91–100 of 159 posts
In the "Top of the World" graph in the article, there's a dip for Saudi Arabia. Does anyone know why?
They started drawing from their fund to continue paying for all the entitlements their citizens expect.
They calculate they can ride it out longer than the rest because of their fund. So far they are correct.
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Yeah but I'd pick stocks for them for a thousandth of that.
The difference between $60k and $60M, for a fund nearly a trillion dollars large, is worth it if that person worth $60M can eek out even a few extra basis points in returns. Despite what many people believe, there are those out there who have an eye for value, and _can_ pick stocks.
[...] and no one else could/would have performed better for less than $60M.
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Interesting. Why do they choose to keep this money in a sovereign wealth fund instead of choosing to pay off their debt?
The Norwegian 10Y treasury bond has a coupon rate of 1.3% (lower than the US T-Note! suffice to say, very cheap). The wealth fund has been growing around 8% per year. Borrow money at a rate of 1.3%, reinvest it and make 8%. It's one of the golden rules of banking: if you can borrow money for cheap, do so.
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> there are those out there who have an eye for value, and _can_ pick stocks. There's simply no evidence that is true at all. Every study of this issue says the exact opposite: there's no one out there who can pick stocks.
In general I've always agreed with this view. But I can't help but wonder how studies like this explain Berkshire Berkshire Hathaway.
Let's say the best performing fund is (fictional) Xanadu Investments we'd ask, how do we explain Xanadu's performance.
882 B / 5.2 Million ~= $170k for every citizen of Norway. At 4% a year that's $6,800 each in annual income. Not bad!
Not bad, but not enough to cover the current levels of household debt in Norway, while a large portion of the debt is tied to mortgages the mortgage debt in the Norway have been increasing faster than income for quite a few years now. http://www.tradingeconomics.com/norway/households-debt-to-gd... This isn't a problem unique to Norway, Norway is just one of the biggest offenders, even in the Nordic countries there is…
Do you have any other citations for this? I have never heard about this in the Swedish news and I'm quite curious where The Telegraph got that information from.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there are those out there who have an eye for value, and _can_ pick stocks. There's simply no evidence that is true at all. Every study of this issue says the exact opposite: there's no one out there who can pick stocks.
In general I've always agreed with this view. But I can't help but wonder how studies like this explain Berkshire Berkshire Hathaway.
http://fortune.com/2016/04/29/berkshire-hathaway-stock-warre...
A little over decade ago, when Norway's fund was called "the Petroleum Fund" and had "only" $147B, an article in Slate magazine explained what was special about it: "Norway has pursued a classically Scandinavian solution. It has viewed oil revenues as a temporary, collectively owned windfall that, instead of spurring consumption today, can be used to insulate the country from the storms of the global economy and prov…
I (sincerely) wonder - what would happen if USA were to receive such a short-duration windfall? Will it be socked away in a rainy day fund, or will it be spent immediately in terms of infrastructure programs, or welfare programs or tax cuts/rebates? In fact, California experienced such a windfall due to rising stock prices in recent years, and Jerry Brown had to fight with the legislature to save that in a rainy day…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund
The fund pays a yearly dividend to permanent residents.
The article also mentions that one of the reasons for setting up the fund was dismay with how the initial $900 mill. of oil income was spent.
Our government hasn't hardly saved a dime of our Oil Income.
We have been taking a small cut of the hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil we have been producing daily for the past 100+ years and spending it as fast as we possibly can.
>Most of the oil companies exploring for oil in Alberta were of U.S. origin, and at its peak in 1973, over 78 per cent of Canadian oil and gas production was under foreign ownership and over 90 per cent of oil and gas production companies were under foreign control, mostly American. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_production_in_Canada...
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>> "...impossible..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies "...famed for one of the best records in investing history, returning more than 35 percent annualized over a 20-year span..."
People have done it before. It has always turned out to be luck. Fantastic track record until they cease being lucky. So, cynicism and economic orthodoxy aside, that sounds like a really cool company. Has anyone tried just tossing a big dumb neural network on stock data and investigated whether it can make money? It sounds very obvious, but a quick googling returns little. But I guess the investment industry is prett…