Viewing profile — bd_at_rivenhill

This is a common misconception. OPEC isn't unified and the Saudi strategy is far more ambitious; they aren't trying to choke out the frackers and other high-price producers, they'r…

They can be described in a single sentence, but detecting the difference between spoofing and legitimate activity can be very difficult, especially when some participants are tradi…

I know that ISE had some sort of automatic cancellation feature from the beginning or very close to the beginning, so not sure if PHLX was the originator of this idea. Also, nearly…

I've worked in automated option market making in the past; if I were on a jury hearing this case, there's no way I would convict these guys of spoofing. They are taking advantage o…

(not so) Detailed Analysis of a Trade: lots of detail is lost here, you can see the problems start right at the beginning with this quote: "The 2nd column is the timestamp of the e…

Author has things reversed. Automation is affecting jobs with higher wages and higher productivity first, turning those markets into winner take all or eliminating labor altogether…

Fortunately, tax law has been made so complex that the Supreme Court eventually decided that ignorance is a defense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheek_v._United_States So you may…

You have to assume that the brokerage must retain and report the information, otherwise you can lie all you want about your cost basis without any way for the IRS to cross check at…

Frankly, we ended up with the cure AND the disease. Special purpose entities were used by Enron to muddy up its accounting so nobody could tell that it was doing stupid deals to hi…

I use a Happy Hacker keyboard in a customized emacs environment, but I'm pretty much Linux only, so no issues with transition between laptop and desktop, although I do have an olde…

I think we will start to see less use of GCs in mobile going forward, especially now that Apple has deprecated GC in favor of automatic reference counting. The issues caused by the…

"You're never going to see a power tool or a tractor or whatever designed in OpenSCAD." I beg to differ on this, I've been using OpenSCAD for a couple of years now, and the two mos…

I've met some of the guys from Ufora and seen a demo of their technology; very impressive. I've always been leery of the claim that you can create smart software to make the proble…

I believe 100% in proactive error prevention as a means of building robust programs but, as you say, there are failures that cannot be handled this way; when the kernel fails (as i…

All kinds of badness here. Bug #2 really reduces the level of comfort I would have with using ZooKeeper as a tool. First of all, the default Java policy of terminating the thread, …

What you are describing is manipulation of what I've seen called "book" or "depth" micro price; the sort of thing that got Trillium in trouble ( http://www.reuters.com/article/2010…

My experience is that "configure;make;make install" has a much higher probability of success (>95% regardless of whether you are running the most up-to-date version of the OS) than…

What is the definition of "layering" here? I've seen this label applied to a technique that is used to ensure that orders are at or near the front of the queue on a price/time prio…

You are ignoring the temporal element of the market; in the short term, prices are set by supply and demand, and trading to match supply and demand is exactly how market makers ear…

This is exactly the case, and it's why "painting the tape" has rightfully been illegal for quite some time.

Actually, what they've really got him on is him explaining the scheme in detail to a broker-dealer, describing it as, essentially, a conspiracy to manipulate the market and defraud…

Amazon should clearly buy this company and mount an attack on the PBMs; automatic delivery of this sort of product would fit well with their core competencies. They could also come…

More like the Saudis are driving the price down partly in order to inflict damage on the Iranians, with whom they are engaged in something close to a cold war, but mostly to choke …

You should read Charles Perrow's "Normal Accidents" and all will be revealed. This is hardly a new problem. http://www.amazon.com/Normal-Accidents-Living-High-Risk-Tech...