Jan
16
What Prosper.com Taught Me About Risk
January 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment
In 2007 I started investing with Prosper.com. Prosper is a peer to peer lending website. I thought I was investing cautiously, only choosing to loan to people with good or very good credit (A & AA). Boy was I wrong. I learned some valuable lessons about risk and predicting the future. With Prosper, like all [...]
Jun
7
Nassim Nicholas Taleb got rich on a day when many many people went broke. He predicted the sub-prime fiasco and the crash of 1997. He didn't really predict these events, he just predicted some kind of event, a black swan, could happen. The Times Online has a new interview piece with Taleb. An interesting article. [...]
Mar
17
What is a Hedge Fund?
March 17, 2008 | 1 Comment
Hedge funds are getting a lot of press these days. It seems that hedge funds are in the news every day and not for good reasons. In the current financial downturn, hedge funds are collapsing left and right. If you’re like a good portion of the general public you have no idea what a hedge [...]
Mar
12
Financial Derivatives Still Considered Harmful
March 12, 2008 | 1 Comment
In the five years since Warren Buffet’s warning about long term financial derivatives contracts the volume of such derivatives has increase five times from $100 trillion to $516 trillion. This according to BIS via Paul B. Farrell of CBS Marketwatch.com, implies “a massive new derivatives bubble is driving the domestic and global economies, a bubble [...]