Viewing profile — flourpower

I couldn't find this by googling - if A is an n by n matrix, can you get A^k strictly faster than you can get a product of k arbitrary n by n matrices?

This is unfair. Some of his work is built around general relativity: http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf

You're thinking of CDS, not CDO. CDS stands for credit default swap(s) and CDO stands for collateralized debt obligation. You're right that a CDO would be really big if you printed…

You're right, of course, but my point (and maybe I didn't make it very effectively) was that to acquire a similarly thorough understanding of macros would require way more informat…

But if you believe that the exchange rate is going to move in favor of the dollar, the sensible thing to do is still to switch almost all of your euros into dollars and convert bac…

I think this tendency to mythologize certain financial derivatives is weird. The concept of a macro is way more complex than the concept of a credit default swap. To demonstrate, h…

I agree with your advice - I just don't think most people follow financial news that closely. However, the euro is down about 8% since June, so it's safe to say there's been a fair…

I think that in this case the reporter doesn't understand what's going on behind the abstraction. One thing that might happen is that some country's equivalent of our treasury dept…

But then why not just change your euros into dollars?

Not that I have a solution to this problem, but who does the filtering once you remove the job offer as a prerequisite? I can't conceive of a situation where the people that get pu…

That's more of a reflection of liquidity than of creditworthiness though.

That's the same as the probability that 2N flips of a fair coin result in exactly heads: (2N choose N)(.5^N)(.5^N). Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_distribution

What Taleb is saying is still true. If I have a 400k market salary and I give up 200k of it for the right to 1% of the profits I generate, then I still maximize the expected value …

And even then it's tricky, because a non-regulated entity can make a bet with a regulated one and end up getting bail-out money by virtue of that bet. That seems undesirable, but y…

But it can only go as far below 0 as the amount in salary you sacrificed in exchange for a potential bonus.

That would work if we wanted to stop banks from transferring losses to shareholders - the real problem is that they transfer losses to taxpayers. Pre-IPO Goldman Sachs was probably…

3 would necessarily raise the bid/ask. If you charge everyone 10 cents to transact, then nobody will act as a market maker at a bid/ask narrower than 20 cents.

The prices now will be less artificial, since more people will be involved in setting them.

But Harvard provides incremental value over Khan academy by serving as a networking tool and a credentialing mechanism.

We shouldn't practice financial regulation like it's holistic medicine. Metaphors about cleaning the pipes and taking the pain should be weighed against the evidence we have about …

The level of uninformed fear surrounding this topic doesn't bode well for driverless cars. Computers trading stocks can't even kill people.

You're talking about volume, not price. Increased volume should, if a market is performing "properly", accompany new information. If there's new information, there's a reason to tr…

Isn't the claim that algorithmic trading will never replace human decision making basically equivalent to the claim that humans will never construct strong AI?

What evidence do you have that the stock prices have recently become less predictive of future earnings? Was the market performing its predictive duty in, for instance, September o…