Dec 10, 2012

I like to think that all of JRE’s readers would be smart enough to run a mile if they saw an investment advertising returns of “20-25% per year guaranteed!”. Unfortunately, a phenomenally large number of Singaporeans and Malaysians weren’t:  KUALA LUMPUR - A gold-trading business shut down [in October] by Malaysian authorities for suspected illegalities may have raised as much as US$3 billion (S$3.66 billion) from its clients, a government official said Wednesday.

Jul 7, 2012

Walter Kurtz at Sober Look had a great piece a few weeks ago, where he wryly suggested a way to make money if you don’t like that IRS the bank’s sold you: default on the payments and sue the bank. (Note: this is not an actual way to make money, and also not a good idea if you don’t like angry traders hunting you down.) The “sue the bank” option has a long and storied history in corporate hedging circles.

May 7, 2012

Update: here’s a text version without smartquotes. Download it, change the extension to .sh, and enjoy. Update 2: this is now on Github, go there instead As a followup to this previous post - a script that automates EBS snapshots on an Amazon EC2 server - here’s a bash script to prune the EC2 snapshots created by the other script. #!/bin/bash export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY={path to your AWS private key} export EC2_CERT={path to your AWS certificate} export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/jre

May 1, 2012

Slightly old news (it’s from January) but this is, to put it politely, quite astonishing: when the SGX ordered listed company China Sky Chemical Fibre to appoint a special auditor to investigate its (probably fraudulent) accounts and (probably dodgy) related-party real estate transactions, China Sky turned around and told the SGX to shove its special auditor up its tailpipe. It says volumes, I think, that a dodgy Chinese midcap can defy the SGX’s market regulatory authority without any repercussions beyond a sternly worded (but weirdly petulant) letter from the exchange:

Apr 27, 2012

Since it was published on Tuesday, Vincent Cignarella’s article for WSJ MarketBeat - The Foreign Exchange Traders’ Lament, and kudos to the WSJ’s subs for the correctly placed apostrophe - has done the rounds of every spot FX desk on the street, and “cable is 1.60” has already become a catchphrase on a par with “don’t fight the Fed”. There’s a good reason for that: Cignarella’s piece nails the current sentiment in FX markets.