hasker

LIBOR refers to a package or rates of which the US Dollar 3 month Interbank offer rate is the most famous. If the Bank of England wanted to control this rate, they would have to come in with infinite liquidity to control the rate. The Fed effectively has infinite liquidity in USD so it can control the Fed Funds rate. Also, it is worth noting that the fed funds rate is an overnight rate, and 3m LIBOR is for three months, so the capital commitment to control it would be much larger.

Maybe they could just write a check to electrify the caltrain a few years faster: http://sonic.net/~mly/Caltrain-Electrification/electrificati... . I never got why it has taken CA so long to make this happne.

black-scholes also assumes the ability to dynamically, instantaneously hedge with very low transaction costs I recall. The market-maker has to charge even more to recover costs in this case since they cannot dynamically hedge and bid-offer tight nor is the market deep.

I suppose you feel the same way about TV ads?

Actually, when entities regulate their employees' trades in public and non-public equities, they typically also require pre-clearance for an member of one's household. At least that was the case for me. As a client paying sometimes in excess of $1,000 per hour, I think one has a right to expect this also.

I think the dealership model in general creates a bad experience for customers. I highly respect Apple for their single price policy. Rarely do any of their products go on sale. Outside of a few cashback, bundled item specials, or loopholes to avoid salestax, the price is the price. This saves me all the anxiety of needing to find a better deal online.

With cars, things are even worse. Having a multi-dealer and dealer inventory sales model necessarily creates a multi-price model. I think most consumers would be much happier knowing they got the best price possible without any extra work than dealing with all of the information asymmetry in buying a car.

Obviously speed and implementation details matter significantly. Your firm may have a better backend or superior code that allows the strategy to work better. Much of finance is working with attorneys to shift the system in one's favor. Gaining access to markets that previously did not allow foreign algorithmic trading, earning fee rebates on trades not available to others, etc matter increasing more in a business approaching saturation.

Excuse my pedanticism, but QCOM's market cap has more to do with their intellectual property connected to CDMA, 3G, and LTE standards than anything else.

Commercial real estate often operates with longterm leases and sometimes pre-defined renewal options. It is quite possible this restaurant signed a ten year lease in the shambles of the last tech bubble and now needs to renew the lease.

Perhaps they want to sell the x86 business and focus on the emerging ARM/alternative architecture business. I wonder what sort of non-compete the deal would include.

I totally agree. Comcast is not the worst. My parents happen to live in an area serviced by a ma and pop cable company (Service Electric Cablevision). 20/2 internet with a 200GB cap for $51 a month. Comcast, which is available to the community less than five miles away, crushes this. This is only 45 minutes from Philadelphia!

Property values for tax purposes are reassessed less than once per decade in many jurisdictions in the US. This is true on the downside also. In some cases, houses sell for multiples of their tax assessment, yet even a transaction will not trigger a reassessment.

You should read about transfer pricing. In many cases it is entirely possible to assign where a large firm's income is made for tax purposes by internally transferring intellectual property.

On the point of why would tech companies want to do this instead of helping the community, I argue it may actually help California. Instead of doing the responsible thing and moving the firm to somewhere with a lower state corporate tax rate, the firm can simply avoid taxes. This keeps employees in the area contributing to state income and property taxes. In a world or multinationals, I am not certain corporate income taxes make sense.

I think many exchanges actually already do this, with a rebate provided for actually orders that are executed. The idea being that it is fine to cancel five orders for every one fill or some other ratio of cancels to fills. Check the pricing for trading with Interactive Brokers. I think they are passing on these exchange fees directly.

I take issue with how this article represents Lance Armstrong's doping as a fact. He never tested positive. From what I understand, someone just testified that they saw him shooting up with something. Who knows what Lance and his team really did or did not do. The US Anti-Doping Agency was out to get him, and from what I understand, the burden of proof is so low that they can get anyone they want.

I also do not understand how the affordability of top doping experts is any different than affordability of top coaches and nutritionists. The author claims that only the top 25% can actually compete legitimately since top doping specialists cost a lot. Top coaches likely do also.

I think these two points weaken the authors points tremendously, when I somewhat agree with is point. He just needs better examples.

It looks like if you preorder by September 14 you can avoid sales tax in CA! I checked on some other preorder items that will not ship before Amazon starts charging CA tax.

According to David Pogue Apple will have a new Mac Pro, possibly in 2013: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/11/an-explanation-of-...

In all seriousness, I am not sure Steve cares. He had a obsessive dedication to the product and the game. Bill Gates used technology to get to the point where he had enough wealth to be the world's best philanthropist, even if he made a lot of "mistakes" with his first "investments." In fact, he is so good that Warren Buffet, having a fortune that rivals Bill Gates, he has left nearly all his money to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Let me get this straight because I think this is what other sources are implying: HBO sells a license to their channels to the cable companies for a flat fee. The cable providers then recoup this by selling subscriptions to HBO or pushing more customers to subscribe to cable. In that way, cable providers actually pay more than the cable providers collect from consumers for HBO subscriptions. This really makes the question not would you pay the same price as HBO costs on cable for Game of Thrones access, but would you pay more? The cable provider's contracts may even preclude directly collecting from consumers. If this is true, I think the community needs to realize this remains a lost cause and instead encourage Netflix's model of creating high quality content directly for streaming.

The WSJ has an interesting article on Groupon today also. Actually, it is more of an excerpt from "Groupon's Biggest Deal Ever" (http://www.amazon.com/Groupons-Biggest-Deal-Ever-Unbelievabl...). "Behind Groupon's $6 Billion Brushoff" (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230364010457744...)

With their current market cap just above 6bn, it may have actually served everyone better to take the Google deal. Apparently the board did not approve the deal because Google would only agree to an $800mm breakup fee, and antitrust approval would take up to eighteen months. Eighteen months from when they turned down the offer in December 2010 ends right around now! Still I have the highest respect for any founders that turn down a 6bn buyout.

Yes, but then that bogus certificate is in the wild. Once once someone has a copy of a bogus certificate, then they can prove that that CA is corrupt. That CA loses its business model. What I am saying does not prevent one-off attacks, but all it takes is one person to capture a bad certificate to discredit a CA. Hence it would not work in a universal censorship scheme as Google is combating. Maybe I am still overlooking something, and I suppose China could just SSL proxy the whole country, which would defeat all of this.

Yes, but that would be likely detected, and the CA that had its private key stolen or coerced for government use would be exposed nonrepudiatably. All browser makers would immediately drop the bad certificate. In the case of targeted connections, this may avoid detection though.

I am totally naive to these cat and mouse games, but why does not Google just force SSL in China? They would have to turn off the partial searches feature, which has been shown to leak the cleartext, but I think it would totally fix any sort of censorship. Then again, maybe this type of response works better politically.

The same is true of most if not all hospitals in the US to my understanding. They cannot turn away patients in the emergency room for ability to pay. Still, the hospital can try to bill excessive amounts. Also, this does not guarantee the highest level of care to everyone, but neither private insurance nor most nationalized healthcare programs provide this.

Read the article. He is complaining about how the casino operated, not how he bet. One of the most crucial piecing of information in professional trading is knowing your exact risk position. NASDAQ apparently was unable to confirm whether trades were "done" or not. Having a uncertain $100mm exposure to something really scares a trader, since he cannot hedge it. This is the kind of situation where telephone hand pieces get snapped in half, and holes get punches through LCD screens. The flash crash a few years ago created a similar situation where the exchanges decided to cancel certain trades at their own discretion.

NASDAQ really botched the IPO. Trading was supposed to open at 11am, and it appeared to me it took until 11:20am to actually start. Problems persisted even after FB opened. They won the listing over the NYSE on the promise this sort of thing would not happen. Mega IPOs always seem to have a lot of drama. GOOG had a lot of stupidity with some interview Larry or Sergey did with Playboy, and I think a few other issues. Finally FB got to the end of the long road to going public.

Some would say the same thing about removing in-flight beverage service or tossing blankets, pillows, and airline magazines to save weights, yet airlines do it. I think it is equally ridiculous to care about such costs, especially at the cost of focusing management away from the top line, but using logic to suggest it does not happen may not get you far in this case.

You probably have a pretty valid point. One of my aspiration toys, the Diamond Star DA42 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_DA42) burns diesel or Jet-A in a internal combustion engines. I forget the economy figures, but I think this plane does quite well when throttled back.

Sometimes you can actually game this. For example, I have noticed cheaptickets.com sometimes fails to update their prices quickly enough. All of the other websites have moved their prices to the new fare, but they slack behind. I know there is an issue since the airline does not ticket their mistake immediately (i.e. make the ticket more than a stub and actually consummate the transaction). I wonder who takes the hit on this?

If you look into all of the issues surrounding the United and Continental merger, there some fascinating material exists on airline reservation systems and back-ends. In summary, I think they get build to defense contractor standards, which does little to reassure me.

I think that would be illegal, as in the type of illegal that is much more serious than piracy.

My thoughts exactly. Well connected people essentially raise money on no-cap convertible notes in their seed round at a sum of a few million dollars with no product yet. That means their VCs and angels want in so badly that they essentially give free money to get preference for the series A in a pay to play sort of situation. The founders may be stingy on equity, but they do not have a problem paying at or above market salaries. Also, I would be very skeptical of any CTO that has not worked as an engineer at some point.