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OK - how about a contrarian location. After new tax regs, Libya has 1) EU time zones 2) 10% personal income tax 3) 5 year tax holidays for business profits (does trading qualify?) 4) govt interest in developing finance sector 5) external debt of $7b vs GDP of $100b 6) govt revenue =...

I've just started using the accumlate/distribute algos in IB to handle some of my execution in the TF & ES contract and have noted that they give me a rebate of some sort for that - it shows up as a deposit in my daily statements. Does anyone know where that rebate is coming from? I must be...

As you know, many political entrepreneurs have successfully won free elections that they then proceeded to convert into dictatorships, so democracy per se is no talisman. Most people can be very successfully manipulated in the short run (and some people can be successfully manipulated in the...

I think you are asking one central question, which is why so many human beings embrace certain beliefs without subjecting them to a logical test or an evidence test. I think the answer is efficiency. The human race is wired for most people to just accept what is popular without rigourous...

The main application of fractals to markets that I'm aware of is the claim that markets are scale invariant - which is to say you can't tell a weekly chart from a monthly chart or a 10 minute chart. This claim is useful because it gives an intellectual justification as to why you can try to...

I think naked short selling of equities could lead to some problems - it's got to do with the value of the business versus the outstanding short interest. If we allow the latter to be unbounded, it's clear at some point it's in someone's interest to hurt the business. But this is mostly a...

I am a self-identified libertarian, but I am wary about the limits of implementing a libertarian state. I haven't thought through this entirely, but I guess one reason why a libertarian state won't be coming to us in the near future is because of defence. Assume you get the land, forget...

It's probably an emini fat finger. A bad print on a stock is unlikely to drag the S&P 500, EURUSD, 10yr into a spike no matter how big. This kind of financial space-time distortion is the work of macro instruments gone wild. I added up all the "excess over normal" volume in the minutes...

Somewhat surprised this hasn't hit ET yet. Goes to show how looney tunes some people can get. http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?178510-Liberal-Activist-Goes-to-Haiti-Gets-Raped-Blames-White-Men ... with commentary

If you assume that you want to fund a standard of living that you've cost out at $50,000 a year in present value terms for the next 30 years, how much do you need? There are many ways to approach this calculation, and I am curious as to what people think. One popular way is to take the...

Being a major world financial centre has nothing to do with 1) the language spoken 2) the coolness of the people 3) the freedom of the govt 4) the way they treat their handicapped 5) the number of cable tv channels 6) the hotness of their women 7) the quality of their plumbing and mass...

You got to be a little clearer when you say something like "Life in India is so much worse than life in the US" Life for whom? For the guy at the bottom rung of society, born into poverty, no connections, yes - life is arguably shittier in India from several perspectives : social mobility...

The fragmentation and idiosyncratic rules in equities are meat and drink to prop shops, locals and the entire ecology of people feeding at the trough of opacity and unnecessary messiness. The messiness is mostly inherited from the days of open outcry, but there is no reason why trading in a...

If you are making money solely from your own capital, you'll likely be as stingy as scrooge. The living large aspect is mostly for those who make money from attracting other people's money to manage. The flash is to reel in the large number of idiotic people who confuse ability with a good...

Tiger took his uncanny ability to send a little white ball into a hole and added a wholesome role model image to it, in order to help vendors sell billions of dollars worth of sweet drinks and sneakers. The vendors realized that Tiger's proven athletic ability would cause millions of people...

It's not complicated. Gold goes up (against your currency of choice) and gold goes down. Up, down, up down, roughly maintaining its purchasing power but it doesn't go to zero. Everything else can go to zero. Equities, bonds, the dollar, real estate, sports cars - you name it. It's the...

And dont' forget electric planes http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/2008-12/silent-electric-plane Leading powerplants are being designed and made by the Chinese.

Yes - I think what really sucks actually is the computational power. Excel is not very efficient at dealing with large datasets. Graphing has never been a strong point with Excel, but I find it adequate.

This crisis has complex origins, but the basic things that made it so severe were Problems: 1) The ability of banks to place liabilities off-balance sheet to get more p&l from the same balance sheet, skirting reg cap issues. This is basically overleverage. 2) The false belief that...

Always read the prospectus. It's hard work, but thanks to the litigious society we have, everything is usually in there. To get anything more, you usually have to perform even harder work or have privileged access. ETF creation is *completely different* from a normal capital markets...