Hi ST,
Thanks for the note, and yes, this is better on the 'art' thread.
Re: Keynes, I find his commentary both amusing and useful. One fact (out of hundreds) that I didn't learn in school regarding Keynes was that in addition to being the leading economic thinker of the 30's and 40's (d. 1946), was that he was an active speculator in commodities. He initiated a position in wheat futures in the Chicago market in early 1937, (trading from his home base of King's College, Cambridge). Soon, not enough contracts were available to him in Chicago and the action took him into the Buenos Aires market as well. As luck would have it, his positions went under water and Keynes decided to take delivery of the wheat he had contracted for, rather than take the loss.
As the ships steamed up the Thames and into London, Keynes was spotted measuring up the King's College chapel for use as a temporary grainary! He discovered that it was too small by half. You see, at the time Keynes owned the equivalent of a one month's supply of wheat for all of Great Britain. Since prices hadn't improved by the time the first of the ships docked, Keynes met the seller's representative to inspect the grain. Keynes claimed, and was subsequently proven correct, that the grain was not clean. (The standard test was to count the number of weevils in a cubic foot of grain, a tally over 30 weevils meant rejection.) So for the next month, the sellers agent directed day laborers in the removal of weevils from the wheat. At about the third week of this tweezer time, a stockbroker who happened to be a member of the Tuesday Club (Keynes was the Corresponding Secretary of this illustrious economics/investment club), and privy to the machinations of Prof. Keynes, ran into one of England's largest wheat millers. The flour man complained bitterly about some "damn speculator" who had cornered the wheat market. The broker kept his mouth shut, but reported back to Keynes. Indeed, prices moved up sharply due to an acute shortage of wheat and Keynes made a tidy profit when he finally released the grain onto the spot market!
Re: Livermore, indeed he was a great thinker about the opportunities in the market. In April, 1929 he correctly identified the extreme speculative nature of the general market. He went short and by August was completely and utterly busted as the market continued toward the heavens. Just two months before he would have become a very rich man he put a gun to his head in the bathroom of his suite in a New York and ended one of Wall Street's most notorious careers. If you are not familiar with it, "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" by William Lefebvre is a fictionalized history of Livermore's life.
Happy Investing, Ray |
