hilarious comic - not trading-related, but that’s okay!

The bond market has gotten more volatile in the last several months, and analysts at RT-ICAP finger the disparate views thrust upon investors from the Federal Reserve as one of the key culprits.

Laughter in the Dark: An Introduction to the Volatility Smile: These are unpublished lecture notes from the Master’s in Financial Engineering Program at Columbia University.

INVESTORS MAY GET TO trade gold options on the über-popular street- Tracks Gold shares (GLD).

Astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley, and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center have released a rather remarkable Hubble image of a ring of dust around star Fomalhaut, described by New Scientist as resembling “the Great Eye of Sauron”.

Currently, 31% of stocks in the S&P 500 are trading above their 50-day MAs. As shown in the historical chart below, this is not at the extremes we saw when the market made lows in August and January, but the indicator continues to make lower highs just a

In the larger scheme of things, it is irrelevent. Volatility is an estimate. It’s a statistical calculation. It’s not gospel, and certainly not accurate to the penny.

Part of our critique was that dividing the US into quintiles was a variation of the median/average error, and only served to hide the exhorbitantly greater wealth, income and consumption of the top few percent. To that end, there are two pieces of…

The profit & loss graph of the French rogue trader

“There is no way that an individual can go out there and compete with all these highly qualified and compensated professionals,” sniffed the pampered (and incorrect) institutional investor.

exactly right