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Looks like the volume of the pit traded contract. Most sp trading moved to emini on globex.

I agree with what you are saying. I was only pointing out that if your risk taking activities in the market are economically rewarded, and the pot of money to be gained is of significance, you will compete for it with battle hardened veterans.

The irony is that to win as a retail trader you need to be better than the majority of professionals.

John, Jan and Jiang each have a cake. I am taking turns eating their cakes. They seem to think this is a contest among them, the winner being the one with the least cake left on his plate.

Reading threads like this reminds me that it is difficult to get someone to understand something if his paycheck depends on him not understanding it. Rather than talk about the inflation/deflation equine carcass, it would be more enlightning to talk about what is money/credit, how it is created...

It's a simple case of people reacting to incentives. If you have the choice to finance a business by borrowing money below the rate of inflation or selling equity in the business, what would you choose?

VXX bleeds money because it is riding down the VIX curve, and because locals can see the rolls comming from a mile away. I tried shorting it a few years back but the cost to borrow the ETN wiped out any profits I made. It looks like only the issuer can capitalize on its flawed design. Some...

I see three kinds of news. The first kind is noise. The reporter conjures up some reason for what happened. Ignore this. The second kind is real. This is new information not yet priced in. If you are fast and understand what it means you can profit from it. The third kind is...

This is a very good question. Ignoring it is not seeing the forest for the trees.

You are asking yourself a question I have also asked myself many times. Is this the drawdown that ends it all or just another run of the mill drawdown. Even when you carefully avoid look ahead, suvivorship, data mining or the other miriad research biases you can delude youself with to create...

Makes sense. Thank you for your thoughts.

They just floated a bunch of stock at 27. Do you think the underwriters will have a stabilizing bid around that price?

The probability distribution of the outcomes is positively skewed. You are looking at the median outcome which is below the average outcome.

William Manchester wrote in the Last Lion: "University of Chicago and the University of Minnesota have found that teachers smile on children with high IQs and frown upon those with creative minds. Intelligent but uncreative students accept conformity, never rebel, and complete their assignments...

Before turning over to the dark side, Greenspan had some candid thoughts on this. Google "Gold and Economic Freedom".

Good point. While mother nature deals good or bad cards seemingly at random, it is excusable to expect some kind of reason when rewards and punishments are handed out by men. Perhaps having a cat (or bond, or whatever) is as good a reason as any.

You raise some valid concerns. But you are ok with rewarding cat owners while sadling the other catless unfortunate souls with higher costs for everything under the sun.

Perhaps some outside the box thinking is needed. There are more japanese families owning cats than JGBs. A great way to stimulate the economy would be for the BOJ to initiate a cat quantitative easing program. The BOJ should conduct weekly auctions were they could bid for existing cats. They...

Central banks, sovereign wealth funds and public pension plans control 29T or 40% of the world economy today. If you think this fire power is wielded based on economics and not politics you may be kidding yourself. It looks like the tree was cut in 2008 but it fell on the wrong side of the fence.

When holding equities longer than a day, the close is a better liquidity point than the open. It is harder for conflicted intermediaries to play muppet unfriendly games with the close. Doing so exposes them to overnight inventory risk. Also the settlement process requires real cash to...