hackduitz

I only write about very important stuff on this blog! :) And here comes a particularly important entry. What’s your number? If you ever got that question it probably was about how many millions you need to retire or something. I doubt it was about your degrees of separation from Albert Einstein or from the famous Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös in the context of research collaborators! Mathematicians love numbers, however, and they have come up with the so-called Erdös number. If someone called X co-authored work with Paul Erdös, then X has an Erdös number equal to one. If you co-authored with X you have an Erdös number equal to two etc. etc. Now, using the web site of the American Mathematical Society I found out that even though I am not a mathematician I actually have an Erdös number myself! And even better, I have an Einstein number as well!! Erdös wrote a lot of papers but Einstein did not. And Einstein died many decades before the more productive Erdös, so I would expect, ce...

Well, we had a night with record thunder storms here in southern Sweden but the biggest thunders were evidently saved for this morning when we were served BREXIT with our breakfast! A big disappointment for an anglophile like me personally, and for 48% of the British population! And for the financial markets (USD/SEK +39öre, Gold +56 $/Oz, Nikkei -8% and counting....). Let’s hope both the good things and the bad things that come out of this will turn out to be better than expected... It is not impossible! Scheisse!

Today it is June 23, 2016. And tonight we will know whether Britain stays in the EU or not.... Today, The Independent reports two different poll results where the first says 44% for Remain and 45% for Leave and the other one says 43% for Leave and 41% for Remain. Today, The Telegraph reports 51% for Remain and 49% for Leave. In other words, a close call! A most interesting day for all investors out there! My guess, however, is that many undecided voters will vote for the safer option and vote Remain! I also think media etc. are biased and thrive on polls being close to 50/50. Therefore, my bet is that Britain will stay in the EU! AND, PER DIO, I CERTAINLY HOPE SO!!!!!!!!!!

Hands up everyone who thinks the blockchain is the new internet, the new finance disruptor, the new TCP/IP! Now, am I the only one with his hands in the air? Well, if so, even better! Then I can pick all the low-hanging fruit and you get the left-overs... OK, on a more serious note, of course, this is very early to start investing in firms focusing on blockchains. But, personally, I remember when I studied engineering in Berkeley in 1994 and followed a course on something I barely understood called The Internet. We used something called gopher to connect to something called the world wide web to read uninteresting things (texts only) on other computers in boring places like NASA and CERN. There were no browsers (Mosaic came the next year and Netscape after that) and few people even used email. I studied, got bored, studied, got confused and graduated.... Then, I went home to Sweden and no one knew what I was talking about when I mentioned internet, Arpanet etc. And, then, nothing! For ...

I am not too fond of the label ”Emerging Markets”, at least not in discussions about investment opportunities. I mean, what, exactly, is an emerging market? And which countries should count as emerging? Another thing that is often misused, or misunderstood, is buy/sell recommendations. Very often you hear someone recommending a buy or sell for this or that stock without adding a time horizon. I mean, isn’t it possible that a stock could be expected to fall more before it starts climbing? Yes, of course! Also emerging markets stocks…. I will come back to this particular issue in the last paragraph below. Anyway, this entry is not about these naïve observations. Instead, what I want to highlight is a rather unknown (I think) negative (sell) observation that is applicable, first and foremost, to emerging country stocks. As of lately, many emerging market currencies have weakened dramatically against particularly the US dollar. Whether we are talking about BRICS or MINTS or any other group...

In my research I am not only working on credit and credit risk but I also focus on financial stability, performance measures, commercial microfinance, and market behavior in general. I have also written academic papers on the use of news aggregators in finance. Considering the recent Chinese stock market correction, my latest paper on this topic turned out to be very timely! In the paper Byström (2014) “ Language, News and Volatility ” I use Google News to study the relation between news volumes in both English and Chinese and stock market volatilities in China and elsewhere. In collect more than nine million stock market-related news stories in English and (Mandarin) Chinese and find that the stock market volatility and the number of publicly available global news stories are strongly linked to each other both in English- and Chinese language. The relationship between news and volatility is weakest in mainland China, however, and a possible reason for this is that Chinese retail inv...

Some weeks ago I attended an interesting conference at Lund University named “Shopping Asia”. Among all the topics that were discussed, there were some interesting presentations on Fast Fashion. Fast fashion is a term used to express that designs move from catwalk to consumers very quickly in order to fully capture current fashion trends, enabling mainstream consumers to buy current clothing styles at a really low price. H&M, Zara, Forever21 are examples of company names that are associated with fast fashion. One thought that I got when listening to the talks was that there seems to be an ongoing race towards the bottom! A race that takes us from Fast Fashion to Insta Fashion (my term for really cheap clothes that the Instagram generation buys for Saturday night). It is like a second wave of fast fashion , where the journey from drawing board to shop floor is a day or two instead of several weeks. What would the implication of such a second wave of fast fashion be for the environ...