners to a simple planning exercise increases net wealth at retirement by a factor of two to three. Engaging in serious planning then adds another 25% to 35% in extra wealth at retirement.

This is where the true value of financial planning lies and where advisers really add value: Making investors aware that they need to safe, how much they need to save and how best to manage their income and expenses to achieve their savings goals. Everything else is just noise and not worth your time.

Net wealth at retirement at retirement

a.image2.image-link.image2-510-960 { padding-bottom: 53.125%; padding-bottom: min(53.125%, 510px); width: 100%; height: 0; } a.image2.image-link.image2-510-960 img { max-width: 960px; max-height: 510px; }

Source: Lusardi and Mitchell (2011)

“Tenemos que proporcionarle (al consumidor) un pequeño chute de dopamina cada cierto tiempo, porque alguien le ha dado a “me gusta” o comentó una foto, una publicación o lo que sea. Es un bucle de retroalimentación de validación social[…], exáctamente una de esas cosas que inventaría un hacker como yo para explotar un punto débil ... Leer más

La entrada La manipulación de las redes sociales se publicó primero en SIGMADIEZ.

Today's financial pundits are mental midgets standing on the shoulders of intellectual giants. Therefore they are oblivious to the fact that this gamified alchemy is the exact opposite of what created prosperity in the past...
The stock market just closed out its (Second) best first half since 1998 which directly preceded the LTCM (Long Term Capital Management) debacle. We also learned back in April that more money poured into stocks since the election than in the prior 12 years combined. Since that time, inflows have continued their record pace - ETF inflows are almost at a new record only six months into the year. What we are witnessing is the ideal recipe for panic meltdown. 





Going back to 1998, Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) was a massively leveraged hedge fund managed by financial PhDs who were considered geniuses on Wall Street and in academia. The collapse of their fund in the second half of 1998 almost brought down the global financial system. They had made various asinine assumptions about the correlation of risk assets that were true most of the time but categorically failed when markets went into meltdown mode following the 1997 Asian Financial crisis. In other words they were oblivious data miners who assumed the past could be endlessly extrapolated into the future, hence they blindly ignored all imminent signs of risk and focused solely upon statistical probabilities. Which is the way all of today's quantitative/algorithmic trading programs work. Ignorance is bliss. More on that later. The book that described the entire debacle was called "When Genius Failed". Hence, the title of this post. The net result of that collapse was a massive Fed bailout that inadvertently lubricated the melt-up phase of the brewing Dotcom bubble. 
The Dotcom bubble itself was abided by the asinine belief that valuations, profits, and even sales no longer matter. All that matters is internet page views aka. "eyeballs". That new "business model" consisting of massively unprofitable companies going public at a record rate soon found the natural limit of fools with money to burn on worthless IPOs. At that point, the "smart money" rotated to the Big Cap safe havens - Microsoft, Intel, Dell, and Cisco. And then those stocks imploded bringing down the entire casino.
A divergence very similar to what is happening today:






When the Fed sponsored DotCom bubble collapsed, they lowered rates to a multi-decade low 1.5% which set off the melt-up stage of the brewing housing bubble. At the time, Fed Chairman Greenspan lauded the "financial innovations" taking place in the subprime lending market and he encouraged borrowers to load up on adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs). ARMs had been previously unpopular in the U.S. market because they shift all interest rate risk from the lender to the borrower, offset by a minor interest rate reduction. Within months, Greenspan jacked up rates 17 meetings in a row and imploded everyone who took his advice. But not before Wall Street had figured out how to package subprime dog shit into self-destructing weapons of mass destruction that inadvertently imploded the global financial system. 
And here we are again in the midst of a monetary fueled housing bubble:



So, what to do? The Fed bailed out Wall Street on the systemic meltdown they had created. AND paid them in full on their bets that the whole shit show would collapse.  Then the Fed lowered interest rates to 0% and started pumping money directly into financial markets. Thus inventing socialism for the rich.
Fast forward to today and the Idiocratic beliefs that attend this post-pandemic bubble are first and foremost the ubiquitous faith that assets are worth whatever price the last fool paid for them. In addition, the belief that central banks are omnipotent. The other obligatory delusion is the studied ignorance of accumulated market fragility which is a net result of 13 years of continuous monetary bailouts.
At this lethal juncture, low volatility is conflated with low risk. Which has been proven to be an asinine assumption over and over again these past years and decades. Nevertheless, serial bailouts have kept this critical hypothesis alive. 
Introduction To Volatility Targeting"Volatility is the most common risk metric of a stock. The main aim of the volatility targeting technique is to manage the portfolio’s exposure in such a way that the volatility of a portfolio is as close to the target value as possible. In other words, to ensure that the amount of dollar risk remains the same. To do this, the portfolio manager has to increase or decrease the amount of leverage, depending on the volatility"

Here we see that S&P 500 volatility is at a three year low:




Here we see that these algo controlled "volatility targeted" markets are making new all time highs this week amid the lowest number of stocks confirming this rally in 18 years. I calculate the number of stocks BELOW the 50 day moving average at every S&P all time high: 




Below we now see that this past month June 2021 officially has all top ten highest option skew values in recorded history going back 30 years. Which from a statistical point of view is a Black Swan outlier event. In a random distribution, the probability that a top ten skew value will appear in a given month over 30 years is 1 in 36 (2.7%). The chance that all ten would be in the same month is .027 to the tenth power: (0.00000000000000027). In other words, "someone" is making massive bets that this gong show is ending.
As a reminder, skew represents deep out of the money option bets on a "Black Swan" market event:
"The SKEW index is a measure of potential risk in financial markets.
SKEW values generally range from 100 to 150 where the higher the rating, the higher the perceived tail risk and chance of a black swan event"
As we see the highest values happen to be the last four trading days of the best half since 1998:






Amid all of this asinine risk, it's ironic that FINRA finally got around to fining Robinhood for causing "widespread and significant harm to customers" during the Gamestop debacle. Which incited the suicide of one young trader who woke up to an erroneous -$720,000 account balance.
However, in the meantime since that debacle in late January, the Robinhood platform has added record numbers of new users, Congress has officially sanctioned Reddit pump and dump schemes, and margin debt has reached new all time highs. In other words, this fine is totally meaningless with respect to addressing the increasing fragility of market structure. A fragility that is hidden behind the collapsed volumes and volatility that have been extremely profitable for options market makers.
Suffice to say that the number of young people who are now at risk of waking up to negative account balances is quite unthinkable. All aided and abetted by a profoundly corrupt financial services cartel that has now captured regulators and effectively neutered them. 
Which ensures that they are always barking up the wrong tree. Penalizing the pissant Robinhood platform while the real risk is officially sanctioned.


"This week alone, 18 companies are seeking to go public, including Chinese ride-hailing company Didi Global in what will be the biggest IPO of the year...That’s the most companies in a single week since 2004"
 June was also the busiest single month since August 2000"
The majority of the returns are going to the (pre-IPO) institutional buyers.” 
FOMO [Fear of Missing Out] is the biggest thing"

(FYI, my IPO data includes SPAC IPOs)https://stockanalysis.com/ipos/statistics/