Search results

10%? Shit, that's nothing. I've traded 100% of the daily volume! :) Martin

You guys think a 35-40% marginal tax burden on earned income is high? Compared to Europe? What a joke. Martin

That's not a surplus. A smaller deficit is still a deficit. A surplus is a negative deficit. Martin

It'd be fun to buy a round lot of BRK-A through a discount broker. An $8 million order for a $1 commission. Martin

Notebooks are an ergonomic nightmare. If you want to use a notebook to trade (without an external keyboard) make sure you have good disability insurance. Martin

Einstein supposedly called compound interest mankind's greatest mathematical discovery. I think one of the greatest strategic mistakes of many traders is the failure to compound their gains. If your risk controls are sound, compounding is the key to wealth. If your risk controls are inadequate...

No, it's not a matter of cost efficiency; it's a matter of energy efficiency as the original poster wrote. If ethanol production uses more energy than it produces, it does not do anything to make us more secure since it does not reduce our net energy requirements. Martin

I can't really argue the reusable vs. non-reusable case for launch vehicles. However, you should distinguish between critiquing the design of the space shuttle and critiquing the choice to build a space shuttle. You are really saying we should never have built a space shuttle at all, which is...

Yeah, but it might have raised some minor technical problems like how the shuttle main motors are going to work when they're pointing straight at their own fuel source. If you put the motors on the external tank it's not a space shuttle anymore, it's basically Saturn V. Martin

That's an interesting point. I have found EWMA to be useful and produce noticably better results than a simple moving average in some backtests, but I can't really justify it theoretically. Yeah, more or less. :) I think the basic idea is that you can always get more information about...

Open-high-low-close estimators converge faster and with a given amount of data tend to produce a more accurate result. If your strategy is sensitive to fast changes in volatility you might want to use a shorter window with one of these estimators. Similar logic applies for exponentially...

There are a variety of volatility estimators some of which perform better or converge faster than a simple standard deviation, and are included in Peter Hoadley's option tools: http://www.hoadley.net/options/develtoolsFAQs.htm#historicvolatility All except GARCH models are very easy to...

Sure. If I had to choose between one 20" 4:3 and one 23" widescreen, I'd take the widescreen. But if I'm spending my own money, I prefer a 4:3 monitor and if I need more real estate I'll buy another panel. That's another argument against widescreen: multiple widscreen panels are harder to fit on...

The 2005FPW is always cheaper than the 2001FP, although it is newer and has better specs. The 2001FP must be more expensive to manufacture, I can't think of any other reason for the price difference. The 2001FP has a mild screendoor effect (pixel coverage is lower than 1905FP and 2005FPW). It...

This is an extremely well studied problem. You can go back to Markowitz' original 1952 paper, if you want, it's moderately readable. You can also look in any financial economics text. For that matter, here's a reasonable overview in Wikipedia...

So on the one hand the Saudis are running out of oil and hiding it from the market, on the other hand they are responsible for inflating prices? Maybe your two sources, al-Husseini and Yamani, should sit down and have a chat. Martin

If you read the article, he's skeptical that the Saudis can sustain a production increase of more than 50% in less than a decade. That has nothing to do with a production peak, it is just an unsustainable rate of supply generation. Martin

It is, to me, completely implausible that the Saudis would be hiding a desperate shortage of oil reserves. That basically would mean that they are intentionally deceiving the market so that they can sell oil at far below its fair price. What possible reason could they have to be doing that...

Demand is increasing every year. Long before the Saudis reach peak production, their production will fall short of new demand. This has already happened for light crude, and the Saudis have warned that they will be unable to meet world demand in 10 or 15 years even with heavy crude...

The same observation has been made about new converts to other religions. Newfound faith seems to lend itself to fanaticism. Martin