The Chicago School of Trading

Week of October 5, 2009 Boo! October is always a scary time on Wall Street and La Salle Street. It started on October 24, 1929, Black Thursday and climaxed on October 29, Black Tuesday, when the stock market lost 13% in one day. By the time it was all over...

Week of September 28, 2009 One way or another, the logo you see above will be history as of Friday. It will be either replaced by a real Olympics Logo or simply be dispatched to the dustbin of history along with my 1984 and 2008 Cub’s World Series tickets. The...

Week of September 21, 2009 Trading CDS vs. We not talking about trading music CD’s, but something very different. Last year at this time we were hearing a lot about credit default swaps or CDS. A CDS is a contract where the buyer makes payments to the seller and in...

Week of September 14, 2009 One Year Later Emanuel and Mayer Lehman in the 1880′s, Lehman’s New York Office 1 Year Ago One Year ago investment banking giant Lehman Brothers collapsed and started a chain reaction which almost destroyed the world’s financial system. Emanuel and Mayer Lehman began their firm...

2008 Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote an extensive piece last week entitled “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?”. The gist of the piece is that many economists had come to believe that the once divided science of economics had evolved into a field where there was unanimity...

Week of September 7, 2009 Apple is throwing an “iPod Event” on 9/9/09, where it is expected to unveil the latest generation of iPods. This most certainly will mean iPods with cameras, but what else? The invitation (above) uses a line from a Rolling Stone classic which fuels speculation that...

Week of September 1, 2009 - EBay to sell a majority interest in Skype to private investors. EBay was criticized for overpaying for the internet calling service in 2005 when they outbid Google and paid nearly 3 billion if you include incentives. They didn’t even acquire the technology behind Skype’s...

Week of August 17, 2009 When a tenant failed to paty $87,000 in rent on two townhouses and retail property in Trump Plaza in New York City, the landlord, Trump Plaza Owners Co-op, did what the Donald himself would have recommended and began eviction proceedings. The tenant? Why that would...

Week of August 3, 2009 Newsweek recently proclaimed that the recession is over, and with the Dow over 9,000, the S&P over 1,000 and the Nasdaq around 2,000 maybe it’s true. But Wall Street often gets ahead of Main Street. The street is going to keep a very close eye...