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I’ve mentioned Harriman House before. They sell trading and investing books, and today they’re having a mad sale: 12 offers in 12 hours, 1 book per hour.
They’re offering well-known titles at, like, $5 for the eBook version.
Can someone please enlighten me as to what happened 2 weeks ago that made insiders go on such a wild shopping spree?
This article in The New Yorker is short, sweet, and interesting.
Highlights:
- “digital goods and services are everywhere you look, but their impact is hard to see in economic statistics” (because most content online is given away for free and/or stolen. also, hard to track.)
- “You may think that Wikipedia, Twitter, Snapchat, Google Maps, and so on are valuable. But, as far as G.D.P. is concerned, they barely exist.”
- ““information sector” of the economy—which includes publishing, software, data services, and telecom—has barely grown since the late eighties, even though we’ve seen an explosion in the amount of information and data that individuals and businesses consume.”
- “New technologies have always driven out old ones, but it used to be that they would enter the market economy, and thus boost G.D.P.—as when the internal-combustion engine replaced the horse. Digitization is distinctive because much of the value it creates for consumers never becomes part of the economy that G.D.P. measures.”
- “Figuring out the invisible value created by the Internet is no easy task. One strategy that economists have used is to measure how much time we spend online (on the assumption that time is money).” (Funny. All the time we spend trolling on Facebook is counted as created value and real dollars.)
- “The enormous gains for consumers in the digital age often come at the expense of workers. Wikipedia is great for readers. It’s awful for the people who make encyclopedias. Although the digital economy creates new ways to make money, digitization doesn’t require a lot of workers: you can come up with an idea, write a piece of software, and distribute it to hundreds of millions of people with ease.”
GDP as a measure was developed in 1930′s. They need to come up with a new method of tracking the value created by the Internet, but I’m not convinced that “time=money” in this case.
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Frankfurt returns are on par with the S&P 500, except for the 10-year return which is much better. Guess the German market didn’t drop as much in 2008-09. This is all despite talks of instability, and “Germany isn’t what it used to be”, high unemployment, ethnic groups taking advantage of the generous social support system etc etc.
The dogs are barking, and the caravan keeps going. A large part of the German economy is still based on manufacturing, not services. They’re in a stronger position by default.
German DAX is like DJIA in the US – 30 bellwether stocks.
(DE: 85.32 +0.54%) – iShares DAX ETF
Click to enlarge
Looking at the runaway action on (SPY: 180.94 +1.12%) and the abysmal performance of (SLW: 19.83 +1.02%), I just have to laugh at myself. I mean it takes a special kind of skill to do ALL trades wrong 
The takeaway this year is – when distracted, don’t put on trades “just because”. Yes, the market and staying IN is addictive, but like drugs, it costs real money.
Thankfully, in other financial realms 2013 has been kind to me.
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