Barton Biggs has inspired me to open and run a hedge fund. He was a big player at Morgan Stanley, and this book chronicles his thoughts on Wall street and the rise and fall of hedge fund traders, and other greedy folks on Wall Street.
My favorite parts of the book include his meeting with Margaret Thatcher (Hillary is no comparison), the ins and outs of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in short order, and the short-essay length biography of John Maynard Keynes (the gayest economist in history, called his love of boys "Higher Sodomy").
Also, he explains ideas such as the rise of gold in fairly simple terms, in which he gives an insight into some of his thinking. The Institutional Investors have about half of the $60 trillion market in tradable securities. There is only $200 billion in investment gold available in the world at the "true" price of about 500/ounce. So, if the Instituional Investors get nervous, and move some of their usual 3% of money in Gold to 5% of assets, the price jumps by quite a bit. Two percent jump of about $30 trillion dollars is an additional $600 billion invested in gold. So, if the price gets to a total of four times its "true" price, then he would short it big time.
So what to trade? I'll be purchasing five hundred smackers of Proshares relatively new Ultrashort ETF for the Nasdaq called QID. It is designed to increase twice the amount the Nasdaq drops. What fun! If you think China is in a bubble, they have an ETF for that.
2 comments:
I can't agree more wholeheartedly, I was uncomfortable with the market between Christmas and New Years so I moved a large percentage of my funds into a small gold mining company CALVF.
It turns out the timing couldn't have been better. First I missed most of the DOW, S&P 500 and Nasdaq plunge, but more importantly. I was thrilled to enjoy two weeks ago when CALVF nearly doubled on the winning of a cobalt mining contract with China.
Needless to say, I locked in a substantial portion of my gains and re-invested back into traditional holdings while they are still down.
First time I timed it well and right in a couple of years.
Dude, it looks like all of your stocks are tanking! Any advice from the authors about what to do?
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