About

Long ago, in an era almost lost in the mists of time, there was an Equities analyst who produced twice-daily strident musings on any market that took his fancy.

Sometimes he was right, and sometimes he was wrong – but he was never 'on the fence'. On balance, they say, he was right significantly more often than he was wrong.

As a Funds analyst, he had been the bane of the 'BDM' (which supposedly stands for 'business development manager', but actually stands for 'brochure delivery man'). He was prone to enjoy the fund manager's hospitality – especially any white wine on offer – and then give the manager's research liaison a hard time.

After several years in an institution (the Centre of Policy Studies at Monash University), this analyst had been loosed on an unsuspecting investment community, armed with fearsome numeracy and a lexicon that made copious use of the vernacular.

This analyst escaped into the wild in 2002 and started eating his own kills – trading his own hook and babbling away in e-mails to a widening group of former clients.

With the advent of 'blogging', this e-mail list ("GT's Daily Rants") congealed into a blob of bloggy material known as GT's Market Rant - a misnomer considering GT's tendency to go off on tangents ranging from geopolitics to how to build a shack.

Our Beloved GT tired of simple vanity-publishing in 2006 and decided to build an equities analysis platform – the latest iteration of which is the subscription area of this very site.

As to why the site might be called "MarketMentat" – well, there are two answers.

First: why not? Why "Yahoo!"? Why "Google"? Why "Twitter"? Why "Worldwide Pants"?

Second: in Frank Herbert's Dune, a mentat is a human thinking machine: a sort of polymath whose prowess and training is augmented by sapho juice. You do the (poly)math.

Note – sapho juice has nothing to do with Sappho, the Lesbian poetess who, while certainly Lesbian, may not have been lesbian.

And "Worldwide Pants" is David Letterman's production company.