Ben Hunt PhD's Blog

DIY’s newest frontier is algorithmic trading. Spurred on by their own curiosity and coached by hobbyist groups and online courses, thousands of day-trading tinkerers are writing up their own trading software and turning it loose...

Back in my portfolio manager days, I was a really good short seller. I say that as a factual observation, not a brag, as it’s not a skill set that’s driven by some great intellectual or character virtue. On the contrary...

Global growth is really bad! Hooray! That was the verdict of U.S. markets yesterday, as the Fed minutes “revealed” (to use the breathless phrasing of mainstream financial media) a “growing concern” with the damaging impact of European torpor...

Two years ago, the new seven-member Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo — the most powerful political entity in the country — was introduced to great fanfare. All seven men walked on stage wearing a dark suit and a red tie, but to me the most striking aspect of their appearance was their hair.

We’re all familiar with the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, less so with the Red King. He’s sleeping all the while, and when Alice goes to wake him up she’s warned off by Tweedledee and Tweedledum, who tell her that everything in Wonderland — including Alice herself...

Deng Xiaoping and his ally/mentor, Zhou Enlai, are the architects of modern China, of China as a Great Power. For 30 years Zhou tempered the Maoist ideology of permanent revolution, preserving the kernel of a stable army and stable government bureaucracy, setting the stage for...

There’s a great scene in the 4th season of The Sopranos where Tony is upbraiding his crew for their lack of “production”, particularly in the traditionally lucrative field of loan sharking. The recession is no excuse, says Tony, for failing to make money from “our thing” — organized crime.

A brief note today on what might be an arcane subject for some but is a great example of the most basic question in risk management — are you thinking about your risk questions in a way that fits the fundamental nature of your data?

There’s a wonderful commercial in heavy rotation on American television, where three women of a certain age are discussing one of the friend’s use of Facebook concepts such as “posting to a wall” or “status updates”.

If you don’t adapt, you die. Or worse … for an artist, anyway … you become uncool and passé. Your performance art becomes performance shtick. And yes, I’m looking at you, Elvis Costello. There’s an adaptive genius to the David Byrne’s and the David Bowie’s of the world, quite separate from their musical genius, and that’s what I want to examine in this note.