Finance Trends Letter

Photo via marshfieldrodandgunclub.com Welcome, n ew readers . Be sure to check out the full " Lessons from Hedge Fund Market Wi zards " post series (interview s with Colm O'Shea, Ray Dalio, Jack Schwager and more) in our end notes. Thank you, and enjoy th e series . "Remarkable performance consistency".  These are the words Hedge Fund Market Wizards author, Jack Schwager uses at the outset to describe the track record of Steve Clark's Omni Global Fund . In his opening notes on Clark's event-driven hedge fund, Schwager points out that Omni Global has been profitable every year since its inception in 2001. This, of course, includes the panic year of 2008, during which Clark handily outperformed the Hedge Fund Research index of funds sharing this strategy.  The combination of strong gains and moderate equity drawdowns and losing periods gave Omni Global an "extremely high Gain to Pain ratio", a return/risk measure favored by Hedge F...

Some Presidents' Day reading and insights to guide us into the coming week. Recently popular posts on Finance Trends: 1. Trading psychologists: Overcoming your fear of pulling the trigger .  2. Global macro trading: Lessons from Market Wizard, Colm O'Shea . 3. Lessons from Market Wizard, Ray Dalio . - "Markets teach you that you have to be an independent thinker." 4. Lauren Templeton shares investing lessons from Sir John Templeton . Real wisdom on markets, behavioral finance, and life here. 5. Jim Rogers on Street Smarts and outsized investing returns . Rogers says the 4,200 percent returns he and Soros achieved at Quantum Fund are replicable, if you are passionate and work hard enough. Items of interest (markets, trading, and insights) from around the web : 1. Excellent Q+A with trader, Brian Shannon: Better Trading With Multiple Timeframes . 2. Joe Fahmy on The Greatest Trading Book Ever . 3. Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich (e-boo...

  Jim Rogers has a new book out called Street Smarts and he's out talking about it, along with a few other favored subjects.  Here are a few highlights from his recent interview with Open Currency :  1 . Asked about Germany's repatriation of gold from American vaults, Rogers says they're right to do it and he's surprised they haven't done it sooner. Recently, the Federal Reserve refused the Germans an audit of their own gold, and according to Rogers "it's clear some of that gold has been lent out, or something, as it will take 7 or 8 years to move the gold."  2 . Nearly all governments are printing money, for the first time in recorded history. All major banks are "printing" and debasing their currencies, which brings us to Rogers' favorite safe haven - hard assets.  3 . We are destroying all the people who save and invest. People are getting wiped out because interest rates are zero and below the rate of inflation. Those who bo...

  Steve Jobs on failure : "You've got to ac t ... and you've got to be willing to crash and burn."  Apply to entrepreneurship, trading (try to manage risk to avoid complete crash and burn of your account), talking to that pretty girl... life. Related posts :  1. Steve Jobs: Billion Dollar Hippy (BBC documentary) . 2. Steve Jobs PBS interview from 1990, recently surfaced .

Investor Lauren Templeton shares some life wisdom and investing lessons from her great-uncle, Sir John Templeton in this VIC 2012 video.  By way of background, John Templeton was a pioneer of global share investing who founded the Templeton Growth fund in 1954. As his wealth increased, he also became known for his philanthropic efforts and writings. In the 1960s, he renounced his U.S. citizenship (an increasingly popular move among the rich of late) and continued to live in the Bahamas as a Bahamian citizen. In her talk at the Ben Graham Centre for Value Investing, Lauren Templeton shares some insights on Sir John's investment philosophy and his life. A few notable lessons and quotes :  1 . Born in Tennessee, Templeton was an excellent student who attended Yale and Oxford. While at Yale, young John found he had to work to pay for a large part of his schooling. His skill with probabilities helped him earn a good part of the money playing poker.  2 . After stu...

  Authors @ Google presents Nassim Taleb , discussing the concepts from his latest book, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder .  Here, Taleb offers his view that the opposite of fragility is not "robustness", as commonly supposed, but anti-fragility. Whereas things that are fragile need to be handled with care and kept in a state of tranquility, things that are anti-fragile benefit from volatility.  According to Taleb, fragility and anti-fragility can be measured, whereas risk cannot (in spite of what Ivy League academics with risk models may think). You'll hear why anti-fragile systems have benefits that outweigh their risks, and why some fragile systems are vulnerable to "prediction error" and hidden, intolerable risks which vastly outweigh any associated benefits. Using the example of Seneca, a wealthy Stoic philosopher who often imagined himself to be poor, Taleb suggests we should always try to have more upside than downside from random eve...

Today we continue our series, "Lessons from Hedge Fund Market Wizards" , with a look at Jack Schwager's interview with Scott Ramsey of Denali Asset Management.  Ramsey, a futures trader and CTA who works on the island of St. Croix, spoke to Schwager about his first foray into the markets, his evolution as a trader, and the process he stands by to protect and grow his clients' money. 1) . Ramsey started trading in college. He was roped into the OTC metals market via a broker's ad in the Wall St. Journal. The broker charged customers a flat fee to buy and sell as much as they wanted in a particular market for six month. At the time, Scott was a novice and didn't know about futures, so he traded metals in this fashion through the inflationary run-up of the late 1970s. 2) . Scott had to rethink his trading strategy after he bought silver at $50 an oz., only to watch it collapse to $26 following a long string of limit-down days. He sold as soon as the market...