SEMINAR NOTICE
Topics in Financial Mathematics
Applied Math & Statistics 550.747
Date: October 16, 2009
Time: 4:30pm – 5:20pm
Place: Hodson 313, Homewood Campus, Johns Hopkins University
Speaker: Steven Jon Kaplan CEO, True Contrarian
Title: Why the Financial Markets Consistently Generate Losses for the Maximum Number of Investors
Summary:
Steven Jon Kaplan was graduated from the Johns Hopkins University in May 1982. He created TrueContrarian.com in 1996 with the goal of being able to identify irrational extremes in the financial markets and to profitably capitalize upon them. Steve has published a daily newsletter since February 2006 which attempts to identify current and potential future extremes which are worth trading. As investors worldwide have discovered the hard way that buy-and-hold strategies will fail over any extended period of time, Steve's subscriber base has more than tripled since the summer of 2007. Steve also sends intraday updates whenever he buys or sells anything, so that subscribers can track his performance over a period of years. His thoughts on the financial markets have been quoted in Barron's, Dow Jones Online, MarketWatch, and elsewhere. Steve organized his first conference in New York City in April 2009.
Steve's basic philosophy is that price movements in the financial markets are driven primarily by emotions rather than by logic, so the extremes which are really worth trading are almost entirely irrational. Such emotions include panic, despondency, euphoria, and complacency. Just since the summer of 2007, we have experienced all four of the above with an intensity that had not been present since the 1920s and 1930s. In just 1-1/2 years, we went from investors literally lining up to open new brokerage accounts in China with an average P/E ratio of 110 to the Russian Stock Exchange closing during regular trading hours more than once due to major outbreaks of investor panic and an average P/E ratio below 5.
Steve will explain how to use both quantitative and other measures to identify these extremes, and will enjoy fielding questions from the audience.