We’ve had a very interesting week with the up-tick in volatility. Notwithstanding, the notable inflection in the trend that can be seen in the chart below (as opposed to the steadily increasing gap which originally piqued our curiosity)–is still not enough to convince me that complacency has abated. Rather, the swings that we are seeing between days of bad news and days of merely no news makes me feel like I should hire IBM to make me a cynical version of Watson with a germanic sense of humour and first-order predicate logic to take advantage of these stupid swings and bubblets: I shall call it Günther. No matter how much I love my Bloomy, I get the feeling that the market has too many people sitting on Bloomberg and Reuters terminals trying to–and perhaps only capable of–making their lunch money on improbably spurious syllogisms and fundamentally flawed deductive reasoning. I guess my only problem is that indeed the market could probably remain irrational far longer than Günther could remain solvent.

Anyway, as soon as we’re done with final exams next week we’ll be far more free to begin a thorough investigation of emerging market securities which I can’t wait to discover. Going to be looking closely at Columbia, Peru, Chile, Turkey, Indonesia and a few others. I actually plan on going to Burma for a fact-finding trip this summer because I think we could see some great opportunities there over the next decade.

End of the week snappy of JML: