Today’s visualization breaks down $59.7 trillion of world debt by country, as well as highlighting each country’s debt-to-GDP ratio using colour. The data comes from the IMF and only covers external government debt.
It excludes the debt of country’s citizens and businesses, as well as unfunded liabilities which are not yet technically incurred yet. All figures are based on USD.
Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century named to seem similar to Das Kapital supposedly proves that capital is bad for everyone, and some people owning a lot of it is REALLY bad.
The solution? Tax the heck out of their wealth, and globally because destroying wealth will create more of it. All data-driven, because in France economists are not respected and need to prove their case. Since Marx Sr. had such a pleasant impact, who knows what this book destined to be “something big” and much appreciated in a thorough Harvard Business Review review will bring?
Knowledge is the key to winning and gain in the Stock, Commodity and Futures, and Forex markets.
Trading on trust is a fools game.
Do not attempt to place a trade. If the market triggers the exit signal you had predefined, without emotion follow it immediately. Many traders enter the market with more ‘hope’ than understanding. You have to take complete charge of your trading. The best way to do this is to get knowledge and all of the information you can about the market you wish to trade and then form a plan.
You plan should include not only the entry parameters but also the exit parameters. The departure is the most important. Your trade should be protected. Failure to admit that you’re wrong when the trade is moving south is one of the reasons.
Learn to trade on knowledge. There isn’t any need for fear and hope that get in your way. When you’re able to trade on knowledge, you’ll have the ability to react to trading opportunities when it’s time to do 31 and to exit out.
Your best friend needs to be the Stop Loss order. (more…)
Our genes harbor many secrets to a long and healthy life. And now scientists are beginning to uncover them.
The cover story in National Geographic this month is off the hook – if you’re a believer in the big healthcare secular bull market and fascinated by demography’s effects on economics (as we are), you’re going to want to check this out. They did four different covers, pretty cool:
Longevity (National Geographic)
Those of you who have read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Edwin Lefevre’s classic book reportedly based on Jesse Livermore, will know that ‘Larry Livingston’(Livermore) profited from shorting stocks immediately prior to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Initially the market held up, but Livermore was patient enough to sit in his positions, and the market finally succumbed to a sharp downdraft after a couple days.
In Michael Covel’s book Trend Following, there is a section devoted to major events that have occurred, which have significantly affected the markets, and that it was pointed out how often a trend follower was trading in the correct direction at that particular time. By definition, a trend follower would be trading in the correct direction when there is a major market specific event (such as the 1987 market crash, the dot.com bubble, the 2008 crash etc), but also more often than not when other major events occur, such as the collapse of Barings Bank, 9/11 etc.
Back to Livermore. While he started shorting stocks on a hunch prior to the earthquake, I follow the trend on the indices as a basis for whether I should be long or short stocks. Indeed, Livermore himself came to the same conclusions:
“I began to see more clearly – perhaps I should say more maturely – that since the entire list moves in accordance with the main current… Obviously the thing to do was to be bullish in a bull market and bearish in a bear market. Sounds silly, doesn’t it? But I had to grasp that general principle firmly before I saw that to put it into practice really meant to anticipate probabilities. It took me a long time to learn to trade on those lines.”
“We’ll (Berkshire Hathaway [BRK.A][BRK.B]) never buy a company when the managers talk about EBITDA. There are more frauds talking about EBITDA. That term has never appeared in the annual reports of companies like Walmart (WMT), General Electric (GE) or Microsoft(MSFT). The fraudsters are trying to con you or they’re trying to con themselves. Interest and taxes are real expenses. Depreciation is the worst kind of expense: You buy an asset first and then pay a deduction, and you don’t get the tax benefit until you start making money. We have found that many of the crooks look like crooks. They are usually people that tell you things that are too good to be true. They have a smell about them.”
Interesting take on the longer term Secular Bear Market Vs. Cyclical Bull Market, via Kerry Balenthiran:
“My research has identified that a 17.6 year stock market exists within the markets consisting of downtrends lasting 2.2 years and uptrends lasting 4.4 years (2 x 2.2 years), with a combined cycle length of 17.6 years. I have called this cycle the Balenthiran Cycle and demonstrate how the intermediate turning points match stock market behavior going back to the early 1900s and extrapolate the cycle forwards to provide a market roadmap of the next secular bull market to 2035 and subsequent secular bear market to 2053.”
A few caveats: The 17.6 year cycle has been bantered about for a long time by various people. (See “previous” below).
Second, I would add is that cycles can be interrupted by external events — like Bailouts, QE, etc.
Last, the world changes over time, and I doubt that any oscillation period dependent upon humans would stay all that consistent over decades and centuries.
