by Jürgen

War, intimidation, international conflicts. Strategic games, political chess or deeply routed vendettas. Every once in a while, the inherent human entropy moves countries back in the battle field, resulting in a series of political discourses. One discourse comes back quite frequently: “Our energy became too dependent on oil coming form region xyz. We need to [...]

by Markus

Choose Wisely in Fragmenting Hedge Fund Industry Source: Reuters Hedge funds are looking less and less like a single asset class as the credit crisis sweeps through the industry and picking the right strategy will become more important than ever in the second half. The days when buying into almost any hedge fund strategy meant [...]

by James

US equities closed the week almost flat (S&P 500 up 0.15%) last week. They remained volatile on low volumes, and held within their trading path of the previous week. A couple of notable down days did not break the rally. S&P 500 Index – Trading Range Holds This relative flat performance came in contrast to [...]

by James

Five days into the fighting, it is time for MM to discuss the violent conflict that has seen Russia enter a de facto war with Georgia. This is clearly a predominantly political topic, but it has financial market implications in the form of oil, and for some of the world’s key emerging markets, not least [...]

by James

Investment professionals are so far better able to relax this August than they were last year. It was certainly a volatile first full week of the month, with the S&P 500 trading in a 4% range, but so far the direction is benign, and a series of higher lows is a bullish indication (see chart). [...]

by Jürgen

The last couple of years, a big buzz has been created about green energy: solar, wind, bio-sources… Governments use it as a marketing instrument – or find it useful in the Kyoto context. Companies jump on this natural financial resource. But can a fresh Wind Power breeze beat the Solar heath?

by James

The Russian equity market has dropped about 12% since Putin publicly attacked Mechel. It is down some 18% since a week earlier (when the market suddenly lost correlation to global themes, on heavy local selling ahead of the Mechel attack). The longer-term costs are more significant – all of the major brokerages have increased their [...]

by Dino

Pop quiz: When was the last time the Dow rallied 300 points or more? Now try these questions: Answer: Yesterday (up 332 points). OK, that was easy. A (polar) bear jump Bonus question 1: How many 300+ point rallies did the Dow have from March 2003 to July 2007? Bonus question 2: How many 300+ [...]