The big dogs are starting to pile into gold…
….as the world’s welfare democracies continue to trash their paper currencies by running their printing presses overtime.
This includes some of the smartest investors who had the foresight to bet against the sub-prime bubble. See the Wall Street Journal’s, “Bearish Big Investors Catch Gold Bug“(3/9/09, page CI).
So why […]

A quick quiz:
Q. What does Wall Street do after they’ve introduced a new, quasi-asset class like structured investments to its well-heeled clients?
A. They roll it out to the retail investor population.
A quick review:
Structured Investments are derivative instruments, that mimic a portion of an underlying index, while purportedly intending to return the original principal.
The […]

The beginning of wisdom as revealed in a poignant quote….
“There’s no end to things they can invent that seem to me little more than a gamble for the enjoyment of the inventors.”
(From Charles Brooks, a physician in Allentown, Pa., age 65, who expects to sell his two structured products at 7 cents on the dollar, […]

Too bad there is no inoculation for this nasty bug emerging in Asia.
I had never heard of it, until November 6, when I read Laura Santini’s article in the Wall Street Journal, “Asian Investors ‘Accumulate’ Big Losses on Risky Contracts” (page C1).
In the grand scheme of things, it’s not the worst idea that ever came […]

How the mighty have fallen.
I’ve long believed that hedge funds are really nothing more than a compensation scheme tricked out as an exotic asset class.
But fairness requires that we give the devil his due.
Hedge Fund YTD Report Card
Here are the results year-to-date (as of the end of August) of the core hedge fund strategies, from […]

After yesterday’s look at gold speculation, let’s take one final look at the coin of the realm.
Inflation continues to take its toll. It now costs the U.S. mint more than a penny to mint a penny. And it costs them more than 5 cents to manufacture a nickel.
Not to worry. It’s the […]

We may be closer to a market bottom than I had thought.
The proof is the hysteria over gold.
When the investing public is scared straight, they cash in all their chips and put their money where they know it will be safe.
When tech stocks crashed in 2000, bringing the whole market down as well, retail investors […]

We are going on fraud patrol now. Sadly, the only indicator that reliably ticks upwards during economic slowdowns involves the incidence of fraud.
Today we tackle the subject of affinity fraud, and in our next post we will expose the practice involving advance loan fees.
I’ve been waiting for the mainstream business press to step up to […]