Month: July 2009

HFT

These systems are so fast they can outsmart or outrun other investors, humans and computers alike.

why is the nyt so hopelessly naive? it is quite embarrassing.

“There’s this whole world below 650 milliseconds. It’s like landing on another planet. It’s an enormous part of the market which is out of human reach. We have a glimpse of the kind of ecology that’s going on down there.”

shades of the mundane singularity. the goal of these clowns is to create arbitrage opportunities by spamming the system with requests.

A single mysterious computer program that placed orders — and then subsequently canceled them — made up 4% of all quote traffic in the US stock market last week.

the reason HFT compete on latency is because they can’t compete on price: the minimal price increment is $0.01 and it is illegal to go lower. thus we waste a lot of people on reducing latencies. we should remove the minimal price increment instead.
2013-06-04: Why is there all this bs with “business days” when you do any bank transactions? Are the computers only working 9-5? Why is it 2013 and we still acquiesce to ridiculous notions like bank transactions that take days instead of seconds? The banksters know how to do it for their HFT buddies but not for the real economy?

Hard Times at Harvard

Only 1 year ago, Harvard had a $36.9b endowment, the largest in academia. Now that endowment has imploded, and the university faces the worst financial crisis in its 373-year history. Could the same lethal mix of uncurbed expansion, colossal debt, arrogance, and mismanagement that ravaged Wall Street bring down America’s most famous university? And how much of the turmoil is the fault of former Harvard president Larry Summers, now a top economic adviser to President Obama? As students demonstrate, administrators impose Draconian cuts, and construction is halted on an over-ambitious $1.2b science complex, the author follows the finger-pointing.

harvard is so fucked

What Makes Us Happy?

For 75 years, in one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history, researchers have been following 268 men through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age.
Men who had “warm” childhood relationships with their mothers earned an average of $87K more a year than men whose mothers were uncaring.
Men who had poor childhood relationships with their mothers were much more likely to develop dementia when old.
Late in their professional lives, the men’s boyhood relationships with their mothers—but not with their fathers—were associated with effectiveness at work.
On the other hand, warm childhood relations with fathers correlated with lower rates of adult anxiety, greater enjoyment of vacations, and increased “life satisfaction” at age 75—whereas the warmth of childhood relationships with mothers had no significant bearing on life satisfaction at 75.

Vaillant’s key takeaway, in his own words: “The 75 years and 20y million $ expended on the Grant Study points … to a straightforward 5-word conclusion: ‘Happiness is love. Full stop.’ ”