I will stop frequenting and reading Seeking Alpha because of this:
UPDATE: It appears Seeking Alpha and Barry Ritholtz reached an agreement, as Seeking Alpha has renamed "The Big Picture" as "The Macro View".
Breaking News: Lehman To Be Acquired by Tooth FairyThe market responded with enthusiasm to reports that the Tooth Fairy has agreed to acquire Lehman. The purchase price has not yet been determined and will be set by Dick Fuld wishing upon a star, clicking his heels three times, and being transported back to that magical place where Lehman still sells for over $70 per share.
In related news, Lehman has agreed to sell all of its level III capital, including CDOs, ABSs, pet rocks, baseball cards, slightly used condoms, and credit default swaps written by MBIA and Ambac. Lehman’s level III capital will be acquired for 150% of its face value by Tinkerbell, who will carry it off to Neverland to be fed to a crocodile. Lehman is financing 90% of the acquisition at an interest rate that has not been announced; Tinkerbell’s up-front payment consists of a handful of pixie dust, three crickets, and a bullfrog. Analyst Dick Bove estimates that the bullfrog could eventually be transformed into three princes and a pumpkin coach. The deal gives Lehman no recourse to any of Tinkerbell’s assets other than the Level III capital. If Tinkerbell defaults, Lehman’s successor entity will stick its hand down the crocodile’s throat and attempt to get it to regurgitate. The firm’s historical value-at-risk analysis shows that sticking your hand down a crocodile’s throat is completely safe.
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson issued a statement: “I am delighted that SWFs (Sovereign Wealth Fairies) continue to express confidence in the terrific values represented by American financial institutions. As I have been saying since August of 2007, this shows that the crisis is now over.”
Meanwhile, the SEC has announced an investigation of mean, evil, bad short-seller David Einhorn. While out for a beer with a friend, Einhorn reportedly suggested that the Tooth Fairy does not exist and that wishing upon a star is not a wholly reliable price discovery mechanism. Christopher Cox, chairman of the SEC, said, “Vicious rumors attacking the Tooth Fairy will not be tolerated. Our entire financial system and indeed the American way of life depend on the Tooth Fairy and wishing upon a star. How else could one value level III capital appropriately?” The SEC is reportedly planning to set up re-education camps for short-sellers.
I've created a new group on the professional networking site, LinkedIn. It is oriented toward finance useRs. The goal of this group is to help members:
I posted earlier about creating the new opentick package. Since it requires reading/writing binary data to a socket connection, I wrote some utility functions to made the conversion to/from raw data easier.
These functions are tangential to opentick and potentially useful to others, so I created yet another package... called pack. pack attempts to replicate the functionality of PERL's pack and unpack functions.
The functions are probably best illustrated via an example:
> computer <- pack('C A3 v x V a*', 3, 'foo', 21, 50000, 'bar')(For those curious, the post title is pack in hexadecimal... sorry, but I find it amusing.)
> computer
[1] 03 66 6f 6f 15 00 00 50 c3 00 00 62 61 72
> human <- unpack('C/A v x V A3', computer)
> human
[[1]]
[1] "foo"
[[2]]
[1] 21
[[3]]
[1] 50000
[[4]]
[1] "bar"
>
Lifehack.org has a nice post about how to make quality choices. One way to analyze choices is to ask yourself why, 5 times. I have to share this hilarious excerpt below:
Ask why – five times
The Five Whys are a problem-solving technique invented by Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota. When something goes wrong, you ask “why?” five times. By asking why something failed, over and over, you eventually get to the root cause.
Why did my car break down? A spark plug failed. Why? It was fouled. Why? I didn’t get a tune-up. Why? I was too busy playing GTA4. Why? Because I’m miserable and lonely and the people in the game are the only ones that really love me.
See? Your car broke down because you’re a sociopath.
I haven't posted much the past month because I have be remodeling my kitchen. We installed a ceramic tile floor, all new cabinets, new counter top, all new appliances. It's been an adventure, since I've never done any of it before.
I've been working on updates to TTR and making small progress on the opentick package, but blog posts have taken a back seat. I will have much more time to program and post when the kitchen is finished in ~2 weeks.
