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.

Apr 23, 2012

The old “About JRE” page text: Your editor is an FX options trader, exiled in sunny Singapore. JRE is finance, politics, economics, and a little bit of travel photography on the side. The new “About JRE” page text:  Your editor is a former FX options trader, now working in a San Francisco software firm. JRE is finance, politics, economics, and a little bit of travel photography on the side.

Apr 16, 2012

Update: right, here’s a new version of the script that doesn’t spew when you run it as root. Update 2: made the path to /sbin/service explicit so that mysqld goes down properly. Update 3: here’s a text version without the silly smartquotes. Download it, change the extension to .sh, and go nuts. Update 4: oh just go look at it on Github As you may have noticed from the intermittent downtime, I’ve been screwing around with the josh.

Apr 2, 2012

DBS Bank has just launched the largest ever banking M&A deal in south-east Asia, offering more than SGD 7 bio to buy Indonesia’s Bank Danamon (which is 67% owned by Temasek, the SWF that also owns a one-third stake in DBS). Two thoughts: 1) The hefty control premium - 50% above Bank Danamon’s pre-announcement price - means that DBS has effectively written a massive cheque to its own largest shareholder to get the deal done.