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Featured Research on Investor Sentiment and Beauty Contests

I read two papers on two of my favorite subjects today.
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Collective “Belief Structures” Shift towards Pessimism

But don't jump off the bridge yet. Yes, there is a problem, but it is also being perceived through a lens of collective belief structures that have shifted to pessimism. Other data tell us a different story.
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Stages of The Average Trading Day

Back in 1998, “Trader Vic” Sperandeo wrote about “time of day”. Here's an updated version for 2011.
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Diversify Against Volatility, Hedge Against Market Risk

The point of using ETFs instead of stocks is to minimize idiosyncratic risk, namely the risk of something going wrong with an individual company. The point of adding ETFs of different asset classes is to cover more bases, such as real estate, commodities, currencies, etc. But endogenous (or market) risk remains, and this is why we employ an absolute return strategy.
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Portfolio Theory, Fat Tails, and Risk Management

"2008 reminded us that human beings have limited ability to peer into the future. . . . One way of shining a light on the future is to assume that the aspects of the future you care about (return, usually, for investors) can be represented by a probability distribution, that is, by a list of all possible values a variable can take on and an assignment of relative likelihood to each possible outcome."

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Asset and Risk Management in a Post-Crisis Market

"The recent global financial crisis exposed investors to the two pitfalls of institutional investing: pro-cyclical investments and overly complex portfolios. Surprisingly, even sophisticated institutional investors followed the herd during the financial crisis and derisked their portfolios at the worst possible time."

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In Theory, Wealth Trickles Down

America made subprime loans to undocumented workers to move people up the real estate Ponzi scheme. How will China do it with workers that make so little? If anything, China’s Gini coefficient is getting worse over time, not better.

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Blame It On The Fed (Again)

The question to ask is this: if it's not the Fed, where is the inflation really coming from?

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