Hi Jay,
Re: The lessons of asset class, geography and time diversification just got reinforced ... ouch.
OTOH, really good insider information would make all the difference in a situation like this.
I've read a bit about the deliberation of the Alberta EUB:
news.google.com
and it strikes me that these folks aren't that different from the Texas Railroad Commission, historically speaking.
As some here know, the Texas Railroad Commission's most important role has nothing to do with railroads. It is, rather, in regulating the oil & gas industry in Texas. If one were to follow their deliberations, one would have a clear idea of what developments were favored, when production caps would come in to play, etc. [As an historical aside, one of the Texas Railroad Commission's most famous decisions was to shut down the East Texas oil fields in the vain hope to raise prices from essentially zero to ten cents per barrel of crude oil in 1930.]
Wouldn't the best place for a speculator be in the cat bird's seat at any regulatory agency's preliminary discussions? Say you were a media speculator. Wouldn't it be lovely to be able to chat with Mike Powell and Kathleen Abernathy at the FCC last week, last month and last year and find out whether or not they were dragging Kevin Martin along with the sell-out of American democracy? If you were like that lobbyist Kevin Maines, who had 34 meetings with Powell in that period, while the public got one meeting, you'd know where to invest. Now wouldn't you? Hell, you'd even know where to speculate, now wouldn't you?
They say the best things in life are free. What they meant was that the best things in the life of the regulator you are going to seduce are free. And the rest is market profit.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. |
