A lot of people are wondering why Icap, the world's largest inter-dealer broker, is doing so well at the present time when so many financial businesses are in the shit - due to the credit crunch. But Icap's chief operating officer, Mark Yallop, has an explanation. He says it is all down to 'pure uncorrelated alpha'. Now, some of you no doubt believe that Mr Yallop is talking 'pure uncorrelated nonsense'. Well, you're wrong.
There is such a thing as the alpha spirit. The alpha spirit soars above the petty, everyday concerns of your average joe and lives and breathes in a world of its own making. Mark and his colleagues at Icap have this spirit. They have created their own reality. As the great German mystic Jacob Boehme once wrote: 'Thus the compunction willeth upwards, and whirls crossways, and yet cannot effect it, for the hardness, viz. the desire stays and detains it, and therefore it stands like a triangle, and transverted orb, which (seeing it cannot remove from the place) becomes wheeling, whence arises the mixture in the desire, viz. the essence, or multiplicity of the desire; for the turning makes a continual confusion and contrition, whence the anguish, viz. the pain, the third form (or string of sense) arises.'
I think that says it all really.
