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TLDR: there was a huge forced seller in Ripple’s common stock, and they finished selling a few days ago.

If you’ve hung around personal-finance forums for any length of time (and god help me I have), you’ve run across the “4% rule”: when you’re figuring out how much you can spend in retirement, the rule of thumb is that you can withdraw 4% of that initial lu…

TL;DR Ripple has announced an unexpected tender offer, for a further 2.5% of the company at $250/share; It looks like they’re increasing the frequency of buybacks from 2x/year to 4x/year, as well as increasing the price; This lifts the buyback-DCF valuati…

Back in 2014, clients and banks in Hong Kong got carried out backward when a sharp move in USDCNH blew up clients who’d unwisely bought Target Redemption Forwards (henceforth TARFs).

TL;DR SEC v Ripple has come to an end, with Ripple agreeing to pay a $125mio fine; XRP is officially not a security, and Ripple is not barred from selling XRP except through certain channels; Re-running my analyses from 2022 gives a valuation for Ripple c…

Disclaimer: I own a bunch of Ripple common stock thanks to being an employee there for nearly five years, so I’m absolutely talking my book with this article.

Let’s hop in the hot tub time machine and head back to the other financial crisis of 2008.

I’ve banged on a little bit on Twitter about how digital asset markets are continually recapitulating discoveries from fiat markets (securitization, credit-default swaps, corporate actions oh wait no disregard that).

Step n+1 in the process of moving josh.sg to a static site (steps 0 through n are right here) was to enable TLS encryption.

Fifteen years ago, when I spun up what became josh.sg, Movable Type was the de rigeur blogging platform, the CMS before any of us even really knew what a “CMS” was.

Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back…

…or, Managing and Mitigating the 2014 CNH FX TARF blowup (Author’s note: I wrote this a year or so back for a few friends on Finance Twitter who wanted to know what FX TARFs were and what effect the huge vol overhang from USDCNH TARFs would have on the sp…

(I was going to turn this into a tweetstorm, but it’s a bit over the line for what would be a reasonable-length tweetstorm and also I am an old fart who thinks tweetstorming is unwieldy.

Amid the fiasco of MtGox’s apparent collapse last night (acquisition?

So despite having been away from Disneyland-with-the-death-penalty for more than a year, I can’t resist keeping up with the news from Singapore’s spectacularly dodgy S-chip stocks - the Chinese small-caps that infest the lower reaches of the SGX because i…

An eagle-eyed colleague recently pointed me to the case of CLS Bank v Alice, where Alice Corporation is trying to enforce a set of patents against CLS Bank, the little-known (but systematically vital) central settlement point for interbank FX trades.

In 2010, a Florida man parted with 10,000 units of a new-fangled anarcho-currency thing called “bitcoins” in return for two hot, fresh, tasty pizzas.

I like to think that all of JRE’s readers would be smart enough to run a mile if they saw an investment advertising returns of “20-25% per year guaranteed!”.

Walter Kurtz at Sober Look had a great piece a few weeks ago, where he wryly suggested a way to make money if you don’t like that IRS the bank’s sold you: default on the payments and sue the bank.

Update: here’s a text version without smartquotes.

Slightly old news (it’s from January) but this is, to put it politely, quite astonishing: when the SGX ordered listed company China Sky Chemical Fibre to appoint a special auditor to investigate its (probably fraudulent) accounts and (probably dodgy) rela…

Since it was published on Tuesday, Vincent Cignarella’s article for WSJ MarketBeat - The Foreign Exchange Traders’ Lament, and kudos to the WSJ’s subs for the correctly placed apostrophe - has done the rounds of every spot FX desk on the street, and “cable

The old “About JRE” page text: Your editor is an FX options trader, exiled in sunny Singapore.

Update: right, here’s a new version of the script that doesn’t spew when you run it as root.

DBS Bank has just launched the largest ever banking M&A deal in south-east Asia, offering more than SGD 7 bio to buy Indonesia’s Bank Danamon (which is 67% owned by Temasek, the SWF that also owns a one-third stake in DBS).

The country that gave us bubbles in equities, jade, paintings, shares in paintings, table salt, fermented tea, fake French wine, 19th-century stamps and silver is now inflating a bubble in - hold your nose - dead-caterpillar fungus.

Unless you read the Straits Times (and my deepest sympathies if you do), Sunshine Empire might be the biggest ponzi scheme you’ve never heard of.

Steven Levitt, author of Freakonomics, gave a talk in Singapore last month - and he had some interesting things to say in the Q&A session about the country’s casino gambling policy.

One of the larger investment scandals in Singapore - a city which is not short of investment scandals - was the saga surrounding Profitable Group, a land-banking investment firm that collapsed in 2009, taking tens of millions of dollars of investor funds…

Update 2: as JRE exclusively predicted last night, the winner is Mr Tan!

Josh Brown’s article from yesterday on the “ETF Singularity” is a winner.

The price of COEs - Certificates of Entitlement, the piece of paper that allows you to buy a car in Singapore - has reached new 14-year highs.

Via Barry Ritholz: Aussie comedians John Clarke and Bryan Dawe (of “the front fell off” fame) discuss Greece’s debt problem: JOHN CLARKE: Well, they can’t pay their debts, Bryan.

(Note for the humour-impaired: this post is not investment advice; this post is comedy.

Earlier today, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong spoke (and begged for mercy from the electorate) at a People’s Action Party rally in Singapore’s CBD.

Update: Hi!

Update: Hi!

Even if you read nothing else this weekend, you must read John Hempton’s incendiary takedown of the SGX’s thwarted merger with the ASX.

I’ve ranted previously about people calling things “flash crashes” that don’t deserve the name.

In 2007, Singapore’s stock exchange started enthusiastically pitching for Chinese SMEs to list on the SGX.

I ranted a few weeks ago about an egregious structured deposit from UOB - a trade that locked aunty-and-uncle customers in for six years, mysteriously linked their returns to a 2y5y SGD swap curve steepener, and had worse returns than a term deposit down…

“The joy of giving continues at UOB”, shouted the flier that Singapore’s second-largest bank stuffed through my letterbox earlier this week.

Singapore has, according to estimates, about thirty thousand real estate agents in a city of five million people.

17:55 to go, Singapore: Takeoff.

Back in the seventies, a German bank named Herstatt Bank earned an ignominious place in history.

On March 2nd, 2000 - less than a week before the Nasdaq Composite index hit its all-time peak - network equipment maker 3Com spun off its Palm mobile-devices division in a blaze of tech-bubble-fuelled glory.

With less than a month left in this decade (have we even decided what to call it yet?

Welcome to the wonderful world of electioneering in Singapore.

This article was buried in the Arts section of Saturday’s NYT - and unjustly so, because the writer has stumbled on yet another bubble being pumped up by Chinese money.

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