There’s lots of what’s known as tail risk. Most of the time, it works great. Most of the time, computerized trading makes stock markets more efficient, and it’s easier and cheaper for investors, both large and small, to trade. And it’s a good thing for everybody. But every so often, things can go horribly wrong, and we don’t know when and we don’t know how and we don’t know what the consequences might be. And that huge uncertainty, I think, is the biggest danger in the markets right now.
Our financial markets have become a largely automated adaptive dynamical system, with feedback. There’s no science I’m aware of that’s up to the task of understanding its potential implications.
—Michael Kearns, professor at the University of Pennsylvania: via Wired, quoted by Felix Salmon, who framed his observation, “That’s a tacit admission that the system has outgrown the humans that created it…Even if each individual algorithm makes perfect sense, collectively they obey an emergent logic”
Auld Lang Syne holds a special grip on new year’s eve – one Robert Burns may never have anticipated when he drafted the verse in 1788. So when we we found ourselves in its warm embrace Sunday morning, either before a performance or participating in one, we can only imagine the many variations that have emerged over the years.
Each performance carries with it the emotional weight one would expect from a song entitled for old good times. From the bewildered casino patrons in the original Ocean’s Eleven who carry-on among each other’s arms in a intoxicated celebration of the new year while Danny Ocean and his crew rob them blind, to Billy Preston and Aretha Franklin’s soulful rendition, or the formal enthusiasms of the BBC orchestra, as by an act of nature, we’ve seen it evolve, mutate and emerge, again and again. The mysterious pronunciation itself would suggest a time of merriment and intoxication. Afterall, doesn’t auld lang syne sound like the gutteral jubilation of a party-goer just barely holding onto their sobriety.
Perhaps this is why one rendition stands apart from the others. Vivian Leigh and Robert Taylor danced to a waltz-arrangement of the song in Waterloo Bridge, and at some point between the film’s release in 1940 and 2006, someone decided to anthologize the movie, the moment, and the song with a synthesizer rendition of auld lang syne. Call it a step into the uncanny valley or a late performance in the theatre of the absurd, but something was wrong.
—Winifred “Wini not Winnie” Jiau, alleged to have provided a diligent source of material nonpublic information through Primary Global Research since 2006 – That’s what my guy say.
Wini appears to be the latest addition to a ring of individuals
dealing in inside information anchored by Primary Global Research. These include Mark Anthony Longoria, who worked at chipmaker AMD, and Walter Shimoon, formerly of Flextronics, a Singapore-based maker of electronic components, both of whom consulted through PGR; James Fleishman, a sales manager at PGR; Don Chu, an Asia-Technology specialist at PGR. It goes to show that the FBI and SEC aren’t so much investigating an expertnetwork as much as what appears to be a sophisticated criminal operation that has been mistaken for a necessary feature of an expert network.
The double-dip is almost here, as six cities set new lows for the period since the 2006 peaks. There is no good news in October’s report. Home prices across the country continue to fall
–David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poor’s, remarking that “Existing homes sales and housing starts have been reported for both October and November, and neither is giving any sense of optimism…On a year-over-year basis,sales are down more than 25% and the months’ supply of unsold homes is about 50% above where it was during the same months of last year”: via S&P
As our information-processing technologies improve and become better and better adapted to fit the niche provided by the biological brain, they become more like cognitive prosthetics: non-biological circuits that come to function as parts of the material underpinnings of minds like ours.
—Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics in the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences at Edinburgh University, remarking on the progressive integration of so many digital tools into our lives: via NYT
“not one of us said, ‘Fonzie, jump a shark? Are you out of your mind,'”
—Fred Fox Jr.
If you stand right fronting and face to face with a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
We may speculate with confidence when this band or that show jumped the shark, but do we know when Happy Days jumped the shark? No.
The fifth season of happy days brought the cast to Los Angeles. Memories of Elvis Presley’s Blue Hawaii, the Beach Boys, and Endless Summer conspired to roll the cultural archetypes of working-class
roustabouts through the waves and tribulations of a tropical setting. It was in the fifth season of an eleven season run, and many popular episodes would follow. Why, then, would an outrageous hijink from the Fonz, the otherwise unflappable assurance of cool, become synonymous with the show’s decline and inseparable from the culture’s idea of a fall from grace?
“Here we go, Fonz. I’m headed for the ramp. Are you sure you want to do it?” asked Richie Cunningham. Fonzie gives him a thumbs up, and they plot an improbable route along the shoreline. Ralph Malph exclaims, “Look at that shark Potsie!” and points to a string of yellow buoys not more than fifty feet from the beach, marking the outline of the shark’s undersea pen. By now, the boat should have either skidded up over the sand or crashed through the nest of tall, wood stanchions holding up a not too distant pier. They hold their heads, work their hair and bite their lips. Fonz is going to do it. He’s going to jump the shark and usher into the idiom a phrase that would haunt the show and loom over many others for years to come.
The realization is said to have been made in 1987. The Iran-Contra scandal had broken the year before, and the ensuing investigation introduced C-Span to America while the many possibilities of Oliver North’s whereabouts and engagements distracted the audience from an increasingly bewildered presidency. A group of friends dropped the more the mundane engagements of a college education for the free-wheeling release of a few speculations on when Happy Days began it’s decline.
But the observation itself demonstrates one thing. The example doesn’t always fit the facts so much as fit the mold. In this case, Fonz having jumped the shark could only have happened with the onset of a general and persistent decline. It could only have happened at the end, not the beginning. But it didn’t.
To mark the decline of Happy Days with the Fonz jumping the shark relies on an accumulation of mistakes. Many years separated the group of friends and the fateful episode when Fonzie jumped the shark. The episode might have been only barely visible, mixed and spread among many others in the murky depths of their recollection – its position, unclear.
Syndication precipitated the slow erasure of sequence that had organized shows into seasons and seasons into the series. It mixed-up and confounded the series in a way that enabled one to connect jumping the shark with the end. Though the Fonz jumped the shark in season five, it could have happened anytime, so the question that fateful evening among friends wasn’t when did it happen, but when should it have happened? Though only three years had passed since the show had ceased production, the shift to syndication and its effects began earlier. Happy Days had long filled the slots before or after the evening news in an endless cycle of re-runs and run-ins between the periodically out of synch episodes – like a gropey old transmission, slipping between gears.
That night, the circle of friends conjured the decline of Happy Days irrespective of the facts. The distance in time softened the outlines of the past. Syndication took the sequence out of the series. It wasn’t in the middle. It wasn’t anywhere. Combined with the character of the show itself, it was easy to mistake its position for one closer to the end than the beginning. It was easy to mistake and agree to a reality according to the mold, not the facts.
The friends didn’t bother with the facts. The facts would have disrupted the story. And perhaps, if they had stood “face to face with a fact” and seen “the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter [scimitar],” it would have cut right through their clever conceit of the irrepressible Fonz and his shark, concluding its career. So, in answer to Thoreau, do we only crave reality, be it life or death? Or are we just as happy to exist among the myriad inventions that underpin and imagine the relationships between the Fonz, a shark and the decline and fall of Happy Days?
Expert networks and traders of inside information are analytically separate categories, not synonyms. This has been the main failure of the press’ coverage of the insider trading scandal. Expert networks match experts with those in need of their expertise. That’s it. Done properly, they bring transparency and compliance to conversations that are otherwise already happening between outside experts and analysts. Expert networks are not clearinghouses for inside information.
Dealbook provides a useful recap of the facts, essentially collecting many of the extant who and what’s that have been involved, along with a fresh set of juicy complaints.
There are users of expert networks, be they hedge funds or mutual funds, that have been known to put a good bit of pressure on the experts to give them more than what they know is permissible information. And anyone who put that kind of pressure on an expert should be very worried right now.
—Sean O’Malley, partner with White & Case: via Reuters
The information trafficked by the four ‘consultants’ went way beyond permissible market research. It was insider information.
—Janice Fedarcyk, a Federal Bureau of Investigation assistant director in charge of the investigation: via WSJ
Few hedge fund managers have the investment skill to deliver the benefits that they promise. They have to find an edge however they can — in this case through the expert networks.
—James Fanto, a professor at Brooklyn Law School in New York, mistaking expert networks for the ethical failings of those alleged to have traded in inside information: via Bloomberg
Stilltitled 