Worth listening to

[nadreck]

Well we have a thread for worth reading I though one for worth listening to would be in line. I do an O&G futures report podcast and the occasional interview podcast ( one this week with Don Gray of Peyto - warning 50 minutes long 9MB) but I found a portal just for financial podcasts called StreetIQ.

One I really liked on their list was Wall Street Free Thinker not just a podcast but a web site with some interesting satirical spin on the finance establishment and the preconceptions we have about our world.

[Brix]

One I really liked on their list was Wall Street Free Thinker

Thanks for the pointer. The WSFT's Max Rottersman is an amusing, interesting guy. His subversive satire on Thomas Friedman and Iraq ("A Calculator in Iraq") had me ruefully laughing out loud.

From Rottersman's tongue-in-cheek review of The Wisdom of Crowds:

I have been really down on crowds lately.

Crowds are awfully good at getting the world to produce nothing I like at the lowest possible price.

On Wall Street, if we used crowds properly, we wouldn't need investment bankers, portfolio managers, currency traders and so on. But then crowds would have no one to beat. [The author] artfully dodges the question of what would happen if crowds had no one to beat up on anymore. My guess is they'd buy more Lotto tickets.

Good stuff.

[nadreck]

I interviewed Mike Heier of Trinidad Energy Services Income Trust yesterday: http://www.nadreck.com/INVESTING/INTMH20050826.htm

BTW if anyone else finds good audio about investing or related topics please put it on this thread.

[Bylo Selhi]

Drunkard's Walk

We started this segment with a scene from the movie version of Tom Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. In it, the two characters stumble on a paradox -- With every toss of a coin, there is a 50-50 chance that it will come up heads. But to do that again and again and to have it come up heads again and again ... Well, that just seems to defy the odds. Even though the odds on any given toss are 50-50.

According to Leonard Mlodinow, there is an important life lesson in this. Whether we leave things to chance, randomness pretty much has its way with us. Leonard Mlodinow is a theoretical physicist who teaches randomness at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He was a writer for the TV series, Star Trek: The Next Generation. He's also the author of several books, including his latest, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. His next book, The Grand Design, is co-authored with Stephen Hawking and it will be published later this year. And Leonard Mlodinow was in our Toronto studio.

Mlodinow gave a public lecture in Waterloo last week on the same topic. It was kind of neat to see him discussing Bill Miller's 15-year run in the midst of a lecture series intended for science buffs. You can watch it here. (For some reason the PDF generator for his slides doesn't seem to work for me.)

In 'The Drunkard's Walk', acclaimed writer and scientist Leonard Mlodinow shows us how randomness, change, and probability reveal a tremendous amount about our daily lives, and how we misunderstand the significance of everything from a casual conversation to a major financial setback. As a result, successes and failures in life are often attributed to clear and obvious cases, when in actuality they are more profoundly influenced by chance. By showing us the true nature of chance and revealing the psychological illusions that cause us to misjudge the world around us, Mlodinow gives us the tools we need to make more informed decisions.

These programs are intended for general audiences and touch on investing so they're ideal for family and friends who may not be familiar with the role that randomness plays in their lives. They're also worth listening/watching by FWF regulars.

[FinEcon]

1 hr interview on CSPAN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA20Am0pwtA

Bio: http://www.tavakolistructuredfinance.com/biography.html

[George$]

1 hr interview on CSPAN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WA20Am0pwtA

Bio: http://www.tavakolistructuredfinance.com/biography.html

Thanks FinEcon!

Excellent! Well worth listening for 60 minutes to this honest, articulate and smart lady.

More recent commentary by Janet Tavakoli at CNN.Politics.com

Interested men with reputations and fortunes at stake rode roughshod over public interest. The American public is owed part of the profits Goldman was able to make because of the largesse of our Congress.

Wall Street's "financial meth labs," including Goldman's, massively pumped out bad bonds and credit derivatives that have melted down savings accounts, pension funds, the municipal bond market and the American economy. Risky assets, leverage and fraud led to acute distress in the global financial markets.

The biggest crime on the American economy may go unpunished with no consequences to the perpetrators. The biggest crime was not predatory lending, but predatory securitizations, packages of loans that did not deserve the ratings or prices at the time they were sold. They ballooned what should have been a relatively small problem into a global crisis.

Wall Street owes the American public for its key role in bringing the global economy -- and in particular, the U.S. economy -- to its knees. Goldman is not alone in owing the American public. It is not the worst of all of the Wall Street firms. But among all of Wall Street's offenders, it is the most well-connected, and Goldman was the firm that cleaned up the most as the result of government bailouts.

[newguy]

http://www.psyfitec.com/2009/09/david-s ... views.html

They're well worth listening to, especially if you have doubts about a buy and hold strategy. If there's a single theme it's about buying cheap, but there's far more here than that. Thought provoking.
Podcast 1: James Montier, Albert Edwards and Tim Bond
Podcast 2: Paul Marsh, Elroy Dimson and Rob Arnott

Some familiar names here, thought some might want to listen. I'm in the middle of it, but you can download and listen at your leisure.

newguy

[scomac]

Thanks for posting the links to those podcasts; it was an hour well spent.

[newguy]

Thanks for posting the links to those podcasts; it was an hour well spent.

What bugs me is, it's probably only a 10 minute read....and easier to reread when you stopped paying attention

newguy

[WishingWealth]

Christina Romer will be on Charlie Rose tonight.

WW

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Romer

[Doug]

Upthread, new guy posted a link to two podcasts that take about 1 hour. For the novice investor like myself, if you just listen to tthe first 15 minutes of podcast 2 by Paul Marsh and Elroy Dimson, that should be very productive. The rest is for more sophisticated investors,

[WishingWealth]

Michael Lewis author The Big Short will be on C Rose tonight.
He was on 60 minutes last Sunday and he's quite interesting/enjoyable to watch.

A review/article in Vanity Fair.
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/feat ... rpt-201004

Betting on the Blind Side
Michael Burry always saw the world differently—due, he believed, to the childhood loss of one eye. So when the 32-year-old investor spotted the huge bubble in the subprime-mortgage bond market, in 2004, then created a way to bet against it, he wasn’t surprised that no one understood what he was doing. In an excerpt from his new book, The Big Short, the author charts Burry’s oddball maneuvers, his almost comical dealings with Goldman Sachs and other banks as the market collapsed, and the true reason for his visionary obsession.
...

WW

[Clock Watcher]

Michael Lewis author The Big Short will be on C Rose tonight.
He was on 60 minutes last Sunday and he's quite interesting/enjoyable to watch.

A review/article in Vanity Fair.
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/feat ... rpt-201004

Betting on the Blind Side
Michael Burry always saw the world differently—due, he believed, to the childhood loss of one eye. So when the 32-year-old investor spotted the huge bubble in the subprime-mortgage bond market, in 2004, then created a way to bet against it, he wasn’t surprised that no one understood what he was doing. In an excerpt from his new book, The Big Short, the author charts Burry’s oddball maneuvers, his almost comical dealings with Goldman Sachs and other banks as the market collapsed, and the true reason for his visionary obsession.
...

WW

"By June 30, 2008, any investor who had stuck with Scion Capital from its beginning, on November 1, 2000, had a gain, after fees and expenses, of 489.34 percent. (The gross gain of the fund had been 726 percent.) Over the same period the S&P 500 returned just a bit more than 2 percent."

I think this guy is my hero!