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Is it just me, or the list of speakers the strangest I have seen for an automated trading conference? No CME? As far as I know, at least two of the participants run no automated trading systems. It just seems bizarre to me.

Refco (the parent holding company) has around $1.2B in debt, of which I believe around 600M is senior sub-ordinated. Details are still sketchy as to what JC Flowers bought, whether they would assume partial debt, or cash, etc. Before anyone says "this deal has to include the $750M in cash", it...

Retail, correct, but for a number of US firms that trades KOSPI today, they do it through off-shore entities. KOSPI volatility actually decreased from the high around 14-18 months ago.

General purpose computation may or may not be faster in the GPU than CPU, depend on the application. I wrote a set of large-number library that was slower on a GPU (I used a Radeon 9600 pro) than the Xeon 3.2, but not by much (20-25% or so). GPGPU has some good code snippets (I believe FFT...

Let's put all these talk about Chinese economic structure aside (while it is intellectually interesting, I won't make any money writing B grade Chinese history papers), and get to the trading discussions. Geowalker, what kind of market do you trade? What kind of system (discretionary, trend...

Thanks so much for the correction, my memory is clearly a bit wacky.

Disclaimer, while I have been a student of China with particular attention to economy for quite some time now (over a decade), my understand is still flawed / coloured by what western historians wrote, native Chinese with a much more accurate information please feel free to correct me. From I...

There are two kinds of reports, one is the standard CBOE (forgot the name) greek report (I remember what the report is, but no idea what the name is anymore), I doubt anyone still is using it to trae. Another is a personalized option theoretical price report that a system like MicroHedge or a...

It is not true that foreigners can not bring profits back to the US (or any western countries for that matter). There are plenty of foreign banks in China, foreigners are free to open accounts in any of them in any currency domination, and then wire transfer the balance. Chinese nationals are...

The Hong Kong property laws stipulate a 99 year lease on the land, the Chinese property laws is a 70 (or 75?) year lease.

I have a doctorate, but not in finance, so maybe I am biased here. First of all, MBA and PhD are substantially different degrees, even if one does not plan on a career in finance. MBA, IMO, is a professional degree, it teachs the basics of business analysis and management. In finance, MBAs...

For most of the week, I thought that TH Lee would want to pump capital into Refco and try to put the firm onto firm grounds and then selling assets for better value than the confusion and negative publicity for the last few days. However, if the news reports that the regulators are talking to...

That is completely different, IPO underwriters have fiduciary responsibility to ensure that the information presented accurated to the public markets, the private equity firms does not have that responsibility. Problem with whomever buys Refco at this moment is that they will also take over...

I agree that the original REF & Co. was a good firm, and the core of that futures business is still very good. Hindsight is 20/20, I would say, but the original Refco became a spring board for Bennett, which used the Refco brand name to go on a bit of an acquisition spree (Lind-Waldock, CIS...

I am Canadian, born and bred, so now here in US, I am completely indistinguishable from your average American. The girl didn't work out because her parents believe she should marry a traditional Chinese, but I forced myself to learn Chinese for over year to meet her parents. Since then I have...

Thanks for the information. I can read and speak a little Mandarin (I almost married a Chinese woman a few years back). I thought financial futures (specifically equity futures) is a certainty for SHFE? I am referring to this announcement from SHFE...

According to the news sources and press release on Monday when the Refco problem first become news, it seems that Refco discovered the problem itself, through an "internal review". Now, it is consistent with TH Lee's philosophy of disclosure, a lesser firm would have tried to coverup (i.e...

Now, I know I am with the minority of hedge fund industry here, but bear with me. I have been on both sides, with a few hedge funds and one fairly big prime broker. It is very easy to commit hedge fund fraud, it is substantially easier for a hedge fund to fake a set of results than a...

It is already happening, a lot of the institutional investors (pension funds, endowments, etc) already negotiate for a lower management fee, I have seen 0.5 / 10 quite a few times over the last year or so on large allocations (usually $100M+).

By the way, thanks for posting the memo. It has been sometime since I was on the sell side, when my inbox used to flooded daily by the announcements from CME CC / DTC / NSCC / FICC / LCH / TCC. Now I flipped over to the trading side, I am usually too lazy or too tired from a day of trading to...