According to someone who knows I’m not welcome on the Telegraph business or finance pages. Someone there doesn’t like me therefore the word is don’t commission Timmy. Can’t imagine why given me sweet and peacable nature but there it is.
Short-sellers aren’t listening, having snapped up the company’s bonds on the cheap in a bet that prices have further to fall.
Perhaps there’s a fatwa against employing anyone – even freelance – who knows fuck all?
Short sellers sell stuff in the expectation that prices will fall and so they can buy back cheaper. No one buys stuff in the expectation that prices will fall further. But here we have, a major newspaper, saying that short sellers buy bonds in the hope and expectation that prices will fall further.
Not employing Timmy is such a wise idea, eh?
I tend to assume that most of the legacy media is just a chumocracy now. How many people at the Guardian, Telegraph, Times, Sun, BBC really give a shit if it gets a bigger audience, makes more money?
Wine writing still seems to be good…
Twenty years ago the youngest Grist showed a flair for English, got good grades at A level and wanted to study English at a decent university but was warned off by his English teacher who said ability in churnalism counts for SFA, it’s just who you know. So, yes, twas ever…
I had a little bet with myself before clicking the link that it would be Ben ‘thick as mince” Marlow. One of the reasons I gave up my free Terriblegraph subscription.
The last day we take the Telegraph is fast approaching: we have cancelled our subscription. The price has been getting extortionate and we can’t use its quality any longer as a justification for continuing with it. So, no papers; morning, nor evening, nor weekend. Changed days: I grew up in a house that took four newspapers. Plus a twice-weekly local rag, and a weekly local rag, and a weekly trade paper for Dad. Plus magazines of course.
Nor do we take weekly magazines. Nor any monthly except “Which?” and the RHS jobby.
Also a free one courtesy of Lloyds Bank. Can’t remember its name: Killing Foxes for Pleasure and Profit, that sort of thing.
Once your subscription ends you will be flooded with desperate requests to renew again, with a final offer to pay £29 for the next year. (At least, that was my experience.)
Dearieme
I cancelled it two years ago and not once have I regretted it. While not as bad as the Guardian it has drifted further and further to the Left. Suzanne Moore FFS? Really?
I was trying to think of a verb equivalent to “snapped up” to apply to shorting.
Farting out seems appropriate. Since it’s an abrupt emission but nothing gets delivered.
Not for the Telegraph Financial pages? They are generally fulla shit.
I’m not seeing the problem with their claim. If prices have fallen recently and a short seller buys bonds, they are expecting them to “fall further” aren’t they?
Granted, the short seller doesn’t care that the prices have fallen, they are strictly forward-looking. But the description seems accurate.
No, you buy bonds when they have fallen and you expect them to rise again.
You short sell bonds when they have fallen and you expect them to fall further.
If a short seller is buying, it’s because he sold the stuff he didn’t have earlier and now has to buy them to actually deliver on the contract.
That’s what short selling means. You enter a contract to deliver something for a certain price in the future, but you only buy that to deliver it when it’s due. Hopefully you can buy it for less when it’s due, otherwise you’ve lost money on it.
It’s almost as if they’re employing people to write on the finance pages who don’t know anything about finance.
To be extremely charitable, the writer may have been saying that short sellers have cashed in, and are now entering more contracts to short sell again.
But if so, the quote is a really bad and confusing way to say it.
It’s almost as if they’re employing people to write who don’t know how to write.
And subs who don’t know, or care about, their trade
It’s in Trading Places. The Dukes are snapping up all the Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice options they can get because the report is fake and they think prices are going to rise. Winthorpe and Valentine sell it at a high price (around 140). Then the actual report is announced and the price collapses and Winthorpe and Valentine start buying up at 50.
It also highlights the massive gains/losses well. Winthorpe and Valentine end up on a yacht, the Dukes end up ruined.
Do these people not even watch the movies about this stuff?
Short sellers borrow stocks or bonds and sell what they borrowed in anticipation of further falls. They then buy the bonds or stocks when they have fallen in price, return them to the lender and keep the difference. (More or less as there is also a cost to borrowing)
Having reread the quote above, I confess I’m not sure if the hack fails to understand the concept or is simply incapable of expressing himself coherently.
In todays Telegraph business section they have a piece about a potential ban on sewage sludge being used as fertiliser on farmland. In it they suggest that artificial fertiliser costs £60/tonne. The actual price in the UK is currently c. £400/tonne (for ammonium nitrate). It hasn’t been £60/tonne since the 1990s, and then only for a brief period. For sustained prices at that level you’d probably have to go back to the 70s.
They may not know much about markets and shorts and money, but I bet they can write the bejeezus out of doing pronouns correctly and serving underserved deserving communities and mis-serving overserved undeserving ones.