Thursday, July 31, 2008

Where are the important charts?

wikiInvest.com looks like a great site. It has lots of relatively well thought-out investing content, and, like many other sites (e.g., Google Finance) has stock charts that you can embed in your own web site. It also takes the concept a step further by allowing people to annotate the charts to try to explain price movements.

But why are there no embeddable charts for the really big markets? I'm talking about the $25 trillion dollar U.S. bond market for example - or the even the credit markets in general. Where's the yield curve I can put on my Google homepage, or the CDS spread widget that shows me how likely companies are to go bankrupt? These are huge markets, and even if they're not as sexy as equities, they have just as large of an impact on individuals' financial well-being.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

MARB

Bloomberg is really an amazing piece of software. I have always been interested in learning about risk arbitrage, but Bloomberg's Merger Arbitrage screen ("MARB") makes it easy to narrow down my focus. Over the next few months, I'm going to try to run a test portfolio (portfauxlio?) focusing on the smaller deals that hopefully aren't as appealing to professional merger arb analysts.

Related reading: http://www.focusinvestor.com/MergerArb.pdf