Dive into the archives.
- The Markets’ Increasing Dread
It has been a few weeks since the “resolution” of the US debt crisis. And there has been a cascading erosion of public confidence as unemployment, diminished growth and “Japanization” in Europe and the US, increasing dangers of Eurodebt sans Eurobonds have correlated with a 16% drop in the S&P ( a measure of convenience). [...]
- Equities and the Time Value of Emotion
A commonplace in Finance I is the “time value of money”- the idea that future worth may be discounted to the present moment. But looking at the oscillation of stocks over a given time-period, spanning a universe of daily volatility unknowable in any discrete “present”, it makes you wonder about an equity’s present “value”. What [...]
- Aporia: On knowing. On not knowing.
It is 8:05 AM: my cup of coffee and Financial Times are before me as I prepare for US markets to open. Andrew Hill, writing the “On management” column today, presents a chilling precis on BP and the snail’s pace of corporate culture change with far wider implications for investors: “A safety survey of the [...]
- Beneath the Headlines: BP’s Radical R&D
Our headlines continue to engulf BP with our passionate blame. But increasingly, after we turn the page, another story begins to coalesce: BP as the genius of Big Oil’s future: it has been BP’s pioneering fieldwork in capping the busted Macondo well that has shaped Big Oil’s billion dollar emergency response plan for the Obama [...]
- Valuing Selective Attention as We Risk
BP is our tragedian of moment. Our anxieties are priced in the cost of its shares, off 50% since April. As investors, we anticipate significant punitive and reputational damages, eyeballing the $30bn gap between worst-case scenarios and its $20bn escrow fund, puzzling on internal bets between our personal fantasies of corporate resurrection and bankruptcy. What [...]
