Monthly Archive for May, 2006

Is $1.5 billion the highest income in the World?

It is official. I am astonished by the size of some of the incomes reported for hedge fund managers. When I first heard about the $150 to $200 million dollar incomes for CEOs and Celebrities (reported by Forbes magazine) that was impressive. But apparently that is barely enough to make the top 25 incomes for hedge fund managers in 2005:

This time there are two who break the billion-dollar barrier: James Simons of Renaissance Technologies Corp. and BP Capital Management’s T. Boone Pickens. In 2005 math whiz Simons, we calculate, earned a staggering $1.5 billion, edging out oil tycoon Pickens, who took home an equally astounding $1.4 billion from two hedge funds he quietly launched ten years ago. . .

. . .One thing that never seems to change for this exclusive club: The cost of admission keeps going up. A manager had to earn at least $130 million in 2005 to qualify for a place among the top 25 money earners, compared with $100 million in last year’s survey and just $30 million in 2001 and 2002. The 26 managers on the list made, on average, $363 million in 2005, a 45 percent jump from the $251 million the top 25 earned in 2004. The average, of course, got a boost from the billion-dollar boys, Simons and Pickens. But the median earnings also grew, jumping by a third, from $153 million in 2004 to $205 million last year.

[tags] hedge fund managers, income, James Simons, T. Boone Pickens [/tags]

Popularity: 2% [?]

Graphing historical data: DJIA

Playing around Yahoo finance with a friend of mine (Hey Fleur!), we started looking at historical stock data. Yahoo has daily values for DJIA going back to 1929 so the obvious thing to do is look at the crash of 1929.

Yahoo plotted the DJIA on a logarithmic scale because of the large change in values over the last 80 years:

Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1929 (Log scale)

We switched to the normal view:

Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1929

You can see why the log scale is needed. Without it the 1929 crash and the Great Depression are invisible. But what about 1987? Wasn’t that the biggest drop in the history of the stock market?

October 28, 1929 – Dow Jones plummets 38.33 to 260.64 (13% drop)
October 19, 1987 “Black Monday” – Dow Jones down 508.32 to 1738.74 (22% drop)

In both of the above graphs we are plotting cumulative wealth (the current value is based on the previous day’s value). What we need is the percent change day-by-day, which is why daily history at Yahoo is important:

Dow Jones Industrial Average since 1929 (Daily Percent Change)

[tags]DJIA, stock market crash, Yahoo Finance[/tags]

Popularity: 8% [?]