Triple Top?

Clemmo's Trading Odyssey

My son’s basketball coach is encouraging another parent to buy gold instead of investing in real estate. It’s my first shoeshine boy moment. This, combined with the world gold council ads are a possible signal that commodities have topped. It might ...

Clemmo's Trading Odyssey

If there was a single lesson I took away from Salomon Brothers, it is that rarely do all parties win. The nature of the game is zero sum. A dollar out of my customer's pocket was a dollar in ours, and vice versa.

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He would buy precisely those securities in Japan that appeared the least desirable to others. First, the stocks of Japanese insurance companies. The world would probably assume that ordinary insurance companies had a great deal of exposure, when in ...

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Alexander wasn't constrained by appearances, he sought to exploit people who were. (The occupational hazard of his role was an ugly elitism; you begin to think everyone else is stupid.) The second pattern to Alexander's thought was that in the event ...

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Dash did what most salesmen did, only better. He kept his nose pressed up against the green screens on which the market in U.S. government bonds was trading and looked for small discrepancies in price. To anyone but a born bond salesman (they do ...

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There was a convenient way of looking at this situation. My customer did not like his loss, but it was just as much his own fault as mine. The law of the bond market is: Caveat emptor. It was not an auspicious start to my career. Within a month I'd ...

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Ok I must update because in chapter 8 the focus of the book switches away from Salomon brothers to Lewis himself and his sales experiences. Since he befriends two highly capable salesmen (Dash Riprock and Alexander) with trader instincts, their ...

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Everyone said this was going to be a very interesting week. Equities did get a bump but basically this is what the market expected. Maybe the FOMC statements will set the world on fire but I doubt it. Whenever something is overhyped it tends to be a ...

Clemmo's Trading Odyssey

This is neat. I didn’t realize Lewis also wrote The Big Short and Moneyball. Clearly he found his vocation. url

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Chapter 7 This chapter is about the soap opera that is the end of the mortgage department at Salomon. It ultimately concludes with the firing of Ranieri and one of the firm’s VPs becomes the new head of mortgage securities despite knowing little ...

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Chapter 6 This chapter gets bogged down in stories about fraternity style pranks that the traders play on each other, details about the food they eat, and the petty bickering they do over salaries. However near the end of the chapter we can see how ...

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Chapter 5 This chapter gets bogged down in the inter-departmental feuds between government bonds and mortgage bonds. It’s not just that there are no generalizable lessons to gain from this history, it’s that it’s a dull story. Although one ...

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Chapter 4 Who knew where he had picked up the wise statesman routine? But no one thought it was real. Just dangerous—like the mesmeric gaze of a cobra. Uncle Dale's face wrinkled. "What do you want to know about that for?" he snapped. Throughout the ...

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The back row set the tone of the class because it acted throughout as one, indivisible, incredibly noisy unit. The back-row people moved in herds, for safety and for comfort, from the training class in the morning and early afternoon, to the trading ...

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Chapter 3 He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.—Samuel Johnson In 1968, the last time a degree count was taken at Salomon Brothers, thirteen of the twenty-eight partners hadn't been to college, and one hadn't graduated ...

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Chapter 2 The first thing you learn on the trading floor is that when large numbers of people are after the same commodity, be it a stock, a bond, or a job, the commodity quickly becomes overvalued. The crowd is both wise and foolish in different ...

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to succeed on the Salomon Brothers trading floor a person had to wake up each morning "ready to bite the ass off a bear." It is like going into battle each day. If you’re not ready you can get wrecked. Foolish names and foolish faces often appear in ...

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Liar’s Poker Rising through the wreckage in Wall Street By Michael Lewis is exactly the sort of book that I thought it would be. Tells the story of a novice trader at Salomon brothers during the 1980s. Lewis, being a sensitive artistic type inclined ...

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In an attempt to slim down and avoid dying of a heart attack too soon, I have dismantled my home office and converted it into a home gym. I also got rid of my desktop and now do my trading entirely on my phone. I’ve been told this is crazy but it ...

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