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True for sponsored links, not true for AdWords. Incidentally, further evidence that Google's brand is not necessarily durable: they didn't pay anything for it. Google has done virtually no advertising. It is a brand that established itself based almost entirely on word of mouth. All they...

You're welcome. :) Martin

I remeber when search=lycos. I remember when search=altavista. If you think Google is unassailable, you weren't around when Alta Vista took over search mindshare almost overnight. With that said: Personally I think both are valuble. And along with the cash, the people, the growth potential...

I wonder where he got the confidence to estimate Sun, Oracle, and Cisco far below market value. Must have been some other kind of bias. This is of course due to your adaptability inversion covariance bias, so having pigeonholed it I can dismiss it. Well obviously I did, since you thought...

When Hussman wrote that article, Goog had about $12/share in cash. Since then, they did exactly as he suggested, increasing their value by cashing in on their inflated currency (stock). The only way Google's secondary offering makes any sense at all is if their executives also believe that...

I don't think so. If you read the article, his estimate for Google is not predicated on what happened to Oracle, Cisco, Sun, etc. Personally though, I am more comfortable with Aswath Damodaran's valuation at $110 per share...

And why do they get that cut? Because they advertise the product. They are an advertising company. In any case, your assertion is wrong. If Google ever starts filtering its core search results based on sponsorship, they will quickly fall from grace among users. So no, they will not...

Warren Buffett's answer: "I bet we all in this room live about the same. We eat about the same and sleep about the same. We pretty much drive a car for 10 years. All this stuff doesn't make it any different. I will watch the Super Bowl on a big screen television just like you. We are living...

Hi Grob, Your only substantive critique as far as I can tell is that I answered a different question than malaka asked. That's strange to me given that the title of the thread is: "why do funds perform so poorly?" And my paraphrase of his post: "malaka56 asks, in essence, why can't...

That's precisely what I'm talking about. Martin

Condescend all you want after you've pointed out the flaw in my argument. :) Martin

My point has absolutely nothing to do with efficient markets or any other academic constructions beyond basic arithmetic. It holds even in wildly inefficient market. Go back, read it again, maybe you'll understand. *shrug* If that's all you're saying, who can argue with that? Martin

I'm not defending individual investors here. I make a good living off dumb investors and their dumb money. However, if you think (as malaka and blunt seem to) that institutional investors earning a mere 12% are the dumb money then you don't understand the markets. "Here's some numbers I...

Thought? I'm regurgitating basic financial economics. This stuff is 40 years old. What makes me think twice is that you don't even recognize it. http://www.stanford.edu/~wfsharpe/art/active/active.htm Martin

Bullshit. Talk about dumb; I can't believe on a message board of so called "Elite Traders" nobody knows even the most basic financial economics. malaka56 asks, in essence, why can't all institutional investors earn fantastic market beating returns. The reason is because it is impossible. For...

I'm tempted to just let that go but... no. It was not a matter of familiarization. Pytables was and still is inadequate for my needs. Incidentally, the straw that broke the camel's back, it was highly space inefficient. An EArray based HDF5 representation of my data was far, far larger...

IIRC deleting or inserting into a table was problematic. I also found that reading in a table was rather inefficient, IIRC each row was a dict? I don't remember the details. I haven't tried any more recent version. pickle can marshal just about any data structure you can use in Python. I...

I have "Python in a Nutshell" also by Alex Martelli and have found that it is all I need. On the advice here, though, I'll have to check out the Python Cookbook. On the topic of relational databases, I think they have their place. They are good for storing stock metadata and providing data...

Why are we even talking about <i>public</i> hedge fund managers? It's a virtually nonexistent category with good reason. A hedge fund management company is a lucrative business with almost zero capital requirements. What incentive would such a business have to trade ownership for capital...

Presumably "they" don't. This is just like nondeliverable currency futures. Settlement will be in cash based on the index price. Anyone taking the long side is going to be rather exposed. As a result I expect these will trade at a large discount. Regardless of the sentiment of the market...