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The full title of this book is Equity Smart Beta and Factor Investing for Practitioners by Khalid Ghayur, Ronan G. Heaney, and Stephen C. Platt (2019). The authors are from the ActiveBeta Equity Strategies team in Goldman Sachs Asset Management. This is a very good book that has good breadth and depth. It covers a lot … Continue reading
For an asset swap buyer (a.k.a the “asset swapper”), the asset swap is a synthetic floating-rate note. It is used to transform a fixed-coupon bond into an asset that pays a floating rate (LIBOR + ASW Spread), so that an investor can take exposure to a credit without taking exposure to interest rate movements. Mechanics … Continue reading
I stumbled upon an article on Andrew Chen‘s blog on calculating Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and read around some related topics. Some quick notes below. Definitions CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) Cost to acquire a paying customer CAC = (Marketing + Sales Expenses) / # of New Customers Acquired If your customers are acquired through Google … Continue reading
Recently read a pretty good article on personal finance, titled Achieving Financial Success Without Extreme Frugality or a Huge Income by Trent Hamm (link here). Overarching Message Critically question every purchase, think about whether it really brings value to your life. If it doesn’t, think about how the spending can be cut down (e.g. store brand, … Continue reading
A recent WSJ article titled Andreessen Horowitz’s Returns Trail Venture-Capital Elite triggered a swift response from Scott Kupor, the managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and Damodaran also chimed in on the issue with a follow-on article. The articles carry some good nuggets of information, namely on how VCs “mark-to-market”. VC Marks Are Not a Measure of Performance Scott … Continue reading
The full title of this book is The Holy Grail Trading System by James Windsor. The book writes about James’ (Soultrader’s) experience live trading an intraday trend following system that was developed with a team of people. The system performed very well over 14 months bringing a starting account of £10k to £100k before it experienced a ~50% loss … Continue reading
Recently read this article on Business Insider titled The bonfire of the hedge funds (link here). It showed some interesting statistics from Hedge Fund Research (HFR) on the number of funds launched and liquidated every quarter since 2008. I found the chart hard to read, so I re-plotted the data as shown. Some summary statistics over … Continue reading
I happened to come across an interview with Kevin O’Leary (of Shark Tank fame) on YouTube, and started to jot down some of his comments on investing and personal finance. O’Leary is an advocate of investing in cash flow paying (dividends or interest) securities, as opposed to growth stocks that pay no dividends. One main … Continue reading
Read this New York Times article about Harold Pollack, a University of Chicago professor that wrote some maxims of personal finance onto an index card, and subsequently published a book Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn’t Have to Be Complicated. The original index card is found here. The article compiled a number of other index cards written … Continue reading
Came across an old (November 2015) Bloomberg article on Barclays’ Last Look functionality in their electronic FX trading system. While there have been lots of complaints from retail FX traders that their orders would run into “technical difficulties” once their trades become too profitable, the article confirms that institutional traders have the same issues when … Continue reading
My earlier post wrote about how one approaches the markets would differ according to one’s fundamental view about the markets. I came across some articles about Victor Niederhoffer and Nassim Taleb that I think illustrate this very well. In a way, Nassim Taleb is to trend-following as Victor Niederhoffer is to countertrend trading. Taleb goes for … Continue reading
I recently read a famous article The Loser’s Game written by Charles D. Ellis in 1975. This is one of the articles that kick-started the passive investing movement which continues today. Reading through the article and ignoring the dates, you cannot tell that it was written 40 years ago, as the content still rings true today. There … Continue reading
Most people are not clear what exactly LIBOR is. Here’s a quick primer in a FAQ-like format. Who Administers LIBOR? LIBOR (London InterBank Offered Rate) was previously administered by the British Bankers’ Association (website here), and was handed over to Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) Benchmark Administration (IBA) on January 31, 2014 (website here). How Is LIBOR … Continue reading
PM Jar recently had a post (link here) on Chapter 1 of George Soros’ Alchemy of Finance. I had never read the book before, but reading through PM Jar’s post, Soros’ point makes a lot of sense. The idea here ties in with Soros’ theory of reflexivity. Basically, in the markets, the actions of market … Continue reading
The full title of this book is Get Wise to Your Advisor: How to Reach Your Investment Goals Without Getting Ripped Off by Steven D. Lockshin (2013). According to the bio in the book, Steve is the founder and CEO of Convergent Wealth Advisors and was Barron’s top-ranked advisor. I picked up the book because I … Continue reading
When I was reading what Seth Klarman looks for when hiring analysts (for my previous post), it mentioned Warren Buffett’s job description for his successor on the investment side. That was revealed in Berkshire Hathaway’s annual letter in March 2007. Here’s some key characteristics for the person: Smart people with impressive records But there is far more … Continue reading
I came across this compilation of quotes from Seth Klarman: The Collected Wisdom of Seth Klarman. Wanted to just capture some of those that speaks more to me. While writing this post, I came across this 2009 interview that Klarman did with TIFF that is pretty good, and have captured some of its points below. … Continue reading
This book writes about how Jim Paul got into Wall Street, rapidly became very successful, and then lost more than a million dollars in a soybean-oil spread trade. In the process to learn from this mistake, he realized that there are lots of different, and contradictory ways to make money, but all the successful investors/traders … Continue reading
The full title of this book is Global Value: How to Spot Bubbles, Avoid Market Crashes, and Earn Big Returns in the Stock Market by Meb Faber (2014). This is a large, thin book, coming in at around 70 pages with large font size and good spacing. As a number of other book reviewers have commented, … Continue reading
I came across this presentation by Aswath Damodaran on the value of control (link here). It wrote about the different ways to optimize the value of a company, as well as propose a framework to think about the value of control embedded in market prices, transaction prices, and the prices of voting/non-voting shares. Quick summary below: … Continue reading
Journeys of a Bumbling Trader 