langreiter.com plain, simple: comments-2008-01-24

LANGREITER.COM plain, simple

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Donnerstag, 24. Januar 2008

"I mean that is like the water's not running today, right? The sun didn't rise." [ Ø KOTTKE • ]

Great interview with a hedge fund manager on the perils of within-system thinking &c.; from n+1, a "twice-yearly print journal" that, fortunately, publishes "web-only material once or twice a week".

"The problem is that the DNA of a lot of these models is very, very similar, it's like an ecosystem with no biodiversity because most of the people who do stat-arb can trace their lineage, their intellectual lineage, back to four or five guys who really started the whole black box trading discipline in the '70s and '80s."

2008-01-24-sunRise

NY Times: 'The French bank [create Société Générale] said Thursday that it had uncovered "an exceptional fraud" by a trader that would cost it 4.9 billion euros, or $7.1 billion, and that it was raising about 5.5 billion euros in fresh capital to shore up its finances.'

Interesting times. Nick Leeson's 1995 Barings-busting losses: $1.8 billion.

2008-01-24-tradical

The Rise and Fall of World Economic Powers in Pictures, assembled by Gong Szeto.^*

^* Famous in (a slightly constrained subset of) Austria for having visited the Helma headquarters back in the last century.

2008-01-24-ecoFall

Aptana Jaxer apparently isn't only server-side JavaScript, but ... server-side Mozilla.