I'm not going to write about Steve Jobs this morning - the papers and media are full of great memories - but I wanted to mention again how much I found his 2005 Stanford commencement talk inspirational.
The full text can be found at the link below, but here's an excerpt from his talk:
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html?wpisrc=nl_wonk
Back to the markets:
This past Tuesday afternoon, at about 3:30, I was in the midst of a conference call with an investment committee of an important client.
I have two screens on my desk, so while one screen had my PowerPoint presentation, the other had stock markets updates flashing.
When we started our call, the screen was mostly red: stocks were largely down for the day.
Then, about 15 minutes into our call, a funny thing happened: the stock market turned around, and suddenly my screen turned from mostly red to mostly green, as stocks suddenly moved sharply higher.
What the heck was going on?
The official explanation was that there was a story written by the Financial Times that suggested that European governments were close to some sort of rescue package for Greece.
(This report, by the way, turned out to be false.)
What really seems to be going on is a market increasingly divorced from fundamentals. Instead, the direction of the market is being set by high frequency, computer-driven trading and leveraged hedge funds. These investors care little about fundamentals or economics; instead, they are looking to hop on stocks if they are going higher, or short them if they are going lower, with a time horizon of five minutes or less.
Here's what Reuters wrote yesterday:
In less than one hour on Tuesday, the U.S. stock market surged by 4 percent -- for no apparent reason.
The last hour of trading was the most volatile final hour in two months -- and it occurred at a speed that frightens many, from experienced hedge-fund managers to mom-and-pop investors.
The late-day "melt-up" that pushed the S&P 500 index .SPX out of bear-market territory might be construed as good news. But it brings back echoes of the "flash crash" that saw markets dive by several hundred points in a matter of minutes, and it's a big reason many are staying away from the market.
"Everyone is scared in both ways -- the shorts are scared, the longs are scared, everyone is scared. The high-net-worth investor is very, very scared," said Stephen Solaka, managing partner at Belmont Capital Group in Los Angeles, which manages money for independent wealth advisers and family offices.
Tuesday's move was the latest example of an erratic, high-octane stock market increasingly driven by levered exchange traded funds and complicated hedging and options strategies that unwind with dizzying speed.
It's a far cry from when the U.S. stock market was viewed as a place for capital-raising by businesses seeking to expand and a place for investors looking to put their savings to work.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/05/us-usa-markets-volatility-idUSTRE7945WA20111005There has been a lot of talk recently about instituting a small transaction tax on every stock or bond trade. Originally called the "Tobin tax" after the economist who first mentioned the concept back in the early 1970's, the idea would be to try to encourage longer-term thinking in the investment community by taxing trading.
Wall Street, of course, hates the idea, and mentions all sorts of reasons why such a tax will either not work or will penalize pension funds.
But the real reason the Street hates such a tax is that it would make high frequency trading considerably less profitable, and reduce trading volumes in general.
If a transaction tax were to be enacted in all of the world's major markets - so that traders couldn't avoid the tax by simply moving their activities to another market - I think it might go a long way to making stocks more palatable to individual investors. Yes, the markets would continue to move up and down, as they always have, but at least the direction would be determined by reality, and not cyberspace.
I think a Tobin tax is worth a serious look.
SIR – Contrary to common sense economics, the creation of financial transaction taxes, as is been discussed by governments and advocated by civil society organisations, has a potential for long term steady growth as main positive externality. The fear of capital evasion ought to dissipate in front of such a tiny percentage amount of tax bite –0.05% or 0.1%– that nevertheless will generate serious cash from the sheer high volume of capital transactions. But to really work, the resources must be invested in people –health, education– and in the environment, not to cover financial debts or fiscal mismanagement.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, we should not have the expectation of regulating financial markets, as proposed by Mr. Tobin, with such tiny taxes. Rather, the logic is as straight as Robin Hood's bow and arrow dexterity: Aid for human development as international public policy, expanding what is currently sustained only by philanthropy –the first moneys to go away in moment of financial crisis.
The commitments signed at the UN level must have specific resource allocation to be more than United Nations goodwill. FTTs might just be the right source of innovative financing to raise people out of social vulnerability and to invest in environmentally sustainable projects. As more people leaves the poverty line, raising their standard of living, there comes more trade, more financial transactions, and the rest is just back to basic textbook economic growth, now amplified by the benefits of globalisation.
The upcoming G20 meeting in November, under Cannes' autumn, feels just about the right time for the world leaders to truly commit to creating FTTs for reverting the negative social and climate externalities the global trade system sustains. This is a very high level political decision, one of those we can just imagine the founding fathers of great nations doing in the past.
Claudio Fernandes
Recife, Brazil