Latest news with #TradingPlaces
Bloomberg
28-04-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Why We're in ‘Trading Places' Territory
Opinion Newsletter John Authers, Columnist Save To get John Authers' newsletter delivered directly to your inbox, sign up here. In the climactic scene in Trading Places — easily the funniest film about commodity trading ever made — Mortimer Duke realizes he has lost his fortune in the day's trading, and screams, 'Turn those machines back on!', thinking that if trading could only start again, things would go back to normal. Larry McDonald of Bear Traps Report offers this as a market analogy:
Forbes
16-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
What Eddie Murphy And Dan Akroyd Taught Me About Trading
People in my industry were ecstatic to see the film Trading Places, hopeful it would help the public understand what we did. But instead, the film took things in a whole different direction, and it was all because of orange juice. getty When I started my job as a commodities trader at Heinold Commodities in 1983, I was still young, and the bloom was a little bit off the rose. I wanted to spend most of my time researching and analyzing various commodities, but I found I spent more time doing sales. While it wasn't perfect, I was still happy to officially be in the industry. So, while I wasn't going to let myself become a cliche salesman, that did mean I had to get more clients and deliver them solid returns. As long as I did that, I'd be OK—and I was until that summer. That's when Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd changed everything. While I didn't want to be a telemarketer, I did have to play the game. I worked hard trying to build up my research and analytics skills, while also meeting client acquisition requirements through my own methodologies. Then the summer came, and with it, a movie called Trading Places starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd. In it, Ackroyd plays a commodities broker who is doing quite well for himself, while Eddie Murphy is a street hustler. A bet between two different rich men causes Murphy and Ackroyd to change places, making Murphy the commodities broker and Ackroyd the hustler. Since commodities were a key part of the film, people in my industry were ecstatic to see it. Maybe now the public would understand what exactly we did. But instead, the film took things in a whole different direction, and it was all because of orange juice. In the movie, some evil speculators want to corner the market on frozen concentrated orange juice (FCOJ) by creating a fake version of the USDA crop report. Whether or not this had anything to do with the next part is pure speculation, but to me at the time, it certainly looked real. Over the next few months, FCOJ futures shot up, and as a result, it was arguably a good idea to short them. We had all seen the movie, of course, which made everyone an expert on orange juice. Next thing I knew, almost the entire firm was shorting FCOJ. Normally, I would spend some time researching the topic, but at this particular moment, there wasn't time. I needed to either get in on the hype or cut bait, and in the end, I caved to peer pressure. I took a small, short position for my clients. I hoped it would work out fine. Christmas day, 1983. Florida, the Sunshine State, which produced (at the time) 60 percent of the US orange juice, had its worst frost in 100 years. FCOJ went to a term called 'limit up,' which is when a commodity price changes the maximum amount allowed in one day before the trading is stopped by the exchange. It did this every day for a solid window of time. It wasn't great. I wasn't in as deep as some of my colleagues, as they had bet the farm. I only bet a shed on that farm, so my clients only took a small loss. But in the end, I shouldn't have lost them anything. I only shorted FCOJ because everyone else was doing it, and had I not hedged, my clients—and me—would have been up a creek. This could have been much worse, and all thanks to a movie. Fortunately, that was now ancient history, which was also now on my mind a bit more. If I wanted to know what my future looked like, maybe I should take some time to look at my past. And that's exactly what I did.
Telegraph
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Your Friends & Neighbours, review: Jon Hamm emulates his Mad Men glory days in this uber-rich satire
Early on in Your Friends & Neighbours (Apple TV+) Jon Hamm 's character falls into a swimming pool. At that point things freeze and Hamm's voiceover asks the viewer direct, 'You think that's a metaphor, right?' Funnily enough, I had just thought, 'Please no, not the slow-motion swimming pool drowning-in-my-own-troubles metaphor again.' Your Friends & Neighbours is that kind of show – clever, very well put together and, if not entirely original, more than sharp enough to get away with it. We'll get the lack of originality out of the way first: this is East Coast Big Little Lies with a dash of Trading Places and all the familiar accoutrements of the modern prestige thriller. It tells the story of Andrew 'Coop' Cooper (Hamm) a hedge fund manager whose charmed life quickly unravels when he's fired from his job for misbehaviour. With his wife also having left him for another man he suddenly finds himself on the outside looking in at the manicured lawns and ludicrous wealth of his former friends and neighbours. With alimony, school fees, flash cars and child support all pressing down, Coop needs money fast. So he starts robbing from his peers. It is a satire on conspicuous expenditure that itself must have cost a fortune – the title sequence alone looks pricier than most of the BBC's annual drama budget. Nonetheless, it relies on familiar tropes: there's plenty of posh house porn as seen in Disclaimer, The Perfect Couple, and Big Little Lies 1 and 2. The satire on the empty lives of the uber-rich is biting and potent but is still the same satire that underpinned Succession and The White Lotus. Your Friends & Neighbours is not breaking new ground. But it landscapes that old ground with real relish. Jon Hamm is superb, those weary eyes lingering on the madness of the world around him and barely able to believe that yes, this is happening. There are echoes of his career-defining turn as Don Draper in Mad Men as he plays another man who's got everything but is left with nothing. And harking back to Mad Men, there is some first-rate writing here, not just in the bravura set pieces (look out for the basketball game gone wrong, or the women's self-defence class plus cannabis brownies) but in a love of words and language for their own sake. This (for once) fully justifies Hamm's voiceover and the soliloquising that comes with it. It is viciously witty, at times wincingly bleak. Put 'It was at moments like these where I realised how far you could drift away from your own life without actually going anywhere,' straight into the Midlife Crisis Quotations book. Above all, Your Friends & Neighbours is very more-ish. Apple TV+ has some gems on its roster, but Ted Lasso and Slow Horses apart it has struggled to find returning hits. No wonder it has already renewed this for a second series before an episode has aired – it looks and feels like a show with legs.
The Guardian
02-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Relentless hunt for profits still not matching global popularity
When William Goldman wrote in his memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade that in Hollywood 'nobody knows anything', he coined a phrase that spoke directly to the chaos at the heart of the movie industry. It was a remark made in 1983, the year of classic movies such as Tootsie, Trading Places and Local Hero and an era when the box office was booming. The phrase came to mind this past week in the ballroom of the Peninsula hotel in London, where the great and the good and the rest of the global football industry gathered for the latest FT Business of Football Summit. Just like Hollywood in the early 80s, the football industry has a lot to shout about today. There is the success of the expanded Champions League (at least in the sense it has increased income for a greater number of clubs and nations). There is more power for clubs within the European system, a response in part to the Super League plot. There is the ubiquitous refrain that, in a world of limitless content, nothing does what live sport can. For the Premier League, it can even point to continued growth in the value of its media rights. Despite all this, the background noise was one of people scratching their heads. For all the brand awareness, the eyeballs and the solidarity payments, most in the business of football are struggling to make the whole thing profitable. When it comes to a diagnosis of the problems and the solutions that should be pursued, opinions differ wildly. Todd Boehly was the headline act and gave a distinctly low-energy tour around his thinking. For the Chelsea co-owner, the future is Netflix. Or at least, it is the Premier League striking a worldwide media rights deal with a global brand (like the MLS has with Apple or the NFL with DAZN). A one-stop shop for every fan across the world, the scale of the opportunity, Boehly thinks, means it has to be an option the league considers and is, in his opinion, 'where we're headed'. That is all well and good for the richest domestic football league in the world, but for others such an opportunity may not be viable. For clubs such as Marseille there need to be 'new ideas'. For their president, Pablo Longoria, that involves turning the Stade Vélodrome into a destination outside matches and making better use of 'digital opportunities'. For Sporting in Portugal and their executive André Bernardo, dynamic ticket pricing needs to be on the table. For Giorgio Chiellini, the legendary defender turned head of football institutional relations at Juventus, more games are inevitable, but the proceeds from those games should be shared. 'It's hard to go back and the direction of travel is more games,' he says. 'The only answer is more redistribution.' While every executive appears to have an idea on how to make things better, there is not a consensus on which approach is most likely to work. Equally, there is no agreement about the other end of the money puzzle: what regulations are necessary to create the holy grail of financial sustainability and competitive balance. A topic at the heart of the debate over the independent regulator for English football, it is something everyone in European football (including its American owners) says they want, but in their own way. For Richard Masters and the Premier League, the imposition of an independent regulator will be overly restrictive, with the 'unintended consequences' an even greater risk. For Charlie Marshall, chief executive of the European Club Association, which speaks for more than 700 men's and women's clubs, the concern is also 'over-regulation' and 'rules that don't allow for dynamism'. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion For Fausto Zanetton, an Inter board member and investor, however, the focus must be instead on stemming losses, and for Ian Lynam, a leading sports lawyer, concerns over tighter regulation are outweighed by the risks of laxer rules. 'You can't say that more competitive balance means a better league,' he says, 'but a complete absence of it leads to destruction.' The lack of agreement was striking, as was the tendency for speakers to use the same terms ('financial stability and competitive balance' among them) to mean very different things. This reflects the problems of a sport that has never been more globally popular but is not generating revenues to match. But perhaps it also reveals the complicated and complex reasons why investors get into football in the first place. For all that sportswashing and financialisation may play a part, listening to owners and executives you also hear very strong personal motivations: a desire for legacy, for excitement and, even, for affection. The human component in any business decision, especially a business as emotional as football, is perhaps undervalued.
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
NASA's 'Women In Leadership' Latest Victim Of Trump 'DEI' Purge
The first weeks of the second Trump presidency have been marked by a flurry of often-illegal executive orders, frequently centered around the removal of diversity, equity, and inclusion language from anywhere the Presidency can touch. Now that mandate has made its way to NASA: The agency has been told to 'drop everything' and focus on erasing wicked terms like 'anything specifically targeting women' from its website. The core concept, as laid out in various Trump administration documents, is fairness — jobs should only go to the most qualified people, regardless of any other factors. 404 media got a hold of NASA's specific directive, to show what that looks like for the agency: 'Per NASA HQ direction, we are required to scrub mentions of the following terms from our public sites by 5pm ET today. This is a drop everything and reprioritize your day request. Note that the list below is the list that exists this morning, but it may grow as the day goes on. The problem with the Trump approach here, and with the general anti-DEI-in-hiring in general, is that people don't actually hire fairly when left to their own devices. Orchestras employ more women when hiring is based only on sound and not on sight, and studies have shown that even something as simple as removing names from resumes to obfuscate race and gender levels out the playing field — white male executives unconsciously gravitate towards white male employees, who make the same mistake all the way down. Trump, personally, is a big believer in intelligence, ability to handle pressure, and even criminality being inherited genetic factors — facets of a person that are built-in from birth and can never be changed. This is the set of provably untrue beliefs that forms the basis of eugenics (as well as the 1983 film 'Trading Places'), as well as the racist great replacement theory. To be clear, this is the attitude that forms the basis for anti-DEI animus in the United States in 2025. The belief that women or people of color are being hired over more-qualified applicants comes from the belief that white men are inherently, genetically superior — anyone being hired over them can't have been hired on merit alone. With this approach now heading to NASA, down to erasing women from its website, we can only wait and see how it will affect our ability to go to space. It's certainly gone great for the air travel industry. h/t Gizmodo For the latest news, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
