I like the juxtaposition of the linked pieces, and eagerly anticipate a future in which electronic stock trading is controlled by cats playing iPad apps.
Is it cheap to laugh at this sentence:
A fit, blue-eyed Wall Street veteran, who wears the monogram "W O'B" on his purple shirt cuff . . .
I am reminded of a Doonesbury cartoon from 1970.
This has the text of the comic that I was thinking of. It looks like the archives are no longer behind a paywall, so if I could just find the date I could link the original strip.
Mr. Taylor, the husband of Mrs. Charles Taylor, and still a svelte, firm 30-32-30, turned more than one head with his sheer, skin-tight socks. Chuck, a special assistant, is a former brunette.
Awesome:
If your cat is pouncing on the first level, it is quite possible that it can buy the upgraded version without your knowing it because an iTunes password is not always needed to make an in-app purchase.
"We think it's a first in competitive video gaming for animals," [the Games for Cats developer] said.
At least he didn't say that it was a first in "the competitive gaming space."
This is so profoundly depressing.
"People are going over the lake and through the church, whatever it takes," he says. "It is very important for these algorithmic traders to have the most advanced technology."
No. It is not important in any way for algorithmic traders to have anything. How could you even imagine that that's true?
Now, it's important to THEM, I guess. But they didn't exist four or five years ago, so I think the billion-dollar infrastructure projects could be better used on human beings, or other biological organisms.
Is "over the lake and through the church" an idiom anyone's familiar with? It sounds like he's going to Grandmother's house.
Fun fact: Games for Cats is also a huge hit with the toddler crowd. There are few things more amusing than watching a cat and two under-threes all sitting around the iPad together, equally enthralled.
The average time that a stock is held in the US is 22 seconds in 2010
I can't figure out what this thread has to do with Egypt.
8.--That or the stock market is actually some sort of a giant text adventure.
Sadly, I don't think it's an idiom at all. I think they're actually running wires over the lake and through the church, whatever it takes. It is, after all, very important for these algorithmic traders to have the most advanced technology.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages all alike. There is a CDO here.
>open CDO
Opening the CDO reveals mortgage tranches.
>get mortgage payments
I don't see any mortgage payments here.
> examine CDO
Inside the CDO you see several mortgage tranches. Your lantern has gone out. It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a giant vampire squid.
14 is, indeed, fantastic.
By the way, I'm sure most Unfoggetarians saw this back when it was new, but for those who missed it: Violet, the text adventure game for anyone who is, was, or knows a grad student.
17.2: I didn't see it. But now I'm finding it frustrating. I say "break stool", it says "why would you want to do that?", I ask it for a hint, it says "BREAK THE STOOL". Sigh.
There are few things more amusing than watching a cat and two under-threes all sitting around the iPad together, equally enthralled.
I would like to see this.
Oh, I see, have to repeat the earlier steps I undid. Grr.
I can't figure out what this thread has to do with Egypt.
Bastet loves her iPad.
Violet, the text adventure game for anyone who is, was, or knows a grad student.
Trapnel would be a temptress if he were female, but I think Violet is going to have to be put on hold.
I just meant that text-based adventure games are tempting to me, but I don't want to be sucked into it right now, so I've marked it for future reference.
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Consider that amazon is almost certainly one of the most reputable online vendors around, this story makes me unhappily nervous about online commerce generally. I mean, this particular issue didn't happen to affect me, but how many similar screw-ups are there at other companies?
An Amazon.com security flaw allows some customers to log in with variations of their actual password that are close to, but not exactly, their real password.
The flaw lets Amazon accept as valid some passwords that have extra characters added on after the 8th character, and also makes the password case-insensitive.
For example, if your password is "Password," Amazon.com will also let you log in with "PASSWORD," "password," "passwordpassword," and "password12345."
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6
Now, it's important to THEM, I guess. But they didn't exist four or five years ago, so I think the billion-dollar infrastructure projects could be better used on human beings, or other biological organisms
Actually I was a little skeptical about that part of the article. It seems hard to believe that a few millisecond speedup by itself justifies building a new fiber line. Can you really charge a big enough premium to recover the cost.
Well here is an announcement from a few weeks back of Hibernia Atlantic getting $250M in funding for the project mentioned in the article from a joint venture of Huawei (Chinese Cisco competitor) and Global Marine Systems. They do not state the total cost, but clearly at least a few hundred million. here is a recent analysis of the economics of another Atlantic cable. In addition to the low-latency premium possibilities, there is potentially a 2nd half of the decade overall bandwidth shortfall as no cables have been completed since early 2000s (pretty overbuilt during the Internet boom). I'm guessing that if there is an price differential arbitrage arms race going on that they are counting on a pretty decent premium--tens of milliseconds add up over multiple round-trips (they probably have pretty efficient protocols, but there will still be some back and forth and error-checking etc., data integrity is going to be pretty damn important as well).
Looking this up brought up some maps which reminded me of how much of the middle east/Indian ocean stuff goes through/by Egypt (in 2008 2 links went out just north of Alexandria and had a big impact on India).
2: A fit, blue-eyed Wall Street veteran, who wears the monogram "W O'B" on his purple shirt cuff . . .
Check out the graphic on pg.20 of this telco industry mag (warning big pdf).
6, 26, 27: It is a massively pernicious lie that we "can't afford" basic human infrastructure these days. Choices, all of it. In some ways it is today's "Big Lie" in the US. Per the USA Today article I linked the other day, US tax "burden" lowest in half-a-century, lots of wealth and money held by individuals and corporations.
Surely this is bullshit:
For Mr. O'Brien, the benefits of technology are clear. "One thing has surprised me: people have looked at this as a bad thing," he says. "There is almost no other industry where people say we need less technology. Fifteen years ago, trades took much longer to execute and were much more expensive by any measure" because market power was more concentrated in a few large firms. "Now someone can execute a trade from their mobile from anywhere on the planet. That seems to me like a market that is fairer."
But how is this related to high-speed trading? We know that regulatory decisions have opened the market more, but nobody seems to be making any case at all that the ability to conduct trades super-quick has any benefit at all to the market.
27
... counting on a pretty decent premium ...
According to the study you linked low latency paths currently only command a "slight price premium". So, while all others things being equal you would build a low latency line, it does not appear that the needs of high frequency traders are actually driving the construction of new fiber lines.
30
But how is this related to high-speed trading? We know that regulatory decisions have opened the market more, but nobody seems to be making any case at all that the ability to conduct trades super-quick has any benefit at all to the market.
There are arguments that high speed traders improve liquidity (and thus lower trading costs). I don't know how valid these arguments are. Trading costs have dropped significantly since 1970 or so. Of course there are also arguments that lower trading costs promote instability and thus are a mixed blessing.
31: Yes, I saw that. In my experience the premium is potentially* much larger than mentioned --but yes, surely they are also banking on the predicted need for general capacity.
30, 31: The Wikipedia articles on high-frequency trading are worth a read to see the kind of opportunities that people are after. They're actually are pretty messy with a lot of competition on people clearly trying to push their point of view, but if you take the "good/bad" with a grain of salt it is instructive to see the kinds of things they are going after.
*Potentially because I don't really have any data/experience on the actual rates that the cable owners get, but overall the finance guys pay a *lot* more (but it covers a lot of things--I'm dangerous with a little knowledge here).
33.mid also to 32
And with a little more searching found the following on Hibernia-Atlantic's project
Bandwidth prices across the Atlantic remain among the lowest in the world. According to TeleGeography's Bandwidth Pricing Database, the median price of a 10Gbps wavelength between New York and London is approximately $10,500 per month, compared with $230,000 for the same amount of capacity between Miami and Brazil. By building along a unique, low-latency path, Hibernia aims to break out of the trans-Atlantic commodity pricing prison. "We've heard of some latency-sensitive customers paying many times the average price of bandwidth in order to secure the fastest connection," observed Stronge. "If Hibernia can sustain a price premium for Project Express, it will meet with a much happier fate than what befell other operators ten years ago."But chances are the TeleGeography is somewhat in the pocket of H-A. Plus the chart at the beginning of the article shows they are really going after just a few milliseconds.
32: Liquidity has dropped since the introduction of high-frequency trading.
Looks like the army is stepping in in Cairo [moving the pro-Mubarak arseholes away from the square], according to reports on the Guardian site, and stuff coming out on Twitter.
Is it just me or is it proundly irritating when the meedja seem to give just as much weight to reporting the inconvenience to foreign tourists and business types in Cairo as they do to the fact that there's effectively a dual power on the ground.
I mean, I'm sure these people's situation is very worrying to them and their old mums back in whatever country they come from, but it's not news. They have my sympathy, in appropriate rations. My situation is very worrying to me, because neither of us know if we'll have a job after next month, but I don't expect the BBC to interview me about it. It's not news.
And to find out about the 20,000 people demonstrating in Sanaa or the slightly smaller number in Amman, don't go to the BBC front page. It isn't there. You can learn that some travel agent you've never heard of is going to be financially embarrassed by those inconvenient Egyptians, but if you want to see anything about the developing revolution in Yemen, you have to drill down.
Also, I love the guy from the university of aberdeen (andrea teti) al jazeera had on just a minute ago. Best facial here in this thing so far, and it's tight competition.
My situation is very worrying to me, because neither of us know if we'll have a job after next month
Argh, that's crap. Cuts starting to bite where you are?
Well yes, aren't they everywhere? Mrs y has to apply for her own job, and my firm's main client will announce next week what they want us to stop doing for them.
It's a bitch, but it still isn't news.
Gah. So far my place seems to be going with a voluntary early retirement scheme, rather than redundancies, touch wood.
Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters today, "Now means now."
President Hosni Mubarak told reporters today, "Excuse me, mister, I think you're confusing me with somebody who gives a shit."
The emperor is sartorially challenged.
comment by Quiggin ...Fukuyama, F^%k ya!
Current reading, without no internet I had lots of time yesterday, and finished a weakie on the Progressive era:Bill Dunn, Global Political Economy:A Marxist Critique excellent
35
Liquidity has dropped since the introduction of high-frequency trading
You have a reliable source for this? A little googling found various opinions including an article with these quotes from Vanguard's Gus Sauter:
Gus Sauter, chief investment officer of the Vanguard Group mutual fund company, says he doesn't think so, noting that the stock market has had middle men for hundreds of years. To assure liquidity -- the constant availability of shares, buyers and sellers -- these "market makers" complete sales by buying and selling in their own accounts if they cannot immediately match buyers and sellers. Market makers earn a profit on the difference between the bid prices buyers are willing to pay for a stock and the askprices sellers are willing to accept. High-frequency traders have moved this process into the 21st century, Sauter says, arguing that profits they earn are "likely less than was taken out of the system" previously by traditional market makers. "If they were doing what they do without computers, we would call them market makers," he says.
and
Trading costs from spreads and market impact have been cut in half over the past decade, he says, from 0.5% of the trade amount for big company stocks to 0.25%. For small stocks, trading costs have dropped from 1% to 0.5%. "High-frequency trading teases out hidden liquidity. There may be something out there that's difficult to find. The high-frequency people do find it one way or another, and they turn around and offer it back into the marketplace."
Of course there have been other changes like decimalization that may account for some of this. But at least some people in a position to know think high-frequency trading is good for liquidity.
Krugman ...no economic(GDP) crisis in Egypt, but GDP not real story
Oildrum ...yes, there is as crisis
James, they're not market makers. They don't have to maintain a market in periods of high volatility. They just pull out.
They just pull out.
Trust me, they'll be parents in short order.
47
James, they're not market makers. They don't have to maintain a market in periods of high volatility. They just pull out.
I don't think you have to be there all the time to be a market maker. And it's not like the specialists always stood fast when prices were moving.
touch wood
Might as well, before it's NMM to your job.
Is it just me or is it proundly irritating when the meedja seem to give just as much weight to reporting the inconvenience to foreign tourists and business types in Cairo as they do to the fact that there's effectively a dual power on the ground.
The Al Jazeera feed is refreshingly free of this.
It's in situations like this that Al Jazeera really shows its worth.
Game Over in Egypt Foreign Policy online
Mubarak tells ABC "He's Fed Up and Wants to Resign" but cannot.
AS OF NOW, I AM IN CONTROL HERE.
The link in 53 is great. The War Nerd would love the trebuchet the protesters built.
I don't think you have to be there all the time to be a market maker.
Actually, this is kind of the definition of a market maker.
47, 49,59: christ, the war stories I could tell.
194 raises a good point. Looking at the sidebar, it's difficult to tell which thread I'm commenting in right now.
It's like that time the power went out while I took an evening nap. I woke and looked at my watch and saw 6:30, but I couldn't figure out if I'd slept all night or just a few minutes.