“I learned that an opinion isn’t worth that much. It is more important to listen to the market.”
“Most traders who fail have large egos and can’t admit that they are wrong. Even those who are willing to admit that they are wrong early in their career can’t admit it later on! Also, some traders fail because they are too worried about losing. I’m not afraid to lose. When you start being afraid to lose, you’re finished.”
Brian Gelber
“I don’t lose much on trades, because I wait for the exact right moment.”
Mark Weinstein
“Many people actually want to lose on a subconscious level.”
“The realization that you are responsible for your results is the key to successful investing. Winners know they are responsible for their results; losers think they are not.”
Dr. Van K. Tharp (more…)
Yet another UK trader is being punished by overzealous regulators for an accomplishment that should instead have earned him accolades: Outsmarting the machines.
In a case that echoes some of the circumstances surrounding the scapegoating of former UK-based trader Nav Sarao, former Bank of America Merrill Lynch bond trader Paul Walter has been fined 60,000 pounds by the FCA for a practice that regulators call ‘algo baiting’.
Algorithm baiting is similar to spoofing – a practice that has been banned by stock-market regulators as those markets have embraced high-frequency trading practices that have broken markets and made them more vulnerable to this type of manipulation. But fixed income markets, like the Dutch loan market Walter is accused of manipulating, have been slower to embrace HFT-type trading. Because of this delay, Walter is a pioneer. Using BrokerTec, a popular fixed-income trading platform, Walter would place a bunch of bids for a given bond, triggering trend-following algos to follow suit. Then he would quickly cancel the bids. Here’s a more complete explanation per the Financial Times.
Mr Walter entered bids for Dutch state loans that pushed up their price. Then, when other algorithmic trades followed him in response and raised their bids, Mr Walter sold to them and cancelled his quote. This happened 11 times between July and August 2014 while he was working for the bank, the FCA said, while on one occasion he did the opposite. He netted a total of €22,000 profit from this “algo baiting”.
Mark Steward, the head of FCA enforcement, said the FCA would remain “vigilant” in detecting abusive practices like “algo bating”. Of course, programmers could also build better algorithms, stamping out the practice without any help from the government.
(more…)
For many, many years, Merrill Lynch had good reason to be “Bullish on America.”
With more than 15,000 brokers and $2.2 trillion in client assets Merrill Lynch was the world’s largest brokerage. It clawed its way to the top and revolutionized the stock market by bringing Wall Street to Main Street.
But in September 2008 – at the height of the financial crisis, it ceased to exist as a separate entity when it was acquired by Bank of America
The world, the company, the Street was in shock.
How could this American institution collapse almost overnight?
In his meticulously researched new book, Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris, The Fall of Merrill Lynch and the Near-Collapse of Bank of America, Greg Farrell reveals it all in never before reported detail.
In this guest author blog Farrell shares how his book came to be and if you continue on, you can read an excerpt from Crash of the Titans.
(Reuters) – UBS on Wednesday joined the growing list of brokerages lowering India’s 2011/12 economic growth forecast, paring Asia’s third-largest economy’s growth to 7.7 percent from 8 percent, as interest rate rises and higher oil prices start to bite.
Morgan Stanley and Bank of America-Merrill Lynch had last week lowered their growth forecast for the Indian economy in the next fiscal year that begins in April to 7.7 percent and 8.2 percent.
UBS also cut the world’s second-fastest growing major economy’s gross domestic product forecast for the current fiscal year to 8.7 percent from 9 percent on weak December-quarter growth and continuing weakness in the industrial output growth.
“The reason for the slowdown is as before: lagged impact of todays tight money on demand plus effect of higher oil prices,” Philip Wyatt, an economist at UBS wrote in a note, adding he sees the economy recovering to 8.6 percent growth in 2012/13.
India’s economy grew at a slower-than-expected 8.2 percent in the December quarter from a year earlier, after expanding at 8.9 percent in the previous two quarters.
Industrial output in January topped forecasts, but was still weak at 3.7 percent annual rise.
“We expect WPI (wholesale price index) inflation to accelerate from 7 percent in March 2011 to 7.7 percent a year hence,” Wyatt wrote.
India’s headline inflation unexpectedly quickened in February on rising fuel and manufacturing prices, raising expectations for aggressive central bank tightening beginning later this week. (more…)
Daniel Tenengauzer, co-head of global emerging markets fixed income strategy and economics at BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research, is not convinced by the buzz surrounding India. ‘Compared to the rest of Asia, India is not the best story.’
‘My problem with the Indian story is fiscal. The government spends a lot of money which has increased the country’s current account deficit. The fiscal deficit for this year is -10.6% – China’s is half of that.’
