BLUELITHIUM

[ID: an illustration of rainbow wolves running to the left. end.]

A colorful, frolicking wolf pack.

The Nightwatcher

Washing away a stain

While washing a thin-layer chromatography plate, Ioan Fuller saw this vibrant blue develop when water hit the plate’s stained silica. Fuller, a PhD student at the University of Otago, had stained the plate with a molybdenum-containing dye so that he could see the various phospholipids in a sample from types of shellfish used in kaimoana, traditional New Zealand seafood. During the experiment, just a few phospholipid spots were blue, but as Fuller washed the plate off so that he could reuse it, the water reacted with the leftover dye on the plate and created this expanse of blue. This design is about 5 cm on a side. — Manny I. Fox Morone

Submitted by Ioan Fuller

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It’s hard to time markets

Make no mistake, it’s hard to time when to enter and exit markets. Financial markets are made up of a host of different investors. There are large institutions, such as fund managers, as well as companies, brokers and individual investors. Over the long-term, markets can do well but in the short term, prices fluctuate on the basis of fundamental news, market sentiment, expectations, and rumour and competitor activity.

Sometimes the ‘herd’ mentality can set in. When the news about a particular stock is good, investors buy in. Even though the price keeps rising, buyers keep buying, as nobody is sure when the price has peaked. Similarly, when prices are falling, nervous investors sell in an attempt to cut their losses.

There are statistical measures and yardsticks, such as price-earning ratios, which help determine the true value of a stock or bond, but as the boom and bust in Internet stocks has proven, rational measures are often ignored and sentiment can take over. Deciding when to invest in this environment can be a stressful task. If the market is doing well you may fear that you’re buying when prices are too high. By contrast, when the market is falling, there is a reluctance to invest due to fears that it may fall further. So what should an investor do to avoid having to make these timing decisions?

Why investing regularly works?