Fail

One year ago, someone quietly parked their three Boeing 747-200F (which as shown on the image below have no identifiable insignia) at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia and since then has decided - for reasons unknown - to forget all about them.

“I’ve always known about your and your people’s complete lack of trust in me and the PMDB. A lack of trust that is incompatible with what we’ve done to maintain personal and partisan support for your government.”

In the end, we are just human. Despite the best of our intentions, it is nearly impossible for an individual to be devoid of the emotional biases that inevitably lead to poor investment decision making over time. This is why all great investors have strict investment disciplines that they follow to reduce the impact of human emotions. Take a step back from the media and Wall Street commentary for a moment and make an honest assessment of the financial markets today. Does the current extension of the financial markets appear to be rational? Are individuals current assessing the "possibilities" or the "probabilities" in the markets?

"Training at this camp began with the knowledge of the Iraqi Defence Ministry and police. Those who make different interpretations of the Turkish military presence in Mosul are involved in deliberate provocation."

It’s important to respect the power of econometric models. It’s important to work with econometric models. But we don’t care who you are... whether you’re the leader of the world’s largest central bank or you’re the CIO of an enormous pension fund or you’re the world’s most successful financial advisor... it’s a terrible mistake to trust econometric models. But we all do, because we’ve been convinced by modeling’s henchman, The Central Tendency.

Perhaps the best way to show what a mess Europe is in is the €3 billion deal they made with Turkey head Erdogan, only to see him being unmasked by EU archenemy Putin as a major supporter, financial and who knows how else, of the very group everyone’s so eager to bomb the heebees out after Paris. But Brussels thinks it’s found a whipping boy for all its failures. Greece. It’s fast increasing its accusations against Athens’ handling of the 100s of 1000s of refugees flooding the country. Everything that goes wrong is the fault of Greece, not Brussels. The EU has so far given Greece €30 million in ‘assistance’ for the refugee crisis, while the country has spent over €1.5 billion in money it desperately needs for its own people. But somehow it’s still not done enough.

The point is, if you are going to attempt to catch a proverbial falling knife on a chart, at least do so only at a point you deem to be a “make or break” type level. Whether or not you can likely accurately identify a “make or break” level is another matter. The point is that, should that level fail, like it did on the CRB Index a year ago, you know the security is broken and it is time to walk away.

When at first you don't succeed (having failed in their bid to draw physical gold from the 'cold, dead' hands of Indian citizens), find another group to exploit. As is standard operating procedure with government, if voluntarism fails, use coercion...

When will America’s half-witted elite running the Pentagon and the State Department see the light and acknowledge that perhaps the US lacks the qualifications, or resources, to run, or strongly influence, geopolitics throughout Planet Earth?

How would a Fed hike be transmitted? To the uninitiated, it might seem as though Janet Yellen snaps her fingers or twitches her nose and just like that, banks and money markets price in the 25bps. But contrary to Haruhiko Kuroda's characterization of central bankers as fairy tale protagonists, it's not as simple as waving a magic wand and in the US, the whole show runs through Bill Dudley's Open Market Trading Desk at the New York Fed.

Yeah, No ...

Why are the worlds’ most successful investors having so much trouble lately? The short answer is that the markets they used to understand have been replaced by something very different. In this new, post-market world, money managers can’t separate signal from noise and end up on the wrong end of wild swings in commodities, currencies and interest rates. And now their clients are figuring this out.

Too Bad Our Government Isn't Serious About Stopping Terrorism ...

"How does all this play out? Timing is the key because as gamblers know there isn’t an endless stream of Martingale chips – even for central bankers acting in unison. One day the negative feedback loop on the real economy will halt the ascent of stock and bond prices and investors will look around like Wile E. Coyote wondering how far is down. But when? When does Martingale meet its inevitable fate? I really don’t know; I’m just certain it will."