John At The Center

Apollo Management, however, has apparently come up with a more straightforward solution: start its own bank.

The private equity giant plans to take advantage of a provision in the new financial legislation that allows banks to operate in multiple American states without a national charter, The Financial Times reported.

via Apollo to Launch Its Own Bank, Report Says – DealBook Blog – NYTimes.com.

The $1 million award is a record for a whistle-blower who provided information in connection with an insider trading case, the agency added. Ms. Kaiser, 45, was once married to David E. Zilkha, a former Microsoft employee who the S.E.C. says tipped Pequot in April 2001 about an earnings report while they were in the process of hiring him.Documents in the Zilkhas’ divorce proceedings revealed that Pequot agreed to make a $2.1 million payment to Mr. Zilkha several years after his departure from the firm in November 2001.

via Whistle-Blowers Awarded $1 Million in Pequot Case – DealBook Blog – NYTimes.com.

What is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain (not necessarily to extend) our current level of technological civilization?

I’ll treat this as a steady-state question and not commit to any particular time frame. Stross wrote:

I’d put an upper bound of about one billion on the range, because that encompasses basically the entire population of NAFTA and the EU, with Japan, Taiwan, and the industrial enterprise zones of China thrown in for good measure. (While China is significant, more than half of its population is still agrarian, hence not providing inputs to this system).

I’d put a lower bound of 100 million on the range, too. The specialities required for a civil aviation sector alone may well run to half a million people; let’s not underestimate the needs of raw material extraction and processing (from crude oil to yttrium and lanthanum), of a higher education/research sector to keep training the people we need in order to replenish small pools of working expertise, and so on. Hypothetically, we may only need 500 people in one particular niche, but that means training 20 of them a year to keep the pool going, plus future trainers, and an allowance for wastage and drop-outs by people who made a bad career choice.

My casual, seat-of-the-pants estimate is that a world of one billion pe

via Marginal Revolution: How many people are needed to maintain current living standards?.

Financial information management software firm Convoke Systems announced late Sunday that it has raised a $5.5 million round of financing to help creditors keep track of all the necessary data required to collect on consumer debts. It closed the round Thursday, the day after the U.S. financial reform bill was signed into law.

via Convoke Systems raises $5.5 million to help creditors collect debt | VentureBeat.

The results of my experiments prove fairly interesting. In particular, our “big news” signal is statistically significant at the 0.001 level. This indicates that on average, good news on FT Alphaville is associated with 1-week ahead outperformance. Conversely, on average, bad news for a company on FT Alphaville is associated with 1-week ahead under-performance. The same effect is not evident in our database as a whole, indicating that there is something “special” about the news that comes from FT Alphaville.

via FT Alphaville Disproportionally Interesting Compared to General News in Predicting Stock Returns | Recorded Future Blog.

A new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston says merchant fees and reward programs offered by many credit-card issuers essentially take money from those who have the least and give it to those who have the most. The imbalance may have to be remedied via government intervention, the authors, Scott Schuh, Oz Shy and Joana Stavins, argued. The paper was published as part of the bank’s Public Policy Discussion Papers on Monday.

via Credit Cards Take From Poor, Give to the Rich – Real Time Economics – WSJ.

CurrencyFair matches people who want to sell Pounds, Euros, Dollars or whatever with people who want to buy them.

Note that word ‘people’.

It’s a unique marketplace where people can exchange currencies with other people, anonymously, at rates only otherwise available to multinationals and market professionals dealing in millions. No banks involved. No middlemen in pinstripes. Just CurrencyFair, smoothing the process along, making it safe and secure.

via CurrencyFair – Peer to Peer Foreign Exchange.

For lightning-fast stock transactions or precise, remotely conducted medical surgeries, a data connection can never be fast enough. The goal of Adva and other networking firms is to make information move as close to the speed of light as possible; actually reaching it is impossible, due to fiber slowing down the light ever so slightly — and because the light pulses must be converted back to electricity, cleaned up and re-amplified every so often.

via Automated Stock Trading Could Speed Up Your ISP — No, Really | Epicenter | Wired.com.

If everybody on Wall Street knew that Goldman was short volatility, it’s pretty obvious what was going on. Goldman was selling a lot of volatility to clients, it thought that the price of volatility was more likely to go down rather than up, and so it happily sat on its short-vol position over most of the quarter, looking to make money as the price went down. Instead, the price went up, and it lost an estimated $250 million on those trades.That’s prop trading. Yes, the equity derivatives desk was indeed meeting client needs, but it was also taking a proprietary directional position on where it thought volatility was headed. Viniar, on the conference call, was essentially saying to regulators, “you can’t prove this is prop trading, we’re just going to say that it was all on behalf of clients, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.” I suspect he’s right.

via Prop trading? What prop trading? | Analysis & Opinion |.

“Contango is a word traders use to describe a specific market condition, when contracts for future delivery of a commodity are more expensive than near-term contracts for the same stuff. It is common in commodity markets, though as Wolf and other investors learned, it can spell doom for commodity ETFs.

When the futures contracts that commodity funds own are about to expire, fund managers have to sell them and buy new ones; otherwise they would have to take delivery of billions of dollars’ worth of raw materials. When they buy the more expensive contracts — more expensive thanks to contango — they lose money for their investors. Contango eats a fund’s seed corn, chewing away its value.”

I strongly encourage you read the full article – it’s lengthy but essential for those who have been hurt by these commodity ETFs long term.

via Must-Read Bloomberg Article on Why Long Term Investors in Commodity ETFs Lose Money | Afraid to Trade.com Blog.