In October of last year, the economist wrote about Porsche’s “brilliantly conceived wealth transfer.” I wrote about it, too - it was amazing - they made Volkswagen the most valuable company in the world for a few days. I thought it was a very sharp move which fleeced hedge funds of billions and billions of dollars.
Now I read in the Telegraph that Porsche is on the brink of financial collapse, and this “brilliant” move of theirs last autumn was just a huge mistake?

Porsche acquired a 51pc share of VW earlier this year after a series of derivatives deals that tripled Porsche’s debt to €9bn.
The takeover bid went badly wrong, forcing Porsche chief Ferdinand Piech to press instead for a merger of the two car makers on increasingly less favourable terms.
Porsche’s travails are largely due to financial acrobatics, not falling sales.

These “financial acrobatics” not only cost Porsche and hedge funds billions, but contributed to Adolf Merckle’s suicide.
So who actually made the money here?

Fellow Singularitarian, Libertarian, and chess master Peter Thiel is betting big on infaltion by buying millions and millions of shares of OIH.

I don’t have a lot of time these days, and I have cut back to read only the best blogs and newsletters to keep up with other opinions about the stock market. Two that I highly recommend are the Highchartpatterns newsletter and Maoxian’s newsletter.
They both also have great blogs that you can read here:

Highchartpatterns blog
Maoxian’s blog

I don’t think you need much more if you want to know what the best traders are looking at. They are both run by really smart, good people with a great sense of humor.

Shareholders of AIPC have had a great past year:

American Italian Pasta Company engages in the production and marketing of dry pasta in North America. It offers pasta in various sizes and shapes that include long goods, such as spaghetti, linguine, fettuccine, angel hair, and lasagna; and short goods, such as elbow macaroni, mostaccioli, rigatoni, rotini, ziti, and egg noodles.

The new issue of h+ magazine has an interesting article on the role that AI played in the current global financial crisis.

…My feeling as an AI expert is that these sorts of problems we’ve seen recently are merely hiccups on the path to super-efficient financial markets based on advanced AI.

I’ve said many times before that the days of the unaided human trader are numbered. It is just going to get more and more difficult for you. Unless you start building your own computer programs that can do the trading for you. Or if you can somehow use technology to trade at the same level as these computers.

h+ is pretty cool - other articles include “Nanobots in the Bloodstream,” “Is Anti-Aging Medicine Coming to the Mainstream?” “Things to do with your body while you wait for immortality,” etc…

Did Zimbabwe really just introduce a 100 trillion dollar banknote? WTF?
That looks like this: Z$ 100,000,000,000,000.00
There are more dollars in one of these notes than there are atoms in the observable universe. (Just kidding).
Seriously, they need to be careful because when you pass ‘trillion’, you might as well just say ‘zillion’ because nobody is going to want to use ‘quadrillion’, or even know what it means.
This comment from Hacker News is also interesting:

Remember that Zimbabwe redemoninated in mid 2008 and took 10 zeroes off the bills, and it hardly seems worth mentioning but they took 3 zeroes off in 2006. That makes this new bill 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 which may or may not be 1 nonillion dollars. It’s a lot of zeroes, I may have missed a few one way or another.

My Million Zimbabwe Dollar Homepage site is completely worthless now - good thing I sold the pixels when I did.

Billionaire Adolf Merckle has committed suicide after suffering recent financial losses.

The desperate situation of his companies caused by the financial crisis, the uncertainties of the last few weeks and his powerlessness to act, have broken the passionate family entrepreneur.

He was a victim of the Volkswagen “wealth transfer” - he was caught short VW shares when Porsche cornered the market and created an “infinite squeeze.”
I can imagine that at 74 it must have been extremely difficult for him to watch the things he had worked for his entire life crumble away.

I found this chart interesting:

via boing boing via dailykos