Matins

¶ A thoughtful reminder that individuals and institutions ought to pursue rather different investment strategies. (Abnormal Returns)

Individual investors have some distinct advantages over institutions.  Most institutions need to be acutely aware of the indices against which they benchmark.  Individuals, on the other hand, are beholden only to themselves.  The performance of the S&P 500, for example, should be but a data point to an individual.  Many institutions need days to enter (and exit) their equity positions so as not to move a stock’s price.  An individual can do this (usually) in seconds.  Maybe most importantly individuals don’t have clients breathing down their necks.  As an individual investor you are your own client.

The point is that individual investors should look less at trying to invest like an institution and focus more on the advantages of their situation.  Most institutions can’t meaningful positions in small cap stocks.  Individuals can. Most institutions can’t undertake options strategies.  Individuals can.  Most institutions can’t day (or even swing) trade.  Individuals can.  Maybe most importantly an individual doesn’t need to trade (or invest) if the set-up isn’t right.  Most institutions are hemmed in by their need to “fully invested.”

¶ Dan Kois sees Toy Story 3, weeps copiously, sings praises. (The Awl)

Certainly you know, from the trailer and from general cultural osmosis and from that horribly depressing Times piece about how kids who were five when the first Toy Story came out ARE NOW TWENTY, that in Toy Story 3, little kid Andy is now college boy Andy and all his favorite toys face obsolescence.

But what you don’t know yet is that Toy Story 3 is totally bonkers. It has a mushroom cloud made of a trillion plastic monkeys, and it has a scene in which Buzz Lightyear is tortured under a bare light bulb. It has a terrifying horror-movie flashback. It has the best escape sequence since The Great Escape (or maybe Chicken Run). One of its heroes is a creepy walking, talking tortilla. It features an agonizing scene in which our favorite toys, facing a roaring inferno, close their eyes, hold hands and make peace with death. It makes an adorable teddy bear the terrifying villain and a baby doll his henchman. It toys with the old gag about the sexual identity of the Ken doll, deftly sidestepping offense and instead presenting the most surprising portrayal of gender fluidity in a 3-D family movie since Johnny Depp played the Mad Hatter as Madonna.

While We’re Away

¶ Seth Godin explains the Ace Hotel Lobby — that’s how as Felix puts it.

¶ At The Millions, Yevgeniya Traps writes rather well about her disappointment with a book that we nonetheless heartily recommend, Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists.

Some of the stories are more successful than others in conveying the final insight, though most fall somewhat short of the Joycean epiphany that is the prototype. (The most compelling of the chapters in this respect is, to my thinking, the story of the paper’s CFO Abbey Pinnola, who finds herself seated next to a recently fired employee on a long plane ride; the ensuing account of their tentative flirtation is genuinely revelatory, its conclusion unexpected in the best possible way, simultaneously surprising and, in hindsight, inevitable.) The short stories are meant to tie together through collision of characters, the intersection of themes, the classical unities of time and place; under the auspices of these commonalities, they are, we are lulled into believing, something greater than the sum of their parts. But where this is true in Dubliners, whose deceptively delicate particles, when assembled together, produce a surprisingly robust total, this is rarely the case in The Imperfectionists. The characters—coming in and out of focus, growing more or less important—do not really develop, and the new information we glean about them from story to story is not always illuminating. The change in perspective tends to come off as artificial, lazily telling what was not convincingly shown. Individually, as a short story, each chapter leaves just enough unsaid: we know something of a character’s experience as it is experienced, asking us to imagine beyond the story’s parameters. The revelations in subsequent chapters, matter-of-fact as they are, do little to truly complicate our perceptions. Presumably intended to magnify, the accumulation of detail, in the form of minor references to characters we thought we knew, instead reduces and flattens, unconvincingly extending the storyline. This is particularly glaring in the final summing up, a last entry in the newspaper’s history amounting to a perfunctory conclusion.

But then, we read this novel as an intensely refreshing fiction not so much about characters as about “the business of journalism” — it certainly evolves!

¶ At New Scientist, an entertaining if somewhat overstated piece about coral reefs, the rate of evolutionary change, and conservation efforts. At the end, a skeptic agrees that new findings suggest a change in the formula.

Malcolm McCulloch, an oceanographer at the University of Western Australia, isn’t so sure. The study’s Caribbean corals have evolved as the environment around them changed slowly over the past 6 million years – the very rapid environmental changes happening now may be too much even for the creative fringes of coral reefs, he says.

But he agrees with the implications for conservation. The limited resources of most conservation efforts are put towards protecting central reefs, “because they were thought to have the best chances of survival”. This finding questions that logic, he says.

¶ Although the piece is pretty wild and unruly, we’re in almost complete accord with Gonzalo Lira’s engaging tirade about corporate anarchy in the United States, at Zero Hedge. We only wish that we could argue more forcibly against the following:

My own sense is, there will be no revolutionary change. The corporations won. They won when they convinced the best and brightest—of which I used to be—that the only path to success was through a corporate career. No necessarily through for-profit corporations—Lefties never seem to quite get how pernicious and corporatist the non-profits really are; or perhaps they do know, but are clever enough not to criticize them, since those non-profits and NGO’s pay for their meals.

Obama is a corporatist—he’s one of Them. So there’ll be more bullshit talk about “clean energy” and “energy independence”, while the root cause—corporate anarchy—is left undisturbed.

Once again: Thank God I no longer live in America. It’s too sad a thing, to watch while a great nation slowly goes down the tubes.

Have a Look

¶ More beautiful photographs from Touraine. Also, the charming portrait of an eighteen-month-old girl who in a phase “de vidage et de remplissage de contenus et de contenants. Vider un contenant quelconque et le remplir pour le vider à nouveau, ranger soigneusement les choses dans une boite, des cubes par exemple, vider et transvaser du sable ou de l’eau, ça l’occupe des heures..” (Mnémoglyphes)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, June 18th, 2010 at 10:00 am.