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What's irrational about being funny? Comedians live by making rational predictions about what will make people laugh. Perhaps a movie of your daughter throwing spaghetti, in the hands of the right director, could make millions.

What we are discussing, moi drug, is the meaning of "irrational". I'm maintaining that markets only appear irrational to us because we don't fully understand them. You are confusing "irrational" with "unpredictable". Keynes lost his shirt because, being a typically arrogant post-Victorian...

Ah... that was JM Keynes, who was a great macroeconomist but lost his shirt on the market. Keynes was responsible for one of the most amazingly accurate predictions ever made. He said that if Germany were forced to pay reparations in 1919, the result would be "a financial crisis in five years...

Not irrational, Ivanovich - unexplained. I have a model that takes into account resource prices (heavily weighted for oil) and interest-rate gap. It worked beautifully in 2006, not so beautifully in the last few months. Conclusion: my model is incomplete. My theory on economic data was...

Dumb. Of course working out crosses is a matter of multiplication, not addition. In other words, a 7-point spread in a currency worth 2 units of something is equivalent to a 3.5 pip spread in a currency worth only 1 unit. So yeah, when I "make my own crosses" in GBPCAD, actually the result...

Very interesting, thank you. As to GBPCAD, I notice this. Two things happened on May 10: the BofE put rates up .25%, and Tony Blair announced the date he would step down. The market hardly noticed the rate change, but Blair's announcement seems to have made GBP nosedive. It means (a)...

Kashirin is maybe too optimistic, but he has a point. The peak oil people think we are approaching the point where we aren't discovering oil fast enoug to replace what we're using up, but we aren't there yet. (Btw Petrochina announced a big new find a couple of weeks ago - it sent their stock...

A brief history of oil prices I found historical data going back to 1949 on http://inflationdata.com/inflation/Inflation_Rate/Historical_Oil_Prices_Table.asp, showing real and inflation-adjusted (to 1/2007) prices. Prices are annual averages. It divides into 5 periods: (1) price...

Fraid your memory is faulty. There is a site out there somewhere that has historical data back to 1950, can't seem to find it at the moment, but conveniently today's Toronto Star published a chart showing prices back to 1976. It's a typical newspaper graphic, with a thick red line for the...

Mmmm. To me, technical indicators all represent attempts to spot patterns and predict the future on the basis of the past. Seems to me people are much better at spotting patterns than computers are, and can take a wide variety of external factors into account, aka fundamentals. However...

Anyway, that was a nice piece of prediction, worth a comment.

Last summer, I made some money on a stock called Ainsworth, a West-Coast lumber producer. I bought at $24 and sold a few days later at $26. Today it can be had for $7, and I expect that after the 2007 annual report has come out it may become a penny stock. So that's how the lumber industry is...

The reason that there are more longs than shorts is that there are more fundamentalists than chartists, and they realize that USDCAD is ridiculously underpriced on fundamentals. "Where the money is" is an expression of wishful thinking, not reality. Friendoftrend may be right that the...

"Oil prices have dropped even though gasoline is still high ... curious." I thought I explained that one. Bottleneck in refinery capacity causes shortages downstream, hence high prices for refined product, while crude piles up upstream, hence glut and price drop. Refinery capacity was...

(sorry, hit enter prematurely) ...won't have to worry about global warming, because oil will hit $1000 in 2024 and even the most expensive alternative energy sources will look cheap. If the "high oil prices are here to stay" crowd are right and you apply the 40% growth rate of the last 3...

It looks like the USDJPY carrion trade topped out at 121.38 and is now doing one of its patented plummets. We may see it back at 116 by the end of June. , so my short there should be paying off in a day or two. My hope is that the interest rate junkies will notice that AUDJPY is 100 pips off...

Well, RBC is with me: they're predicting 1.21 "in response to easing energy and commodity prices, smaller M&A flows and ongoing negative interest rate spreads with the US"

I don't think it can be interest rate differentials: GBP is at 5.25%, same as USD, so the differential is in their favour against the loonie, whereas EUR is at 3.5, so we have the edge. Yet both are tanking against CAD. I think people who are interested in carry trade and only play the majors...

OK, Ivanovich, point taken. But oil sands oil is expensive, and as far as I know not connected by pipeline to any port. So it would cost a lot to ship anywhere. Given any drop in demand, it would be the first to go. There must be some threshold price below which Alberta oil ain't competitive.

If you start with 1998-1999 as a baseline for oil prices and assume a natural growth rate of 17.68%, you track oil prices pretty closely through mid-2004. Iraq in March 2003 isn't even a blip on the chart, even when the wackos start blowing up pipelines. From mid-2004 until late 2006, oil is...