Recent content by bob

Unbelievable that they would let that big an error make it into production. They have pissed away most of their market cap and are desperately looking for someone to buy them. Put more bluntly, in the space of a day they lost nearly half a billion dollars and essentially destroyed the company...

It's true that women generally may have different preferences than men generally when it comes to many things, but I'd be interested to hear why this means that the women who are interested in finance and work there somehow deserve lower pay.

I would love to visit Mesa Verde, as I've heard it's amazing, but it's a gauge of just how incredible our national parks system is that it probably does not fall in the top 10 among those I haven't seen yet but really want to.

Hm, while all of this is going on I'm thinking about the degree to which Americans don't even know their own country. For example, I've seen what I think of as a fair amount of the country but can count 17 states in which I've don't believe I've even spent the night: Hawaii, Alaska, Oregon...

I would love to contribute to this discussion, but as an American I am too provincial to know whether run-of-the-mill Americans are more provincial than run-of-the-mill citizens of this world's other fine nations...whatever they're called. However, as an American my instinct is to assert...

As I was watching his talk at ARPM, which was fantastic, it occurred to me that it must be something of a curse to be a funny quant.

I have a checkered past. But don't tell Dominic: He might take offense if I share my opinion that Derrida is more difficult than differential equations. Anyway, it seems to me that OWS (not to bring the discussion back to its original point or anything) is a fantastic example of precisely the...

I have to agree that the constitutional cheerleading is driven by a deep misunderstanding of US history. Far from being the richest country on Earth, the US was an agrarian backwater for nearly a century after the Revolution. What made us a "modern" country--or a country at all, really--was the...

Some favorable reviews over on Rotten Tomatoes. (The film is due out Oct. 21). From what I can tell, the film owes more than a little to Glengarry Glen Ross, which if you haven't seen you really should. "Coffee's for closers only."

"Luke, I am your subadditive risk measure." "No. No. That's impossible. That's not true!"

My $0.02: (1) Negative public sentiment is affecting finance careers right now. Dodd-Frank, UCITS IV, Basel III are regulatory efforts whose particular nature and form are very much driven by the ongoing credit crisis and the perceived breach of public trust it represents on the part of...

From the standpoint of someone who wants to transact in the market, does it really matter whether it was one, two, or eighty seven algos that produced that cycling behavior? As for the second point, here's a link to paper by the SF Fed giving a demographic analysis that projects stock prices...

I agree that speed per se is not the problem, as long as what's actually taking place is trading. In cases like the "pretty picture" pasted in above, though, those oscillations in the NBBO are not arising from trading. As near as I can tell, it's an effort to create adverse selection in the...

I'll let two guys with ten years experience at Instinet and a brokerage firm of their own make the argument better than I could: A good interview that gives some background: http://www.themistrading.com/article_files/0000/0576/61110_Welling_Weeden_PlayingFair.pdf A recent letter tracking...

It just needs a good UI--something that involves a joystick and lots of movement / explosions. Do it right, and pre-adolescents will be making (losing) millions on HFT strategies from their XBoxes.