Tartaglia

There is too much refinery capacity in the world, margins are wafer thin. Ineos won't miss Grangemouth, but their employees might miss Ineos

This email came out of Ineos head office this afternoon so they were expecting the workforce to accept the agreement There was a deal on the table for the future of the site that could have worked, but to carry on as is, was not an option. Site voted against carrying on to the surprise of everybody.

I'll almost certainly get an email from someone who has the next office to Ratcliffe sometime today. He is as a previous poster pointed out massively overleveraged, in plant which is outdated, poorly maintained and in a region of the World where little expansion is likely to be seen. He was lucky not to go under in 2008

Didn't Enron do something like this just before it failed

Don't panic Mr Mainwaring!

Well, the insurers and reinsurers are certainly going to have to sell a lot of investments. Another bailout for AIG?

I'm surprised its only 9% frankly

I saw someone do it in a clothes shop (Primark I believe) in Stevenage last week. First time I've seen someone do it for ages

This must have been taken from his book http://www.amazon.co.uk/Anatomy-Bear-Lesso...5809&sr=8-1

The "Great Wave" is an excellent book, I read it when it came out

I am certainly not going to disagree with that, but conservatism in investment banking generally follows recklessness and liquidation

Noel, I feel that mathematics and mathematicians are overused in finance. Knowledge of economic history is IMO more important

What like some sort of jump diffusion model, still ultimately dependent on the mathematical properties of BM?

Geometric Brownian motion is the underpinning of the Black Scholes model, which IMO is overused and has considerable weaknesses. It is also used in mean reverting models of interest rates. (eg the Ornstein Uhlenbeck process) There are also weaknesses in this. Interest rates have a cyclic component which is non random and not well described by such models particularly over the longer timeframes.

I certainly wouldn't want to give the impression that I would apply Brownian motion to any financial data. You would have to be a complete idiot to do that. (Plenty of quants in the Investment banks do though).