thingylab

I do not believe aerodynamic stability depends on whether the inputs change or not. For instance, stall a Cessna 172 and it will tend to pitch down on its own even if you keep pulling on the yoke.

Also an aerodynamically unstable plane isn't a plane in which a stall is irrecoverable. It's a plane that, left to its own devices, will not make things better for you.

Please look up what 'amnesty' means. Apple isn't doing anything wrong or illegal by keeping its cash outside of the US. Also note the the US tax code is the only one (in advanced countries) to try to tax earnings made outside of its jurisdiction (e.g. for earnings made in Japan, and already taxed locally there).

Cook is not saying Apple shouldn't pay taxes, he simply says the IRS has no business taking 40% of earnings not made in the US. If you were an expat you would strongly agree with him.

It's called a tariff. They're an incredibly blunt tool and they're generally not a good way to make anything "fair".

Also the rarity of a skill does not necessarily correlate to its economic output. So you would reduce the supply of workers for an arbitrary number of industries where wages are not higher than that number you just pulled out of a hat.

Is it futuristic because it runs tests concurrently?

Are you saying that aviation is inherently less safe in non-predominantly english speaking countries?

I'm even less convinced about the usefulness knowing "how much of a trade a particular counter-party can absorb". And somehow deriving this information from the current book size (as opposed to available capital) also seems somewhat dubious.

Moreover, absent the AUM (or leverage) and asset mix, this number won't tell you much about the actual size of the book.

Correct maybe. Useful, certainly not.

1) I think you're asking too much of what is essentially a silly experiment.

2) What if potatoes become hip?

3) If you want auditable PPP conversion rates: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/PA.NUS.PPP

How good is your index if you don't capture local shocks?

Any practical reason you'd want a "non brand related" index? The way I understand it the Big Mac index is pretty good because it casts a wide net from the cost of producing (or importing) food to the price of labour, and everything in between. I doubt you'd get that with a potato.

And:

3. The number of good developers is unrelated to the number of H1-B issued

1. There is no relationship whatsoever between the secrecy of their strategies and the likelihood of a government bailout. Most companies have some sort of proprietary secrets, after all.

2. They are no more secretive than the average private company. In fact, this is largely a myth, as is the belief that hedge funds are "lightly regulated". You can in fact find a lot of information about a fund by spending five minutes on the SEC website.

I don't see how this proves the market is rigged. What I do see is: 1) One market participant is being less than clever by trying to buy, in one order, 80% of the offered quantity, and 2) Another market participant realizes this, and reacts accordingly.

The post is written as if the world should freeze once the client sends an order. He was 'stolen' shares. Really?

You charge for deposits made in the banks' accounts at the ECB.

A pretty solid evidence is the consistently high number of people coming / trying to come to the US each year... Seriously, you wouldn't put up with all that immigration crap if it was not attractive.

> People are dying, literally drowning in the Mediterranean, to get into Europe.

Right. Don't you think that's an indication of proximity rather than attractiveness? (some) People from Africa might be poor and are dying to go some place else, but they're not stupid. They understand crossing the Mediterranean is easier than crossing the Atlantic...

That's a bit of an exaggeration. Many H1-Bs work in high-value industries and make a decent amount of money (I should know, I'm an H1-B holder). I don't think many of them consider themselves slaves.

The green card process for a H1-B is particularly annoying and restrictive though, as is the arbitrary time limit.

Not sure what you mean by "the H1-B visa employee is legally bound to the job". Sure, your company's name is printed on your visa but it is excessively easy to transfer to a new employer.

What exactly is the point ?

How long it would take for the guy who washes the dishes in my favourite restaurant to buy the shoes I'm wearing? How long would it take a techie in a hedge fund to buy a yacht? How long would it take the sales guy a Cartier store to buy that 75kUSD watch?

More importantly, what would knowing this tell us about anything?

Please re-read my comment. I'm not saying you need options to get rid of a large block of shares.

What I'm saying is that trying to get rid of a lot of shares through $30MM worth of a reconv is very ineficient, if not downright stupid.

The only people I see "guaranteeing any return on whatever investment they sell" typically turn out to be ponzi schemes.

No. If you have a block of shares, there are much better ways to get rid of them. These deals typically take a long time to structure, market and initiate.

Besides, you really don't need a lot of shares to hedge this type of product. You need options that are typically (at least initially) deep-ish out of the money and so have little delta.

How exactly is this a scam ?

These are very generic products, and many investment banks issued dollops of them (especially tied to Apple) in the past few years.

Basically, they look like bonds that pay a higher-than-average coupon, the catch being that if the equity the note is tied to declines in value, you lose part of your capital. Company treasurers tend to like those because of the high headline return rate (i.e. assuming the underlying equity doesn't tank).

Now, the banks do not take the reverse position. They hedge it (probably not perfectly, but very closely) using a combination of cash deposits and equity options (which is really what these products are about). There is little to no trading PnL on these things. They make money by selling the note $10 when its intrinsic value is $9.50.

You just did the equivalent of a user calling tech support saying "my computer doesn't work".

Quick correction here: AAPL has weekly, monthly and quarterly options.

Weeklies expire every friday (except on fridays when it is also a monthly expiry - the third friday of every month).

Quarterlies expire the last business day of march, june, september and december.

Care to share one of these "well told stories of amateur investors making literally billions of dollars finding holes in option contracts that the hedge funds and IBanks missed" ?

I got seriously pissed because a bunch of idiots got excited about the number 500 and Apple, so this will probably be my last comment on this thread.

Anyway, let me tell you this: I work for a (fairly) big 'global macro' hedge fund. Historically we traded fx and rates, but we started (slowly) trading equity last year. The rationale given to our investors was: "the equity market is full of arbitrage opportunities because it is very much a retail market and people tend to trade out of 'gut feelings'.

We are not manipulating the market. You are, and we are profiting from it. Suckers.

What ?!? I can't believe the amount a bullshit about options I see here.

If, at expiry, the spot is 'x', puts with strikes > x are worthless and calls with strike < x are worthless too. This is true for any x, indepently of HN's belief that x is somewhow magical.

Wow wow wow. This whole "prices are pinned around a strike" story does not make any sense.

First, a quick search on bloomberg reveals that stocks belonging to the S&P 500 (with liquid options) do not tend to close at exactly the most liquid option strike price on expiry dates, so a close at 500.00 is not "expected" for AAPL, or any other stock, today.

Second, if you'd take 30 seconds to look up what an option is, you'd discover that option can be either calls or puts (options to buy or sell, respectively) so when the spot (market) price of AAPL is 495 at expiry, the 500 call is worthless, but not the 500 put is not. Third, the market for options is not the only one responsible for the spot price, if only because a lot of people actually trade AAPL stocks independently of AAPL options.

Finally, most people who trade options do not give a damn about the spot price, instead they care about the (implied) volatility. Roughly, it means your profit/loss on an option position is largely immune to the moves in the underlying stock price (just look at people hedging variance swaps).

Do you have any use cases in mind ?

It seems to me that you would mostly act as a proxy between a user and a service, which really doesn't sound too useful unless one actually needs to access dozens of APIs (which doesn't seem to be something that happens often).

Or is your idea really an aggregator (e.g. "find images using such and such keywords" and it returns results from flickr, 500px, ...) ?

Don't you fuel asset bubbles by targetting 0% interest at all times ?

If your incentive is to just get rid of your money because of the inherent penalty, aren't you tempted to, say, buy overpriced houses, to use a recent example ?