More on Dark Pools - fascinating stuff.

A 45 minute radio program from NPR.   Well worth a listen if you want to understand why stock trading is now dominated by professional insiders who are able to game the operations of markets to exploit other traders.

However, when the other traders are large institutions, it isn't clear that anything wrong is going on here.  These are big multi-billion dollar companies playing in a big market.   What is clear is that individual investors should steer clear (and index)!

http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2014/06/27/talking-dark-pools-and-hft-on-npr/

Picking Pockets in Dark Pools

Josh Brown has a fascinating bit on how Barclays allegedly set up a dark pool so that informed traders to make money of the institutions suckered into trading there.  

http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2014/06/26/rolling-the-drunks/

At this stage these are just allegations, but still.

An Uber valuation

Uber, the "find a taxi" app, has been priced at around $18bn based on a recent funding deal.  Now, while I have an awful track record for pricing the latest internet fad, $18 bn does seem a little steep for a company that will, perhaps, earn $200 million in a good year.

Using the flawed Price/Sales ratio as a valuation metric, Uber's valuation is about 90 times revenue.   To put this in perspective, Facebook and LinkedIn are around 12 times.  

It will be entertaining to see how this one plays out.

More on the dark side of hedge funds.

Which begs the question, is there a light side?
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/jun/01/hedge-funds-power-wall-street-pulling-strings

ECB announces a negative interest rate

The ECB (European Central Bank) has set a negative interest rate.   As Time Value of Money math is still correct, this means that a euro today is worth less than a euro tomorrow.