North American energy producers survived the recent oil bust in large part by selling more than $60 billion of new stock. Now they’re beginning to buy it back. Oil Producers Buying Back Shares After Years of Selling New Stock – (Wall Street Journal) 9.8bn of cash was ploughed into hedge funds last year after […]
Category: Other Voices
Weekend Reads: XIV, Bitcoin, and the Olympics
24-year-old Chicago trader has been charged with fraud for allegedly stealing $2 million in bitcoin and another cryptocurrency from his employer to cover personal trading losses.
Weekend Reads: Shock, VIX, and Volatility
“The amount of money I was making was ludicrous, could take out my folks and even extended family to nice dinners and stuff,” he wrote. “Was planning to get a nice apartment and car or take my parents on a holiday, but now that’s all gone.”
Alternative Links: Human vs Machine
Stanford University is challenging asset allocators to demonstrate their ability to pick superior fund managers for a new study, which pits human investors against an algorithm.
Weekend Reads: Nothing but Blue Skies
“This generation of millennials, particularly younger millennials, seem to be adapting the savings habits a bit more rigorously, with a bit more discipline and a bit more intensity than even the older millennials and boomers,” he said. “We’re seeing their saving habits start earlier.”
Alternative Links: Predicting Human Actions
The computer will analyze the patterns in your key strokes and predict your next input. Typically it is correct around 70% of the time—humans have a hard time acting randomly.
Will The Bitcoin Skeptics Fold?
Here’s a small list of some of those and there on-record accounts of how these see Bitcoin and other tokens:
Alternative Links: Exotic Bets on Cheese
Man Group Plc’s AHL Evolution fund, one of the first to enter this niche market, had a return of 18 percent last year. The Systematica Alternative Markets fund run by Leda Braga fared even better, posting gains of 24 percent, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. By contrast, funds that speculated on […]
Alternative Links: Is The VIX Being Gamed?
The number of outstanding VIX futures has certainly been rising. Open interest just before the monthly expiration averaged almost 611,000 contracts last year, 44 percent more than in 2016 and more than double the average of 240,000 in the decade before.
Weekend Reads: Price War
Traditional stockpickers enjoyed a renaissance in 2017, managing on average to narrowly outperform their benchmarks. That helped slow the outflows from US equity mutual funds from nearly $250bn in 2016 to $153bn last year, according to Goldman Sachs.