monsterHash - Part 3

How to think like a hedge fund manager

By Demian Perry | Published: 21 Oct 2010

I’ve been on an investing book kick lately, and I recently read Joel Greenblatt’s classic (from the 90s), You Can Be A Stock Market Genius. Michael Lewis mentioned the book more than once in The Big Short, indicating that it was the manual for the handful of financial whizzes who predicted the near-collapse of capitalism in 2008.

I found the book inspiring, and a little dangerous. The key takeaways were:

Pay attention to spinoffs: they might make you rich
Follow the incentives. If insiders are getting a piece of the action, you’ll want to be there.
When institutional investors exit, prepare your entrance (sometimes)

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Data trading for value investors

By Demian Perry | Published: 12 Aug 2010

For all the badgering that the Chicago School has taken in the months following the market collapse, the efficient market theorists got one thing right: markets react fast to new information. There’s a lovely scene in “Fun with Dick and Jane” that illustrates this perfectly:

The markets really do react this quickly! I remember an exercise in business school where we watched a CNBC reporter revealing new information about a company while, next to her, a stock chart tracked the company’s stock price in real time. She was the first anchor with positive information, and by the end of her five-minute report, the stock had climbed more than 10%.

Posted in Exclusives | Leave a comment

Publish dynamic charts to wordpress

By Demian Perry | Published: 16 Jul 2010

Last year, I wrote a piece on how to chart financial data with php. That was before I discovered the flexibility of google docs. A pure php / mysql solution with a web proxy and jquery is more flexible, but it requires server access and the ability to set up a remote database.