ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

INSIGHTS FROM WARREN BUFFET'S INDICATOR OF THE STOCK MARKET. * This chart is taken from Bloomberg but with my annotations added. Warren Buffet has a long-term stock market Indicator that has proved to be very prescient. Basically it plots t he total stock market capitalization as a percentage of U.S. Gross Domestic Product (adjusted for inflation) . This chart is from 1949-2014. When the value of the stock market is a high percentage of the U.S. GDP, stocks are deemed to be overvalued. ( I should add, high means high as compared with the preceding decade or so). On my chart, you can see this happening and the sudden drop in those years, and the events in those years. What interests me are these points: 1. It seems that from 1995 onwards,the swings get more and more violent. Personally I attribute this to the wide-spread adoption of IT viz the Internet, global communication, and online financial transactions which really began around this date. By compressing the time frame in w...

RARE METALS. Recently,in the course of work I came to be acquainted with rare metals with names that I never heard of: Antimony is not a spice, Yttrium is not a Swedish word, Dysprosium is not a medical condition, Germanium is not a flower, These are all a class of metals known as Rare Metals. Few are aware that these metals are strategic to the modern economy, as they are essential components of many modern industrial processes. This is because these metals have properties such as high electrical conductivity, hardness, corrosion resistance, high refractive index, high melting point, strength and light weight. All these properties are required for many products of the modern industrial economy: Electronic capacitors, missile parts, jet engine fan blades, machine tools and drills, semi-conductor etching, surgical instruments, nuclear reactors, chemical processing plants, LEDs and LCDS, X-rays, fibre optics, hard glass and ceramics... the list is endless. These materials are so i...