Generally speaking, people who talk to strangers are fucking nuts and I make great efforts to avoid them at all costs. More often than not, they either want something from you, are simply lunatics, or have something to sell you in some way, shape, or form. Being a man of diplomacy, I choose to take […]
Being a man of the markets, I took particular interest to the business of falconry, a trade unique to Qatar that dates back centuries. In the past, falconry was serious business, as families and villages often times relied on falcons to hunt for them and bring them food. Training them requires skill, and a special type […]
When a lot of people think of the Middle East, they think danger – never-ending wars and fueled by greed and corruption. This concept is buttressed and aggrandized by media, particularly North American media, who report nothing other than terrorism and political chicanery coming out of the Arab region. This is one of the reasons […]
I am writing this from the most Arabic of Arabic rooms in all of Arabia. The walls are built from carefully crafted limestone and the plates on the table in front of me are filled with hummus and ghanoush. You may find that difficult to believe, especially after looking at the above picture. But what […]
I cashed out of my lotto play, selling HMNY for a shitty 12% gain. She is a bastard of a stock and will burn you if you’re not careful. Just 2 days ago, I was the king of the jungle, sitting on 50% gains, eating candy coated bananas without a care in the world while bitch-slapping the other […]
It was January, 2015, and had I decided to relocate from Bangkok to Japan, with no particular plan in mind. I was invited by an old friend, a university professor in Hokkaido at the time, and also a gigantic cocksucker (more on that later), to help establish a consulting practice in Hokkaido where we would […]
I woke up today to my lotto stock up 47%, on news they are raising $100 million to increase their stake in Movie Pass, a subscriber based platform aimed at movie-goers that has gone from 20,000 users to 600,000+ in the past 2 months. To be honest, the news it was up on is irrelevant, […]
When I first lived in Thailand, many years ago, the first job I had was selling offshore financial services to Japanese expatriates living in Bangkok. My time was mainly spent mingling with the Japanese community, which happens to be an especially cliquey one. Expats are sent by their companies to work in Thailand, generally stationed […]
Earlier this year, I received an unsolicited message from an old high school friend whom I hadn’t spoken to in a decade, completely out of the blue, asking me what would be a hot ‘weed’ stock to buy. I assumed that he was probably smoking that stuff at the time he sent me that message, […]
As we all know, currency dealers, in general, are filled with nothing but malevolence and will stop at nothing to take as much as possible from you when you try to transfer funds. They employ monumental amounts of chicanery to achieve this, including egregiously and insidiously priced exchange rate spreads, and are able to catch you off guard, […]