Friday, December 24, 2010

Tangible Mental Accounts

2- Twitter Fund
+ Turbulence
Complex Adaptive Portfolio Management
Safety Net - BE
Style Rotation
Macro Matters

Sunday, July 25, 2010

How you've been had - The Misconceprtions of Modern Finance and the implications on your retirement

Mistakes and Limitations of Modern Portfolio Theory

1- Serial correlation - Assuming that the joint distribution of Stocks and bonds is just like flipping a coin.
This is WRONG

2- ALL Modern Finance Assumes Stationary..This is Wrong - Think of pricing houses and stocks at any point in time....Decisions are made on the premise that this condition will last forever..that the market will price it self to this condition. Think about the yield curve and pricing off treasuries. if the 2 yr is always 5% and corporates 200bp above then they will always yield 7%. What do you re balance to? or price off of as conditions change.

3- The crucial mistake in portfolio theory that Samuelson pointed out was that you don't live in Tahiti. There is Nothing to Re balance to>

4- MPT assumes there are no structural Changes - That's Wrong

5- Efficient market theory assumed people were rational. That's Wrong

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Some things don't Change

it's still about cash flow, always was always will be.

Monday, July 19, 2010

The Purpose of the MATRIX

To offer a hedge-fund-like approach without the hedge-fund-like drawbacks. The MW/AM is an alternative option without the baggage of lack of liquidity and transparency, high fees and tax insensitivity

There is a time to stand on your own ASSET MANAGEMENT

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Alpha Matrix Portfolio Management

A modular approach to portfolio construction and management.

The purpose of the Matrix is to produce Alpha.

Portfolio management is both a science and an Art. The purpose is to combine not only diffreent asset classes but strategies tactics and time frames to maximize returns minimize risk and produce a desired outcome. Wealth is built by compounding returns over time.

The next level is about building Adaptive Systems to capture structural change in the economy and markets...

RUNNING to Where the Money IS

It tmw Time IS A COMPONENT

Saturday, July 17, 2010

it's all abou cash flows

Making Money in Turbulent markets and an uncertain economy

There Comes a times when you can't patch it up any more. you need a new one

That time has come - In the Modular World Tere is a time and a place for everything.


"It was their Time"

Risk is not about Voliyility or standard Deviation - The apple example...

Making a portfolio less risky. vs making a portfolio profitable.

Asset classes and portfolios/ an inflation hedge or a business enterprise.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

BOND ANALYST VS EQUITY ANALYST - TWO DIFFERENT WORLDS

LOOKING AT CASH FLOWS
MERGING TWO VIEWS
Stocks and Bonds are Separate Worlds

When there is lack of Consensus there is Value to Undercover

HOW THE CITI MODEL arrested the evolution of the financial model

The Components got weaker not stronger in their purpose

An incestuous organization or model does not evolve it limits the gene pool and weakens the species which eventually is overtaken -



Evolution strengthens the essence. Coach KAY and assistant coaches

Understanding the FINANCIAL COMPLEX and the Players in the Game

Investment guys, salesmen, planners, analysts, traders etc and the roles they play.

The Flaw in the Model is on the Equity side

We know the 40 % Buffers risk, We know diversifiacation reduses risk that's cool. But equit prices move in different time frames.
Repetition  + thinking + provides insight = change = evolution. vs doing the smae thing over and expecting different results.

Saturday, July 10, 2010

How the Citi model and Total Merrill set the retail industry back 30 years.

The model was ass backwards, it was not build to evolve. It was build to get big to survive not better. In the end  all they had was a sales machine with more sales talent than investment talent and were hoodwinked by the smart guys.

The Goldman Model was build to evolve that's why the keep making money and the  old Citi and Merrill became extinct.Go to http://www.fora.tv/ and listen to Niall Fergerson, he'll tell you how.

In the supermarket model the investment process was packaged and sold as a commodity in three sizes, small(conservative), medium( moderate ) and large (aggressive). This helped justify the existence of retail brokers and pension consultants, who guided clients through elaborate allocations between different styles. It did not encourage skillful investing.

Niall Ferguson in a lecture on FORA.TV calls it arrested evolution.

and this phase in finance as the Great Repression. Bailing out the supermarkets kept them from evolving are puts this off for another decade Citi has moved on and is now no longer the new citi is bank of america.

MPT led to market crash

Only people who use MPT are those that don"t manage money. That are not responsible for performance other than to tell you that the market sucks not thier strategy. Same concept soros talks about in mtg origination when you separate the agent from the principal and shift the risk to someone else you create a problem.

WANTED: New Model for Markets

Critics of the conventional wisdom say all these efforts are a waste of time. Jeremy Grantham of Granthan Mayo Otterloo, A Boston-based fund Manager, and a long time critic of the efficient markets hypothesis, says academics will "patch theories until they finally collapse under the weight of all the patches".



The Investors dilemma...

While academics look for deeper models of markets that work, investors are left with a toolkit they have had since business school that suddenly seems not to work. It is unsettling. "I look at this process as being, in a sense, halfway done, says Mr Putnam of Grail. We've learnt a great deal but we haven't learnt how to integrate and synthesise that into a way to go forward. So the process, the paralysis, the trauma, has really taken hold right at the moment."

UNITY OF PURPOSE -

Lessons of the Endowment Model - Even the smart guys make mistakes

Taken Institutional Investor Magazine, 04 November 2009

"Beyond then hallowed halls of Harvars University's Cambridge, Massachesetts, campus, accross the Charles River in allston.

BUILDING A MODULAR PORTFOLUIO

1- Retirement Income
2- Capital Growth
3-Avoiding Investment paralysis
4-a notion of the future

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Between Mondernity and CHAOS

The decoupling of Wall street and main street

Wall street is moving on and leaving MAIN Street behind.

RECOVERY - Atlantic

Alphabet Soup V, U, W, L, X
X=EP

There can be no (sustainable, organic) recovery until we find an entirely new model for economic growth. what we have now is not an organic growth model.....

Monday, April 12, 2010

Don't build another wall street straw House to retire in...

... The rational was made out of straw.....Use bricks this time....The world is modular...

Don't rebuild before you retool first....

The process needs to be revisited......

ALL INFORMATION is not in the markets

Think about first jersey IPO What they Want you to know information is valuable ..."if I would have known that i would not have done that...!!!...information is biased ....decisions are made on perception and emotion as well as reason....the rational man is a MYTH....so is the wizard of OZ and the tooth fairy.

Companies tell analysts what they want them to hear and analysts present the story they want to tell. does that perception represent true Value...What is not being included.the bull bias or the bear bias three sides to every story you need all the facts and it often takes detective work.

Move to the MATRIX...build your future....

free markets are a reflection of life itself (reflexivity) and life is not linear nor is it purely rational.

It is full of biases, it is chaotic, complex and fractal and evolutionary in nature.Look around, what do you see...

Economics or the economy is the social fabric of the system of society look at what they did

it accelerated a trend that was already it place the atlantic....gave the market a way to pay for goods that jobs, incomes and productive activity no longer could support.

The OPPORTUNITY: Nothing has changed but change itself

It lives to promulgate its own exietence at the expence of not for the system it believes it is the system

IT's about the fork in the Road

I did not create MAIN & WALL to distribute the financial products of wall street to the private investor...I set it up to help navigate this EP.....

that requires a new structure.....To do so we created the modular world, ampm, amfm, ws$ms, mwtv, and mwu...to bring it to you you.

Bring you a world you can't see

Frame your world and sell you theirs is backward...

Show you a world they don't want you to see....

Still working in silos........

Robert Riech and X

X=EP=F
F=X
X=EP
F=EP

You can define the future but you can't predict it

100 years.....it is a complex system and has a life of it's own like kids and basketball.... extropolate it it but it its always something different like the market

Saturday, April 10, 2010

The Science of Complexity, of order out of Chaos

The Science of the 21st Century

We believe This is better defined as an Evolutionary Phase

....the science of Chaos will better explain it....

Bifurcation Theory

Time is irreversable - the fork in the road

human systems

chemical clocks

The science of Chaos

Non-Linear systems
Self organizing systems,
Evolving Systems
Complex Systems
emergent computation - non-linear systems take quantum leaps

Cellular Automata

non-linear systems must be studied as a whole......

shinking Detroit.....

"All this has prompyed two overdue epiphanies. First Detroit needs to plant the seeds of a new economy. Second, the city can no longer afford itself. In place of the old must come a new, leaner city.

Export or Die

With Demand at Rock Bottom, American firms are Looking abroad.

Time to rebalance

America's economy is set to shift away from comsumption and debt and toward exports and saving. It will be its biggest transformation in decades, says Greg Ip.......The Economist Magazine..04/03/2010

If you got the big Picture Wrong...the long term won't bail you out...

ie Bull market investing in A secular Bear...The convential wisdom is usually wrong....As that is what is always priced in....

The Retail World - Profiting from a reactionary Mentality

Building portfolios in the 21st Century

Separating Main Street & Wall Street

Successful Investing requires a notion of the Future

Scenario Investing......

Asking Questions....What will be the effect of rising interest rates on the Economy?

Understanding Modular & The Modular World

You Compete, You Adapt, You Evolve or You Die

This is not a cyclical downturn/recovery...This is an Evolutionary Phase...Evolution is Modular....Get Modular or get Left behind...

evolution, complexity and chaos theory

The World is more complex