NP: No gov't; best gov't..from John Lanchester LRoB

[Richard Fiero]

I've read all these things. It's all inside baseball. Let's consider 
"A Random Walk Down Wall Street" where we learn of the three 
efficient market hypotheses. We've had a financial near death 
experience where the market has failed and shown that they are not 
efficient. All of these texts are part of the Chartered Financial 
Analyst program. Recall how many CFAs should have been jailed after 
the 2000 tech bubble blew up. I can draw a chart showing that a 60/40 
or 70/30 or 80/20 combination of S&P and TBills beats anything in 
risk/reward. Getting into the first quadrant and staying there used 
to be the game and that is supposedly what quants did. For a number 
of years after the one day '87 crash, all of our institutional 
investors were looking at ways to outsmart such a thing and buying 
into mindless Strategic or Tactical Asset Allocation systems that 
promised simple machine methods of not losing. The trouble comes 
where these university endowment treasurers love to be told that they 
are smart and handsome. Once you've got that person loving to be told 
he or she is smart and pretty, you've got their money to manage.
Fabozzi is great but not entirely useful. The WSJ always has been 
just a Republican operative. They turn up on PBS News Hour - it's joke.
Read John Kenneth Galbraith. Find out what James K. Galbraith is 
doing. Send money to a Pacifica station.

alice wellintown wrote:
>The books and articles I recommned may bore you, but you'll learn how
>things actually  work, what the problems really are, and what the real
>solutions might be. I don't believe that the journalists and
>ex-insiders and muck-raker types are worth reading if you want to know
>the facts. To understand this stuff, you need to do some math and
>master some fundamentals:
>
>How do banks and the Money Market and the the Federal Reserve work?
>
>What are derivatives?
>
>What is a Mortgage and what is a Mortgaged Back Security?
>
>How do the capital markets work?
>
>What is structured finance and private placement finance?
>
>So on and so forth in this, what many will find a stodgy and difficult
>education.
>
>Next to To Big to Fail, Liar's Poker, Bonfire of the Vanities, The
>Great Stagnation, Secrets of the Temple ...but still on Amazon's
>shelf, you'll find Frank Fabozzi and Marcia Stigum. These are two
>authors you simply can not avoid of you want that double major at
>Princeton ;-)
>The Money Market is a basic book with math in it and is a standard in
>finance courses at the best B-school programs. Fabozzi is the experts
>in derivities and mortgages and structured finance. You can never
>really get a clear understanding of how things work unless you know
>what is in these works.
>
>Now, sorry, but the best sources are the best and you'll need to put
>up with the politics, WSJ and Barrons. Take the WSJ dailly and Barrons
>on the weekend.
>
>That should do it.