A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors. Named after Italian businessman Charles Ponzi, this type of scheme misleads investors by either falsely suggesting that profits are derived from legitimate business activities, or by exaggerating the extent and profitability of the legitimate business activities, leveraging new investments to fabricate or supplement these profits. A Ponzi scheme can maintain the illusion of a sustainable business as long as investors continue to contribute new funds, and as long as most of the investors do not demand full repayment or lose faith in the non-existent assets they are purported to own.
A commodity market is a market that trades in the primary economic sector rather than manufactured products, such as cocoa, fruit and sugar. Hard commodities are mined, such as gold and oil. Futures contracts are the oldest way of investing in commodities. Commodity markets can include physical trading and derivatives trading using spot prices, forwards, futures, and options on futures. Farmers have used a simple form of derivative trading in the commodity market for centuries for price risk management.
A stock market bubble is a type of economic bubble taking place in stock markets when market participants drive stock prices above their value in relation to some system of stock valuation.
In finance, speculation is the purchase of an asset with the hope that it will become more valuable shortly. It can also refer to short sales in which the speculator hopes for a decline in value.
An economic bubble is a period when current asset prices greatly exceed their intrinsic valuation, being the valuation that the underlying long-term fundamentals justify. Bubbles can be caused by overly optimistic projections about the scale and sustainability of growth, and/or by the belief that intrinsic valuation is no longer relevant when making an investment. They have appeared in most asset classes, including equities, commodities, real estate, and even esoteric assets. Bubbles usually form as a result of either excess liquidity in markets, and/or changed investor psychology. Large multi-asset bubbles, are attributed to central banking liquidity.
An exchange-traded fund (ETF) is a type of investment fund that is also an exchange-traded product, i.e., it is traded on stock exchanges. ETFs own financial assets such as stocks, bonds, currencies, debts, futures contracts, and/or commodities such as gold bars. The list of assets that each ETF owns, as well as their weightings, is posted on the website of the issuer daily, or quarterly in the case of active non-transparent ETFs. Many ETFs provide some level of diversification compared to owning an individual stock.
A commodity price index is a fixed-weight index or (weighted) average of selected commodity prices, which may be based on spot or futures prices. It is designed to be representative of the broad commodity asset class or a specific subset of commodities, such as energy or metals. It is an index that tracks a basket of commodities to measure their performance. These indexes are often traded on exchanges, allowing investors to gain easier access to commodities without having to enter the futures market. The value of these indexes fluctuates based on their underlying commodities, and this value can be traded on an exchange in much the same way as stock index futures.
Harry Shuler Dent Jr. is an American financial newsletter writer. His 2009 book, The Great Depression Ahead, appeared on the New York Times Bestseller List.
Soros Fund Management, LLC is a privately held American investment management firm. It is currently structured as a family office, but formerly as a hedge fund. The firm was founded in 1970 by George Soros and, in 2010, was reported to be one of the most profitable firms in the hedge fund industry, averaging a 20% annual rate of return over four decades. It is headquartered at 250 West 55th Street in New York. As of 2023, Soros Fund Management, LLC had $25 billion in AUM.
Contrarian investing is an investment strategy that is characterized by purchasing and selling in contrast to the prevailing sentiment of the time.
Market timing is the strategy of making buying or selling decisions of financial assets by attempting to predict future market price movements. The prediction may be based on an outlook of market or economic conditions resulting from technical or fundamental analysis. This is an investment strategy based on the outlook for an aggregate market rather than for a particular financial asset.
James Joseph Cramer is an American television personality, author, entertainer, and former hedge fund manager. He is the host of Mad Money on CNBC, and an anchor on Squawk on the Street. After graduating from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, he worked for Goldman Sachs and then became a hedge fund manager, founder, and senior partner of Cramer Berkowitz. He co-founded TheStreet, which he wrote for from 1996 to 2021. Cramer hosted Kudlow & Cramer from 2002 to 2005. Mad Money with Jim Cramer first aired on CNBC in 2005. Cramer has written several books, including Confessions of a Street Addict (2002), Jim Cramer's Real Money: Sane Investing in an Insane World (2005), Jim Cramer's Mad Money: Watch TV, Get Rich (2006), and Jim Cramer's Get Rich Carefully (2013).
Victor Niederhoffer is an American hedge fund manager, champion squash player, bestselling author and statistician.
Michael Phillips Marcus was a commodities trader who, in less than 20 years, is reputed to have turned his initial $30,000 into $80 million.
Barton Michael Biggs was a money manager whose attention to emerging markets marked him as one of the world's first and foremost global investment strategists, a position he held—after inventing it in 1985—at Morgan Stanley, where he worked as a partner for over 30 years. Following his retirement in 2003, he founded Traxis Partners, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund, based in Greenwich, Connecticut. He is best known for accurately predicting the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s.
George Soros is a Hungarian-American billionaire hedge fund manager and philanthropist. As of October 2023, he had a net worth of US$6.7 billion, having donated more than $32 billion to the Open Society Foundations, of which $15 billion has already been distributed, representing 64% of his original fortune. Forbes called Soros the "most generous giver". He is a resident of New York.
The Quantum Group of Funds are privately owned hedge funds based in London, New York, Curaçao and Cayman Islands. They are advised by George Soros through his company Soros Fund Management. Soros started the fund in 1973 in partnership with Jim Rogers.
The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World is a 2008 book by then-Harvard professor Niall Ferguson, and an adapted television documentary for Channel 4 (UK) and PBS (US), which in 2009 won an International Emmy Award. It examines the long history of money, credit, and banking.
More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite (2010) is a financial book by Sebastian Mallaby published by Penguin Press. Mallaby's work has been published in the Financial Times, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Atlantic Monthly as columnist, editor and editorial board member. He is a senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The book is a history of the hedge fund industry in the United States looking at the people, institutions, investment tools and concepts of hedge funds. It claims to be the "first authoritative history of the hedge fund industry." It is written for a general audience and originally published by Penguin Press. It was nominated for the 2010 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award and was one of The Wall Street Journal's 10-Best Books of 2010. The Journal said it was "The fullest account we have so far of a too-little-understood business that changed the shape of finance and no doubt will continue to do so."
Dmitry Alimov is a Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur and investor in technology businesses, founder and managing partner of the investment fund Frontier Ventures, and co-founder of the online video service ivi.tv. He worked as a senior manager in companies such as Access Industries, TNT, Amedia, ru-Net Ltd, and Sputnik Group. In 2012, Russian business magazine, Secret Firmy, named Alimov as one of the Top-50 Russian Internet Millionaires. In 2016 the European CEO magazine named Dmitry Alimov Entrepreneur of the Year.
