Elections 2012: Live news blog, May 16 | Athens News
Welcome to the Athens News live news blog, where we will be covering all the developments ten days after the 2012 general election - and the first day of the second election campaign
2pm We've a new nationwide poll, this time from the VPRC company and published in Epikaira magazine. It was carried out between May 10-14 on a sample of 804 people.
It shows voter intention and includes don't know, abstentions, etc. The actual share of the valid poll would be higher in each case, in the event of an election.
Party: (voter intention)
Syriza: 20.3%
New Democracy: 14.2%
Pasok: 10.9%
Democratic Left: 6.1%
Communist Party: 4.4%
Independent Greeks: 3.7%
Golden Dawn: 2.2%
Recreate Greece: 1.6%
Other parties 2.3%
Undecided: 17.3%
Don't know/No answer: 6%
2.10pm The party leaders' meeting is over. Panos Kammenos, leader of the Independent Greeks, says that the new prime minister is Panayiotis Pikramenos, chief judge of the Council of State.
My colleague Costas Papachlimintzos has provided the following biography:
Panayiotis Pikramenos
Council of State president
Born in Athens in 1945. He graduated from the German School (Deutsche Schule Athen) in 1963 and from the University of Athens Law School in 1968. He worked as a lawyer both in Athens and in London and got a master's degree in public law from the University Paris II. He was appointed as a court reporter at the Council of State in 1976 and was promoted to the position of associate judge in 1981. In July 2009 he was appointed as the president of the Council of State.
The Council of is the Supreme Administrative Court of Greece.
He's the country's 184th prime minister since 1822.
OK, now that finally Greece has put to rest this political chaos for a while, and there will be no uncertainty for a month, until the elections, on June 17th, I am hoping that finally the Bund will start falling a little bit. There are no news to speculate on. They're all saying that the Greeks are buying german bonds so if the euro ends, they'll be left with marks rather than drachmas. There's a post about it here:
http://maxkeiser.com/2010/05/10/cap...rld-celebrate-the-biggest-bailout-in-history/
Otherwise one could not explain why they kept buying german bonds with a negative yield in some cases.
I don't know much about this yet, but I've been following the bund for a few months now, along with natural gas. A couple of discretionary trades started in February or March made me start researching on energy, public debt, and just about everything else as a consequence (cfr. conspiracy theories - which are true). Yeah, because you can't study the natural gas future without studying energy and its history, and you can't study the bund future without studying public debt, and world politics basically. It's interesting because whereas the bund future is mostly related to politics (and the tendency for politicians to leave debts to their successors), natural gas is mostly about geology, but there's also a lot of politics in it: such as the oil lobby keeping politicians and companies from changing the world so it can lose its dependence on oil, or motivating oil wars (Iraq and other wars).
Of course this whole thing is only happening because I changed my trading from short term and automated to long term (just because it wouldn't go my way in the short-term) and discretionary, based on fundamental analysis. Automated trading can make money no matter what, but the timeframe of my automated trading is hours. So it's based on statistics and it studies the zigzagging patterns of prices.
But then I got bored, so I made some discretionary trades, and started investigating why they weren't working. And I found something very interesting. To the point that now I'd like to keep on doing it no matter what, regardless of my automated trading. Given enough capital, ideally, I'd like to do both. At any rate, for automated trading, I don't need to do anything anyway.
The most important thing now is to get out of these two trades profitably, after following the subject for months.
Other than this, during these last two months, I have discovered that by doing fundamental analysis, you basically are lead to studying the world, its history and its future, because everything interacts and everything has a price. Let's say you want to learn something about agriculture: all you need to do is start a discretionary trade on corn. Within a month, you'll have done hours of research on corn. I wish they had made me study math and all these other subjects with a focus on the money that could be made by studying them.
Since I started trading, because of it, I've studied: excel, programming, vba, easylanguage, math, politics, economics, finance, geography, geology, history... investing is the best incentive to learning.
Investing has made me interested in world events, whereas until recently I only focused on technical analysis and didn't give a damn what happened to Greece or to the world. For example, the major event of this year will probably be peak oil. No one knows about it, if you talk to the idiots surrounding you. Zero. Just as they ignore the facts on September 11th. I hope I'll make something of my knowledge, such as profit at least. As for these people, it's hopeless, because they're too stupid and too ignorant to understand any of these matters, even if you tell them. I have once and for all realized that it doesn't make sense to speak my mind and say what I know and what I think to most people. With them, you should adopt the attitude you have with children. You treat them as children. You don't expect them to understand you.