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Since the beginning of this year, the Financial Times has been all over the case of oil. Its January 5 headline warned: Oil price ‘enters danger zone’ ‘Enters a danger zone’ was in quotes because it came from the chief economist of the “International Energy Agency” who told the FT that “the oil import bills …
Time Preference, Kim Kardashian, Quantitative Easing, Good Black Swan – 2 of 2 Read More »
After Black Monday on October 87, there were loud and bitter complaints about the chaos which had prevailed throughout the day at the exchanges. The problems were especially glaring in Nasdaq, which mostly catered to retail investors. Many sell orders there were never acknowledged much less executed. The chorus of drawn out criticism forced the …
High Frequency Trading and Flash Crash – 4: How the Pieces Fell Into Place Read More »
Nathan Rothschild, head of the family’s London branch, had an agent in the Battle of Waterloo. Upon seeing that the tide of the war was turning against Napoleon, the agent rode to nearby Brussels and hired a sailor for the unheard sum of 2000 francs to take him across a stormy Channel to England and …
High Frequency Trading and Flash Crash – 3: How the Die Was Cast Read More »
I sat down this morning to write the second and final part of HFT. I knew how the piece was going to end. It would end on a note of uncertainty and low-grade despair, that “nothing to be done” condition familiar to Beckett readers. But the dialectics of finance is precisely about going beyond the …
High Frequency Trading and Flash Crash – 2: A Philosophical Prelude to Part 3 Read More »
Today’s American Banker had an article titled What YouTube Teaches Banks About Customer Experience. I do not know what YouTube teaches banks about customer experience. But I know what the iPhone and iPad have taught swindlers – hence the connection between the business and crime. Apple’s business model is to provide cheap apps to a …
During his recent trip to India, President Obama said that India “it not simply emerging. Indian has emerged”. I concur in principle. But I am not the president of the United States and my assertions will not be accepted as proof. So, I am writing a short essay to explain my concurrence. In the simple …
Using footnotes in blogs is awkward. It forces the reader to switch back and forth between the main text and footnote, an extra step that disrupts reading. Hypertext suffers from the same drawback. In a printed page, the matter is easier, but only if the footnote is at the bottom of the page. With a …
The depth, sophistication and musicality of Persian poetry is unmatched in any other language. Many of the great Iranian poets were believed in their time to have divine inspirations, so perfect is the fusion of form and content in their poems. And then there was the legendary spontaneity. A popular form of entertainment in the …
Time Preference, Kim Kardashian, Quantitative Easing, Good Black Swan – 1 of 2 Read More »
The ignorant, pompous academics who created “Continuous-time Finance” — ignorant because they were pompous, pompous because they were ignorant — considered it the crown jewel of their intellectual achievements. Happy were those years of success in the limelight, with this one nominating that one for the Nobel Prize who then turned around and nominated this …
High Frequency Trading and Flash Crash – 1: The Ones Who Saw It Coming Read More »
In an ideal world, I would not have bothered with this year’s three Nobel Prize winners in economics; they would not have merited a mention. But this is not an ideal world. According to the New York Times, three men won the Nobel Prize in economics for their work on “markets where buyers and sellers …