Shurely market prices have to react to buying and selling, or they wouldn't be market prices. The question is whether the buying and selling matches up to anything in what Paul Davidson calls "The Real World" (a place which I visited once, and didn't really like it).
For what it's worth, I'm currently trying to make a few quid out of the market, and I can confirm that, even if you have a model which quite accurately predicts the daily directional movements, it is the devil's own job to actually execute the trades which make you money. I have also in my time sat next to someone carrying out the Royal Dutch/Shell arbitrage and was able to add a third universal truth to my list of "Things I Have Learned During Ten Years in the City": 1. Self-ironing shirts, don't 2. Non-recurring charges, do. 3. Riskless arbitrage, isn't. cheers dd PS: I have two pieces of Marxist financial advice (note to regulators: no I don't). Depending on your own financial circumstances and risk appetite, blah blah, I would: 1. Find a life assurance company run by people you trust and chuck it all into one of their long-dated policies. or for the more adventurous 2. Chuck it into the bonds of more or less politically palatable emerging market countries. Venezuela has a few series of quite high-yielding bonds available, and buying them would both help Chavez to buy a little time to fend off the hegemon, and offer the possibility of a nice capital gain when and if he eventually fails and Vene becomes a US protectorate. Sort of a win-win situation, if you have a rather perverse definition of what constitutes a "win". -----Original Message----- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Doug Henwood Sent: 23 June 2004 05:07 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Marxist Fianancial Advice Sabri Oncu wrote: >Doug: > >> Market prices are "efficient" in that they instantly >> react to buying and selling, > >Rubbish! You know, my new PhD is in this, right? I didn't. What's your argument? Doug
