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    Mortgage Rates- holy sh@t

    You guys have it all wrong. You WANT to buy when interest rates are HIGH not when they are low. I know this seems counter-intuitive but house prices are based on the ability to pay. If you buy a 400K house at 6% with monthly payments of 3k (just picking numbers) and interest rates go to...
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    Buy SKF or not ?

    SKF actually made a pretty good move in the last couple of hours but you shouldn't expect it to track the DOW...since it doesn't. It seems that there is support around 117 so hopefully it won't break below that. In the long run I'm bullish for SKF but you have to have balls of steel to...
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    Is this where all the money is coming from?

    What's to stop the banks from rotating the loans indefinitely? They can pay the monthly interest as long as they can put the borrowed money to work immediately.
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    Is this where all the money is coming from?

    You're right and I'm not even new to this topic. I guess even after all the talk I hadn't realized that the give away is already at least a trillion and headed towards multiple trillions. These amounts are staggering and they impact the deflation vs. inflation argument (of course).
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    Is this where all the money is coming from?

    http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aXgyCIKKp6zQ&refer=home "Banks' borrowing at the rate climbed to a daily average of $13.9 billion in the week ended July 16 from $7.84 billion three months earlier." So currently banks are borrowing about $417 billion per month from the...
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    Getting Started with Automated Trading

    C++ (and C) are much faster than Java/c#/python/perl/etc. in any significant application. To say otherwise just shows a lack of experience. I've used them all in programs from 10k lines to 2 million+ lines. I've seen java take down otherwise good technical companies (application would not run...
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    Why not switch to AUD?

    Yeah...sounds like solid advice but still you haven't said what the risk is. Except for the currency value going the wrong way (which happens slowly) what risk is there? I'm not talking about gearing up through futures contracts, just plain vanilla exchange. So if AUD devalues 5% against...
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    Why not switch to AUD?

    That's true, but if IB (for example) through its partner banks suddenly paid 7% on USD and 1% on AUD I could just convert the money back (with the loss of the conversion cost). Of course this flip-flop would imply that the dollar is strengthening against AUD which would cause an exchange...
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    Why not switch to AUD?

    Yeah, it's all speculation but isn't that what we do here? :) But as you can tell I don't know enough about currency trading to just throw all my cash in. Timbo, do rate differentials flip quickly or do they tend to change slowly (over months or years)? I would expect them to move...
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    Why not switch to AUD?

    I agree that some commodities are over priced but I don't think that they are radically overpriced. For example, oil is probably a little overpriced, but I doubt that it ever goes below $100 again (especially against the USD). China (and the others) are growing at a rate that should keep heavy...
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    Why not switch to AUD?

    I'm curious about switching my USD to AUD and was wondering if anyone had any insight into the issue beyond what 'seems' to be obvious. (The conversion would likely go through IDEALPRO via IB and is not leveraged.) Obviously AUD offers a much better interest rate and I don't see the dollar...
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    Algo traders; How do you describe what you do to friends?

    For friends or chatting with guys 'investor' is plenty unless they want to know more. For women 'racecar driver' or 'brain surgeon' depending on the response you're looking for. Why would you feel the need to nerd out about boring computer stuff?
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    Social Security: How can it ever get exhausted??

    Yeah, the Republicans don't even attempt to hide the fact that they work day and night to maintain their power and wealth. The democrats have nobler intentions but are too dumb to realize that their efforts are destructive too. At the end of the day, the productive among us are the ones...
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    Social Security: How can it ever get exhausted??

    gnome, Capitalism is not fair. Nobody in their right mind would agree to it given its winner-take-all bias. In spite of its problems though, capitalism rewards productivity which is why we put up with it. It might be the least unfair system of all the unfair systems...
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    Highly Recommended Q6600 based custom build

    Building your own can't possibly be worth your time if you make anywhere near a good income. Four hours of fooling around with hardware = $500-$1000 added cost. There might be an exception when building an ultra high-end machine because the builders charge a big premium on that side. But...
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    Are The Banks Broke?

    Hydroblunt, Well I think we agree in principal. I was merely pointing out that free markets can support 'investment banks'. You can call it a 'mutual fund' if you want instead. But there's not much point in disagreeing on semantics when we probably both agree that a government mandated...
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    Are The Banks Broke?

    I think most of us here on ET know how a fractional reserve bank works. The problem is not 'fractional reserve' as even private banks based on the gold standard could be 'fractional reserve' in return for interest on deposits. The depositors then understanding that there is risk involved in...
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    Are The Banks Broke?

    Yes they are broke. But the Fed has "turned on the presses" in order to save the banks. Bernanke was smart enough to realize that lowering the fed funds rate was not going to be enough to recapitalize the banks. He also didn't want to appear to not care about the $ and inflation. So...
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    Problems shorting through IB?

    You can add a field to the layout that shows whether a stock is shortable or not. Today everything I was watching was shortable except for HOV. LEH was limited shortable I believe.
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    Dell T3400.. Do You Have DDR2-800 Memory?

    That looks correct. There are two timings available (I guess this is in the bios) and you are using the 400Mhz timing. With DDR2 you need 2 matched DIMMs to get the double-data rate of 800Mhz. If you have 2 DIMMs you should make sure they are in the right slots. They should go in slots 1...
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