Conservative Economics

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Subject: index funds

An index fund or index tracker is a collective investment scheme (usually a mutual fund or exchange-traded fund) that aims to replicate the movements of an index of a specific financial market, or a set of rules of ownership that are held constant, regardless of market conditions. (Wikipedia Jan 2010)

Commonsense Economics:

The Inefficient Market Hypothesis

The dead Efficient Market Hypothesis has left behind much harmful junk in financial space

Eventually, at some point, without an efficient market, common stocks become mere baseball cards.

Sooner or later, some Baby Boomer, pressed to pay his bills in retirement, will find that one can’t live off the dividends of common stock and that when everyone is trying to cash out their holdings at the same time, market prices plunge to levels that seemed inconceivable for generations. But it will simply be the cost of allowing an inefficient market to flourish for so long.

This article discusses the concept of inefficient markets and the practical consequences.

Fat-Finger Thursday:

Traders violate First Law of Robotics

Mindless robotic trading on stock exchanges led to Fat Finger Thursday.

On May 6, 2010, the Dow Jones Stock Index, at about 2:30 PM, fell almost one thousand points, before recovering when traders discovered that there was no real news justifying the crash in prices. The day will forever be know as ‘Fat-Finger Thursday’, in remembrance of the first inclination to blame the crash on supposed mistaken data entry by some trader, somewhere. Later, the authorities came out and declared that there was no “fat finger”, but that the cause for the anomaly was unknown and under investigation.

Post Modern Security Analysis

The economics of security analysis

A flood of complex information ...

Total salaries of securities analysts working for financial institutions in 2006 amounted to only 1/100 of one percent of the value of outstanding corporate equities, domestic and foreign corporate bonds, and municipal bonds in the US market.

The exceeding complexity of modern capital markets, combined with too little being spent on investment analysis, has put the savings of millions of Americans at risk.

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Featured articles on inside pages

Stock buybacks

WSJ exposes the 9/11 caper

In a major exposé of misused executive options, the Wall Street Journal ran a front page article, reporting that as stocks sank after the the 9/11 attacks, scores of companies rushed to issue options to top officials. Some executives reaped millions.
More ...

Securities Analysis

Jeff Skilling explains US corporate ethics

Unfortunately for society, Jeff Skilling of Enron told the truth according to tenets of moral relativism learned at the Harvard Business School and with McKinsey and Company, when, on being sentenced to decades in prison, he said, "That's the way the game is played. You win some, you lose some."
More ...

US Politics

What is the future of private pension plans?

Between 1999 and 2002, US private pension funds lost US$ 1.2 trillion in value. It would almost seem that pension fund managers had been speculating with retirement money, attempting to beat each others' short-term performance statistics, with little interest in safeguarding the assets of plan beneficiaries. More ...

US equities

Do stocks offer protection against inflation?

There is a common belief that a managed, diversified portfolio of US common stocks provides protection against inflation. However, there is reason to question whether this protection currently exists.
More ...

US Bonds

Bond demand exceeds supply for a decade

Over the decade, 1995-2004, the demand for US bonds of all types has surpassed new bond issues in eight of the last ten years. This is the reason that bond prices have held firm, even in 2003, when net new issues reached almost $1.8 trillion. More ...

World Economy

Signs of US losing its groove?

Thirty years ago, US income from abroad was more than double the amount of income that the US paid to the rest of the world. This year, or the next, this foreign income surplus may disappear forever. Is the US 'losing its groove'? More ...

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2010-12-02 16:02