Search results

OldTrader, I'll happily stipulate all of that but it still doesn't explain the divergence between rents and asset prices. All the factors you cite were just as true in 2000 as they are today. Yet, in the San Francisco Bay Area, rents have dropped ~30% and house prices have risen ~30% since...

OK. I don't have an account with them, I was reporting what I had heard. In any case, the point is that they do not prevent you from trading with unsettled funds in a cash account. That contradicts BrownCo's claim of new stricter Reg T guidelines. Martin

You got this from an email from BrownCo, right? This is a blatant lie. If you email them back and call them on their bullshit, they will sheepishly admit that the Fed did no such thing, Reg T policy is unchanged, and they are changing their own house policy only because their software isn't...

If people were reacting properly, how would that explain the divergence between rent and asset prices. Martin

America does have a real estate bubble. It can be found in Florida, California, Nevada, Arizona, New York, etc. Nobody is saying that every house in America is overpriced. Martin

Not where I live. I doubt if there is a single house for sale in the entire San Francisco Bay Area which could be purchased and rented profitably in today's market. Martin

Trend trading is inherently technical and short term. Staley's book is about finding flawed companies primarily through fundamental analysis.

The Art of Short Selling by Kathryn Staley is a good read if you're interested in a fundamental approach to short selling, finding companies with serious flaws so you can sell them short all the way down. It's pretty much useless for trend followers or day traders, though. Martin

You can. Enroll. :) Lots of business schools have CRSP licenses. Martin

Mergent is $32k. They have both adjusted and unadjusted data as well as a corporate events database. They are largely survivorship bias free. I believe that CRSP provides a similar database for less money, but not a lot less. Martin

Are you sure your app is CPU limited? Have you measured the CPU load? It seems to me like a slam dunk that this is going to be massively IO bound. Just doing inserts of small rows into a SQL database, a Pentium 3 should be able to keep up with a large RAID array. I agree with originalskunk, a...

Wrong. Berkshire's gains on foriegn currency forward contracts (pretax, millions): 2005Q1: -310 2004: 1,839 2003: 825 2002: 297 So a completely legal and legitimate hedging transaction should attract attention from regulators, but only in quarters where it happens to be...

An investor is concerned with gaining wealth, not dollars. For example, you would not want a company to invest cash in such a way that increased your dollar wealth while falling behind inflation, any more than you would want to increase dollar wealth while falling behind the buying power of the...

Why not? He's holding a great deal of cash. It would be stupid not to diversify those cash holdings, especially if you feel that the currency you are holding is vulnerable. That is hardly a speculative position; it is basic investment risk management. And that is exactly the rationale that...

Are you saying that hedging your currency exposure is unpatriotic? Martin

The attitude between day traders and economists is one of mutual antipathy. It's a real shame. I think the reason that physicists and applied mathematicians are in high demand from investment banks and hedge funds is that they have no stake in this pissing match. Most daytraders have a...

First lesson: take responsibility for your mistakes. Your first post was arrogant, hostile, and insulting. So people insulted you back. You came back with a different approach and people (sometimes the same people) were a lot nicer. Yet you do not seem to have learned that your own attitude...

Yeah. :) I've discussed this topic a lot at the Motley Fool board I just mentioned, and they really do try to backtest strategies that trade only once a year for tax reasons (although they enter more than one position). Martin

I think Harding picked the wrong parameter to worry about. Over in the Mechanical Investing group at Motley Fool, people have consistently found that backtested returns do not materialize in practice, whereas backtested standard deviations are very predictive of future standard deviations...

Of course the number of trades is important. Once again it is a matter of statistical validity. If a system gives you one entry a year which you hold for a full year, and at the end of the year you are ahead of the market, you literally cannot draw any statistically valid conclusion about your...