flourpower

9 ms·

1.
by flourpower 15y ago
I couldn't find this by googling - if A is an n by n matrix, can you get A^k strictly faster than you can get a product of k arbitrary n by n matrices?
2.
by flourpower 15y ago
This is unfair. Some of his work is built around general relativity: http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf
3.
by flourpower 15y ago
You're thinking of CDS, not CDO. CDS stands for credit default swap(s) and CDO stands for collateralized debt obligation. You're right that a CDO would be really big if you printed out a formal specification, but that's because a CDO is spe
4.
by flourpower 15y ago
You're right, of course, but my point (and maybe I didn't make it very effectively) was that to acquire a similarly thorough understanding of macros would require way more information - I wasn't trying to make the point that a complete desc
5.
by flourpower 15y ago
I think this tendency to mythologize certain financial derivatives is weird. The concept of a macro is way more complex than the concept of a credit default swap. To demonstrate, here is (in my opinion) an explanation of credit default swap
6.
by flourpower 15y ago
I agree with your advice - I just don't think most people follow financial news that closely. However, the euro is down about 8% since June, so it's safe to say there's been a fair bit of selling.
7.
by flourpower 15y ago
I think that in this case the reporter doesn't understand what's going on behind the abstraction. One thing that might happen is that some country's equivalent of our treasury dept will realize that they're not going to be able to make the
8.
by flourpower 15y ago
But then why not just change your euros into dollars?
9.
by flourpower 15y ago
Not that I have a solution to this problem, but who does the filtering once you remove the job offer as a prerequisite? I can't conceive of a situation where the people that get put in charge of that process are actually qualified.
10.
by flourpower 15y ago
That's more of a reflection of liquidity than of creditworthiness though.
11.
by flourpower 15y ago
That's the same as the probability that 2N flips of a fair coin result in exactly heads: (2N choose N)(.5^N)(.5^N). Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution
12.
by flourpower 15y ago
What Taleb is saying is still true. If I have a 400k market salary and I give up 200k of it for the right to 1% of the profits I generate, then I still maximize the expected value of my compensation that year by maximizing the size of my be
13.
by flourpower 15y ago
And even then it's tricky, because a non-regulated entity can make a bet with a regulated one and end up getting bail-out money by virtue of that bet. That seems undesirable, but you also can't really stiff the non-regulated entity, because
14.
by flourpower 15y ago
But it can only go as far below 0 as the amount in salary you sacrificed in exchange for a potential bonus.
15.
by flourpower 15y ago
That would work if we wanted to stop banks from transferring losses to shareholders - the real problem is that they transfer losses to taxpayers. Pre-IPO Goldman Sachs was probably considered "systemically important" enough for their losses
16.
by flourpower 15y ago
3 would necessarily raise the bid/ask. If you charge everyone 10 cents to transact, then nobody will act as a market maker at a bid/ask narrower than 20 cents.
17.
by flourpower 15y ago
The prices now will be less artificial, since more people will be involved in setting them.
18.
by flourpower 15y ago
But Harvard provides incremental value over Khan academy by serving as a networking tool and a credentialing mechanism.
19.
by flourpower 15y ago
We shouldn't practice financial regulation like it's holistic medicine. Metaphors about cleaning the pipes and taking the pain should be weighed against the evidence we have about what happens when you let banks fail, and that didn't go ver
20.
by flourpower 15y ago
The level of uninformed fear surrounding this topic doesn't bode well for driverless cars. Computers trading stocks can't even kill people.
21.
by flourpower 15y ago
You're talking about volume, not price. Increased volume should, if a market is performing "properly", accompany new information. If there's new information, there's a reason to trade. The examples you cited seem like evidence of the stock
22.
by flourpower 15y ago
Isn't the claim that algorithmic trading will never replace human decision making basically equivalent to the claim that humans will never construct strong AI?
23.
by flourpower 15y ago
What evidence do you have that the stock prices have recently become less predictive of future earnings? Was the market performing its predictive duty in, for instance, September of 1929?
24.
by flourpower 15y ago
I think he should have treated the set of all government actions with more granularity. Imagine that you partitioned that set into two subsets. The first subset would be actions on policy issues that libertarians find it necessary for gover
25.
by flourpower 15y ago
If you buy 100 dollars of mortgage bonds at a price of p and I buy it from you at a price of q, then your profit in that transaction is 100*(q-p), not 100. Besides, if you look at the profits made by investment banks since 2008 you'll see t
26.
by flourpower 15y ago
Trillions? Even if you were referring to the amount of money made by all American investment banks in the last several years, you'd still be off by a few orders of magnitude.
27.
by flourpower 15y ago
Even after excluding a big mortgage related charge, Bank of America's net income last year was only 756 million dollars. If you estimated that each of the named banks would have to pay out an eighth of the 20 billion with the other ten bill