Educating Trywalker

Our young friend knows a lot of stuff about a lot of things. However, I am going to help fill in some of the small gaps...

This is where white wine comes from

Ewer Fabulous

The artifact pictured below recently sold at auction. It fetched more than 3 million pounds, which attracted my attention. It's nice enough at first glance, if a bit fussy and over-worked for my liking. So why is it worth so much? I read on and the first important fact I noted was that it's around 1,000 years old, originally made for the Fatimid court of Cairo.

Hmm, I thought, well that's definitely a long time for glass to survive... but then I read something that I can't stop thinking about. It is not made of glass at all. The translucent bulb of the pitcher was 'carved from a single piece of flawless rock crystal, which was hollowed out, leaving a surface just 2mm thick.' The level of skill, care and patience to do such a thing, without buggering it up is just mind-boggling. This must have required an attention to detail that is adamantly lacking in today's banking industry.

And then to be preserved all this time in pefect condition... I have never really had an interest in tableware before but this is a masterpiece, and I love it.

a really expensive jug.

Back To The Grindstone

The weekend seemed to zip by like a scolded cat on rollerskates on speed, and it's back to the groundhog grindstone. Still, there should be plenty going, and I guess there are worse things one could be doing to earn a living wage...

My own personal occupational nightmare

Gallows Humour

There's nothing traders like more than a bit of topical humour when tensions are running high. Well, maybe winning trades and a hatful of golden logs perhaps. Jokes, like rumours, spread fast in the market, and these days with everyone on Instant Messenger or Bloomberg Chat, you don't even have to go to the trouble of picking up the phone and wasting time on greetings and small talk - just copy and paste to all your contacts. As a result you will invariably get the same joke from a number of different sources in quick succession. The competitive element comes in by trying to be a source rather than a sink for jokes, which further encourages rapid dissemination.

In order to be properly viral, the joke should be short, witty, topical and poke fun at the financial markets (or rather the people involved in them) at a time of highest stress, like last week. I don't know anyone who has been hanged, but I can imagine how the term 'gallows humour' originated...

My favourite joke from last week was a very brief, simple, fake headline, that at first glance looked just like any other of the thousand newswire entries that we had been nail-bitingly glued to for more than ten hours a day.

REUTERS 10-10-08 09:25:26 - *CENTRAL BANK OF JAMAICA SAYS EVERYONE SHOULD JUST CHILL OUT

Kudos, and thanks for the smile, whoever came up with that one :-)

Phriday Photo XI

Today's photo inspired by those people I have spoken to this week, for whom honesty and humility are not troubling considerations. May our paths diverge exponentially...

An interesting close-up of a pile of sh+t

Previous Phriday Photos

p.s. happy birthday somnambulist

Unidentified Trading Wound

Gathering my thoughts about the state of the world this evening I noticed an injury on the outer knuckles of my right hand. Nothing serious, just a scraping and contusion that could have happened anywhere. Except I haven't been anywhere except the office...



The only conclusion I can come to is that since I am currently sitting to the left of Trywalker, and since he is the only person left in striking distance this week, I must have inadvertently lashed out at him once or twice, during a bout of Clear Market Turbulence. Sorry, mate.

Despite the knuckle injury, I still managed to calculate a 1-month forecast for EUR/ISK...

Thin Iceland

Not so long ago Iceland was, ironically, hot property, the home of hot money. Tempted by the country's high interest rates, investors fell over each other to buy Icelandic assets. The problem is that it's a small place, home to a few decendents of some Vikings who gave up half way to Greenland, with very little to actually put your money into. This means that the investment funds were in total disproportion to the real size of the underlying market. In the recent rush away from rISKy assets, the unwary have learnt what it means when everyone rushes for the exit in a small market. The door is just too narrow and something has to give.

One of the dislocations has been the currency. The Icelandic Krona (ISK) yesterday moved in an almost mindboggling manner. Trading at one point at 350.00 to the Euro, it dropped to 140.00 as the Central Bank decided that the proper rate is 131.00 and declared that is where it shall be. Not so, said the market, which almost instantly started paying up to 200.00. Trywalker only had a half-a-million Euro position, but with prices moving at 10% a quote it caught his attention, I can tell you.

Troubling times for a country that used to be called Beejam...


Update 08/10/08 15.00 CET: The Icelandic Central Bank has just given up on its idea of pegging the Krona at 131.00 to the Euro. This is because the rest of the world thinks it's 280.00-300.00 and denial is never a good status for policy-makers.