The Caulfield Cup, and 'Risk...'

I know this big big business guy, who has recently been going around with a fairly dismal expression on his face. And after talking a bit with him, it seems he is worried about ‘risk.’

Things have changed in the wider economic world of course, and in the marketplace, suddenly, ‘risk’ is posing greater and ever greater concerns to all the Jedi knights of finance.

 

It's still cash...

I would say it is due in no small part to the pretence of low interest rates at the risk free rate fabricated by the US Federal Reserve Bank; the rewards having now become meaningless versus the baseline of risk and the risk curve rising from that baseline.

‘Risk’ is more natural and easier to understand when the Fed is not interfering with the price of money – but now that we have the unorthodox situation that we do have though, let me approach the subject also in an unorthodox way.

A race horse does not absolutely need to be the winner of any particular race regardless of all the factors in its favour; there are no guaranteed winners in horse racing. And this is why expert horse people talk about things like courage, and bravery, and style, and spirit - even luck too.

A courageous horse is really, the underdog in a given race – to mix metaphors – and when it shows the willingness to push itself, against some big negatives, into the chance of actually winning, horse people say the animal has shown courage. Today, the world’s richest handicap race over a derby distance was held – namely, the Australian Caulfield Cup. And it was won by a very good horse from Japan.

Tiny mare Miracles of Life

Winner of the Perri Cutten Sprint

But I want to talk about the sprint race before the Cup – the Perri Cutten Sprint. And I want to talk about a horse I have mentioned here before, Miracles of Life. This mare is a small horse by comparison to the other horses around it in the races it runs in, and whilst as a two year old it was better able to match strides and mass and power with the other runners all of the same age and also similar size, build, and maturity - as an older horse which never really grew a whole lot bigger than when it was two and three, it shouldn’t really be able to match strides with its present company.

Well anyway, Miracles of Life won the sprint race today, and it did that on courage, and spirit, and power and ability, and sheer quality as a race horse. The fact is it shared the win in a rare situation because it dead-heated for first with a very much older horse called Bel Sprinter - though a horse also with a ton of ability but which has had to come back from major injuries.

Dead-heating is a very rare thing these days because of the camera technology that allows the smallest of margins to be decisively determined. In this case the dead-heat was not only a fair result, there was almost something noble about it; the small mare should have ‘naturally’ gone down with the older reliable horse being the ‘predictable’ winner. She was not really entitled to be anywhere near where she was. Indeed she was entitled to be beaten badly.

But that is what makes horse racing interesting to old hands.

When you are a very wealthy person, and you give your money away to build schools for children, because you already have a diamond watch and too many sports cars and too many women that give you too many problems (all of this I got from a Jackie Chan documentary, by the way), why then your life could get boring and you could easily become jaded and cynical.

Taking a risk is no longer about losing everything you have, once you are an old hand. It’s about the joy of the ethereal consequences in the event that ‘you’ win; or that your horse does, at least.

And the joy is not about the cash; it’s about the meaning of the victory.

So if I were to reduce the story down to clear cut principles about the taking of risk, they would be like this: ‘you are not really entitled to make a million bucks from some venture run over a mere handful of weeks, and all from some miniscule cash investment – but if you are using real courage, real knowledge, real judgement, real bravery, real intellectual ability, and then, should you happen to derive a fantastic result (which was never guaranteed), the thing becomes extremely personally meaningful, and it is definitely worth the money cost and the human effort.’

"Waddya think you're gonna do?
Waddya think yer gonna do?
I tell yer what - don't think; do! Something. Anything.
I don't care what. Just do."

Real bravery, real courage, real knowledge, intellectual ability – have nothing at all to do with anything you will ever see on televised business commentaries, or in research reports from investment banks or stock brokers, or even in academic courses. These things are about you not being at all even entitled to be ‘in the hunt’ or ‘in the race,’ as they say; but a race nonetheless which you compete in. These things are about you going ahead anyway and placing yourself ahead of all of the competition in the hunt for the big money prize.

You need to start in the race. That’s fundamental. Too many who are prepared to call themselves businessmen and even bankers and financiers today, aren’t even ‘in the race’ as such. They are all pontificating on the sidelines waiting for some amazing market opportunity that is guaranteed to be in their favour at no cost and no expense and no risk but with some exciting prospect of reward all the same. That is what false pricing of dollar cost has created in the mindsets of the modern businessperson.

These people are confusing investment markets reflected on exchanges, with business and business risk. The two are totally different things.

And I have never seen a better time for engaging in real business, and a worse time for market investments and market investing.

A Great Wine

I want to be reasonable about this – there is such a huge demand for French wines these days that manufacturers are forced to extract every drop of commercial liquid out of the limited absolute supply. This is the same kind of thing that the producers of Chanel No 5 face – when it was first made and sold to the world, certainly much less than a hundred thousand litres per annum was manufactured; today, the total amount is in the millions of litres. There is no possibility that the same kinds of ingredients or the same process is used today to make what is sold as Chanel No 5 – as if it were really anything like the original. And that is to be unkind to the great success of the whole thing as an idea, as a brand, as, even – an ideology, really. At least an ideology of style anyway.

 

A French actress has been chosen

as the Bond 24 bond girl...

Champagne is authentic if it comes from Champagne and carries the required appellation stamp.

But if you want to know the truth, dosage is the secret of much of modern Champagnes. Most of the wines are not too old, are mostly just the de-stemmed flesh without the skins, and they get dosed with a Champagne syrup that has a great concentration of sugars and also, of flavours too.

And that again, is to be a touch unfair to the modern world. We spend our days differently to the mi’lords and mi’ladies of the original days of the Follies Begeres, who would gather around the outer vestibule of the Crazy Shepherdess’s, and drink Champagne. Today, we spend much of the day at a keyboard or keypad, drinking in a tide of electrons and digital meaning.

A hint of pencil shavings!

The other day, someone wandered around my own house looking for a pencil sharpener for a disgruntled child, and, thinking only about a pencil’s association to kids, I entirely forgot about my own collection of silver Faber-Castell sets...

And it was somewhat of a shock, when at last a sharpener was found and all of the adults suddenly noticed the charming redolent scent of pencil shavings!!  So quickly we forget what was once the commonplace.

Authenticity has its place and often it is decried as merely nostalgia – nostalgia being something to be criticised, apparently.

 

But let me say this, if you want to experience what a truly great Champagne once was really like, may I suggest something like a very modestly priced Australian, Red Label Wolf Blass Chardonnay Pinot Noir Sparkling Wine. You will not easily find a more elegant, refined, seamless, indeed quite stunning wine anywhere in today’s world, and not for any kinds of money. Wolf Blass makes a lot of wine, and of many styles. But not for nothing has this maker managed to take off second prize in the whole world against all comers in a blind Paris tasting several times in recent years. Not for nothing.

 

Sochi Formula 1

Why was the meeting between Putin and the ruler of Bahrain al Khalifa held today at the Sochi Formula 1 race track?

Al Khalifa of Bahrain and President Putin

at the Sochi Formula 1 race today

 

Because, the air routes had been high prioritised into Sochi due to the running of the race.

 

Nobody knew this meeting was to be held. It was arranged secretly, and the flight took only four hours for the King of Bahrain to get there from his palace in the tiny Gulf Kingdom.

 

However, it ought not to be lost on anyone who watches these things closely, that previous to this meeting, Bahrain had been employing 'contractors' and 'consultants' led by the ex-London Met policeman John Yates - several million pounds, by the way - to provide ideas and strategy about how to prevent the 'Arab Spring Fever' from infecting the Kingdom of Bahrain.

 

And so this meeting with the President of Russia, the despised and sanctioned leader of the New Eurasia World Order, is a bit of a policy departure by the Bahrainis.

 

Highly staged pic!

 

What could VV possibly have told Hamad al Khalifa that could have persuaded him away from his wonderful English buddies who were naturally always out to just help the King of course. He should not have needed to cosy up to Vlad, shake hands and smile for the cameras and all that...

 

 (A final paragraph has been deleted. For those who read it, just forget you ever read it!)

 

 

Armchair Analytics

Dennis on left, with Jon Snow,

the well-known British Channel 4 journalist

 

Felix Dennis died a few months ago.

Felix who?

Dennis was the owner of Maxim magazine, which I suppose, may provoke some recollection of who he was in the minds of some people.

Actually, he was one of the most dangerous and feared figures in the minds of today’s Hard Right political elite (what does that mean, ‘elite?’).  For one thing he was enormously wealthy, a billionaire in fact. The media around the world has studiously kept him out of any of their publications for decades. He was certainly one of the figures behind the funding of Julian Assange.

The history of Felix Dennis begins a lot earlier than with the inception of Maxim magazine. But to cut a very long story short, when countries like Australia, currently led by an idiot, start throwing darts at Russia and China, it’s no wonder that the Chinese government can have actually said Australia’s present foreign minister was a fool!

Well, the present era political Hard Right, has suppressed the names of people such as Felix Dennis, and Richard Neville, to the point that they no longer know of these identities themselves or what they represent and what their existence might mean.

Down down, deep down in the undergrowth, there are things going on that would make even idiots choke, were they to know...

 

God, you should have seen the pic I first uploaded here

and quickly deleted!!

Not many modern Australians know that ASIO – the perceived Australian National Security Agency (which it is not, by the way) was conceived as a political tool of Prime Minister Menzies; it was specifically a political security agency, not a general Federal or National one. And that is why it has no clue about what is really going on ‘under the radar’ as it were – because it does not involve itself with business espionage or banking problems or economic threats, and largely actually takes orders from an overseas-based English Hard Right political elite which controls all of the Right side of the political landscape in Australia, and is sensitive to superficial political vectors only, and not to economic or industrial ones.

It will, though, interfere, and has in the past, interfered with the handing out of banking licences, for instance, if only because of the political obviousness of this kind of thing. But in the modern world, economic power is not so obvious, especially if the media has studiously gone out of its way to pretend certain examples of it – for their own political reasons - didn’t actually exist! It makes such groups of people very easy to hide themselves and their activities and not even ASIO or the NSA will realise anything is going on because there is no ‘red light’ as it were, under those concerned.

Dennis had, and wielded, simply enormous economic power and he had sway with a lot of Left-sympathizing jurists. And he managed to remain unnoticed for most of the time that he exercised his influence. I could say more, I suppose about what tomorrow brings, but then, neither would I wish to hand everything gratuitously over to fools and idiots and their minions. I would much prefer to see all the cards fall where they may and where they must, wouldn’t you? We won’t have to wait long. Clive Palmer says 1 month, and I agree with him.

Please don’t come knocking on my door afterwards and say ‘what did I know?’ I ‘didn’t’ know anything.  I am strictly an armchair quarterback.  Here's a clue though - in the background of the first pic, take note of the cafe's name. It means something. John Galliano knows what I'm talking about.

Keep Your Diaries Clear

The G20 schedule starts this November 15 in Brisbane Australia. Brisbane is a fairly tame place by comparison with its dark side – Surfer’s Paradise, about forty minutes drive away by fast limo.

I just saw a local Australian group up here in Surfer’s called Say Lou Lou - which is mainly a duo of singers consisting of twin sisters.

Now the public is banned from being anywhere near the G20 world leaders when they turn up on the 15th and 16^th for the summit conference.

Of course you wouldn’t consider Jack Nicholson just another member of the public, although he’s not coming as far as I know.

Jack Nicholson, Mr. Putin President of Russia,

and Peta Wilson

A whole clear month before the G20 summit starts is the Russian Formula 1 Grand Prix.

Now in recent past passages I have told you about people like Sir Alex Allan and how he managed to melt into the social scene here far far away from London City life – but you’d be well aware that if I carried on at the time that mischief was afoot no one would have even believed there actually was even such a person despite the fact that he had already been the High Commissioner here for several years and was the next door neighbour of the then Western Australia State Premier Geoff Gallop. Gallop is a close personal friend of Tony Blair.

Of course he, Allan, was no ‘just the High Commissioner’ for gawdsakes – this man is one of the world’s brightest sparks when it comes to computers and internet systems technology. Allan was moonlighting, if that is the correct terminology about it, while he was doing his other, overt day job during the day, presumably.

And so we now have Julie Bishop, and Tony Abbott, selectively either about to be hosting the President of Russia, or not, as the case will turn out to be on or around the 15^th of November, which is, as I say, one whole clear month after the Formula 1 race in Sochi.

Say Lou Lou - one of them, Live.

Mr. Putin, though, chooses his bedfellows wisely, as you can see. That is, if you see with the same eyes as I do. Which eyes are: For Your Eyes Only.

Now look, let your own thoughts run a bit wild here... I’ll give you the bits and pieces so that you can join the dots without accusing me of making stuff up were I to explicitly say it all.

·         S-Class Mercedes special vehicles for the world leaders.

·         Australian government does not like Mr. Putin

·         Mr. Putin is very charming

·         MI6 is here – has been for a while

ET cetera et cetera et cetera.