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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7067725975300504492015-08-02T06:35:39.112-04:00Reading the MarketsInsights from Financial LiteratureBrenda Jubinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-57090378982648727492015-08-02T05:22:00.000-04:002015-08-02T06:35:39.134-04:00Veseth, Money, Taste, and Wine

Mike Veseth, an economist who studies global wine markets, is a prolific writer. His latest book is Money, Taste, and Wine: It's Complicated! (Rowman & Littlefield). It debunks the (obvious) myth that pricier wine is always better wine, even though—and I suppose this is why, in part, it's complicated—we enjoy wine more when we're told it's expensive, even if it's not. The book also offers tips to becoming a smarter, happier wine drinker.

If you're buying wine for yourself, you should understand that the ability to sense aromas and flavors varies from person to person. The range of responses to bitterness, one of the five basic components to taste (the others being sweet, salt, sour, and the pleasant savory taste of umami), is especially great. About 20% of the population are "supertasters" who have an exaggerated reaction to bitterness, 20% are bitter-tolerant "nontasters," and the rest of us are merely "tasters."

If you've got nothing better to do with a few minutes of your time and if you happen to have blue food coloring in your kitchen cupboard, you can find out what group you fall into. "Cut a one-centimeter-square hole in a note card, put a little blue food coloring in your mouth, go up to a mirror, stick out your tongue, and look at it through the hole. Welcome to the supertaster club if you count about 150 bright-blue taste buds in that little square. A nontaster has about fifty taste buds per square centimeter, and average tasters are in the middle, with about one hundred." (p. 25)

Still curious about why people like certain kinds of wines more than others? Veseth points the reader to the websites of Tim Hanni, www.timhanni.com and www.myVinotype.com, to learn about Hanni's classification of wine drinkers into four basic groups.

Now to the money side of wine. Have you ever heard of dump bucket wines? When a winery that normally charges a premium price has more product than it knows what to do with, it sometimes keeps the price of its fine wine high in the home market and then off-loads the excess in a market it does not normally contest. (p. 36) Sometimes the wine disappears into the bulk market and reappears "who knows where with who knows what label, perhaps blended with other wines." (p. 39)

Then there are the big-bag, big-box wines. Not the bag-in-box wines that apparently account for more than half the wine sales in French supermarkets and are now among the fastest-growing wine categories in the U.S. No, the really big bag in the really big box—a 24,000-liter bag in a standard shipping container. The wine is bulk shipped and then bottled in the domestic market, sometimes as a private-label wine. By 2013 50% of New World wine exports were bulk wine, saving an average of $2.25 per standard 9-liter case on shipping and tariffs and reducing wine's carbon footprint.

And what makes Champagne so special? Not the grapes. It's traditionally made from Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Pinot Meunier grapes used in various proportions. Not the production process, which uses industry-standard technology. Not the cost to produce a bottle, which on average is $13. It's marketing, a staggering $16 per bottle. And so we have at least $16 worth of good reasons to choose similar sparkling wines that can be equally satisfying at a much lower price.

Veseth also addresses the question of whether one should invest in fine wine. "The problem with fine-wine investment so far—and I think that this is changing—is that most of the action has been in a very small number of particular assets, mainly the famous names from Bordeaux. This makes the wine investment market a bit like the stock exchange in one of those emerging-market countries where the stocks of one or two companies dominate the action." (p. 135)

And here's a tidbit for correlation fanatics. "The prices of fine wine and crude oil have been highly correlated in recent years." According to an IMF study, "wine follows the twists and turns of oil prices, but it is somewhat less volatile in terms of peaks and troughs." (pp. 138-39)

Veseth's book is an enjoyable read. Take it to the beach with a bladder of wine.Brenda Jubinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-84595537323690033112015-07-26T11:34:00.000-04:002015-07-26T11:34:30.461-04:00Margins and edgesWe don't know what we want—to be part of the mainstream or to live on the margin, to stay in our comfort zone or to venture out to the edge.

Well, that's not exactly true.

We don't want to be marginalized. We don't want to live a precarious life financially, not knowing where out next meal is coming from. Most of us don't want to cross the margin of civilized behavior. But we do want a margin of safety, we allow for a margin of error, and sometimes it's to our advantage to trade on margin. Breakthroughs often happen at the margins.

In a book a margin is that area between what is important, the text, and what is no longer even a book, everything beyond the edge. It's a place between that which matters and that which, to the engaged reader, doesn't. But it's also a place where the reader can add his own thoughts, where he can be creative.

Margins have two dimensions; edges, only one. Margins are for wimps (like those who want to live another day); edges, for daredevils. People who live on the edge take risks, almost by definition without a safety net. Living on the edge can be exciting and illuminating. But the edge itself is unforgiving. There's no second dimension in which to tiptoe forwards and backwards. You can win big, you can lose everything. The edge is not a place for risk management.

We are inclined to be in awe of those who, to our minds, live at the edge. But sometimes their contribution lies not in fearlessly standing at the edge but in working in the margin, moving the edge away from themselves. Scientists, for instance, push back the edge of ignorance. Smart traders find a way to hedge or otherwise mitigate risk.

I suspect that the humble margin deserves more respect, even though I can find no upside to being marginalized. We ourselves have to choose to test boundaries, to push beyond our comfort zone, to take on risk. Perhaps then our profit margin will improve. We don't want others to push us out because we are deemed unworthy of being part of the mainstream—because we are poor, different, or just easy to ignore.
Brenda Jubinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-80759721845134676762015-07-25T05:34:00.000-04:002015-07-25T05:34:00.279-04:00Updegrove, The Lafayette Campaign

A change of pace: some light reading for those who watch programs like "Mr. Robot" and even the dreary "CSI: Cyber." (I exercised through about ten minutes of the latter show before I pulled the plug once and for all.)

Andrew Updegrove, author of The Alexandria Project, is back with another Frank Adversego cyber-thriller, The Lafayette Campaign: A Tale of Deception and Elections. If you (well, only if you're a Republican) think that the worst case scenario is that Donald Trump decides the next presidential election, assuming that he runs as a third-party candidate, think again. Elections can be tipped or determined not only by third-party candidates (Ralph Nader is often said to have been the spoiler in 2000) and Supreme Court decisions but also by hackers.

The more electronic elections become, the more hackable they are. Competing rogue forces can devote funds and skills to shaping their outcome. Indeed, just think about it. Why give millions of dollars to PACs, money which is often wasted, when you can fund a bunch of hackers? The Chicago "vote early and often" pols and the RNC Watergate crew worked in the pre-digital era. Today their exploits seem laughably primitive. Elections can be stolen much more elegantly with a few lines of code.

The Lafayette Campaign is a fast-paced thriller that takes the reader through the machinations of election cyber-fraud. A perfect beach book. Brenda Jubinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-51611724531023977712015-07-19T05:04:00.000-04:002015-07-19T05:04:00.378-04:00Process vs. resultsHow many times have you read that, in investing and especially in trading, it's the process that matters. Results either follow or don't. Since the financial markets are more or less random, one can't control the results, only the process.

In a book that's coming out in late September, a book that should be on everyone's radar screen and that I'll review later—Superforecasting by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner—the authors criticize the American intelligence community for not systematically assessing its forecasts.

"What there is instead is accountability for process: Intelligence analysts are told what they are expected to do when researching, thinking, and judging, and then held accountable to those standards. Did you consider alternative hypotheses? Did you look for contrary evidence? It's sensible stuff, but the point of making forecasts is not to tick all the boxes on the 'how to make forecasts' checklist. It is to foresee what's coming. To have accountability for process but not accuracy is like ensuring that physicians wash their hands, examine the patient, and consider all the symptoms, but never checking to see whether the treatment works." (p. 73)

Similarly, I think that educators who teach traders and investors to focus only on process, not results, may be selling them short. Traders and investors need to learn to think probabilistically, to size trades accordingly, to make and revise forecasts in the light of new evidence. And they need to check their forecasts, including the time horizon of these forecasts, against the outcomes.

Every investor and trader forecasts, however much they may belittle the notion. Why not learn to do it better and make it a key measurable metric?Brenda Jubinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-50952384710815565682015-07-15T05:05:00.000-04:002015-07-15T05:05:00.245-04:00Answers to word triplet problemsAs promised, here are the answers to yesterday's puzzles:

reading, service, stick? Answer: lip

baby, spring, cap? Answer: shower
Brenda Jubinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-74002814699559883532015-07-14T05:02:00.000-04:002015-07-14T05:02:00.926-04:00Word triplet problemsThe pace of reviews will slow over the next few weeks. It's not that I'm being lazy. I continue to read and write reviews. But some of the books that I've written about won't be published for some time, and most publishers want reviews to appear close to the book launch date. Right now I have posts scheduled for August, September, even October.

In the meantime, I'll try to fill the gap with some random thoughts, bits of trivia, and brain teasers. Today's post belongs to the last category.

From Innovating Minds, a book that will see the light of day only in October (so stay tuned for the review), two word triplet problems. In these problems you are given three apparently unrelated words and are asked to think of a fourth word that is related to all three words and that can form a phrase with each of them. For example, the words "age," "mile," and "sand" all are associated with "stone": "Stone Age," "milestone," and "sandstone."

Okay, ready? Here are two sets of words. See if you can find the missing fourth word in each case.

reading, service, stick

baby, spring, cap

I'll post the answers tomorrow.
Brenda Jubinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-73954620035862324012015-07-08T05:14:00.000-04:002015-07-08T05:14:00.195-04:00Zopounidis and Galariotis, Quantitative Financial Risk Management

Quantitative Financial Risk Management: Theory and Practice, edited by Constantin Zopounidis and Emilios Galariotis (Wiley, 2015) is a collection of 15 papers, written primarily by academics. The papers deal with five main topics: supervisory risk management, risk models and measures, portfolio management, credit risk modeling, and financial markets.

One paper that I think should be of general interest to investors is William T. Ziemba's "Portfolio Optimization." Ziemba argued in 2005 that the Sharpe ratio needed to be modified to evaluate properly the returns of great investors since the ordinary Sharpe ratio penalizes gains. The modified measure (DSSR—downside symmetric Sharpe ratio) uses only losses to calculate the denominator.

So what kinds of DSSRs do the great investors/traders have? Berkshire Hathaway's is 0.917. Compared to four other funds (Quantum, Tiger, Windsor, and the Ford Foundation), it has the highest monthly gains but also the largest monthly losses. "It is clear," the author writes, "that Warren Buffett is a long-term Kelly type investor who does not care about monthly losses, just high final wealth."

By comparison, "the great hedge fund investors [Ed] Thorp at DSSR = 13.8 and [Jim] Simons at 26.4 dominate dramatically. In their cases, the ordinary Sharpe ratio does not show their brilliance. For Simons, his Sharpe was only 1.68." Be careful, however, what you wish for. One fund that the author studied had an infinity DSSR. "That one turned out to be a Madoff-type fraud!" (pp. 203-204)Brenda Jubinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-89976852391960906872015-07-05T05:13:00.000-04:002015-07-05T05:13:00.407-04:00Carlson, A Wealth of Common Sense

Ben Carlson, a popular financial blogger, has written his first book, A Wealth of Common Sense: Why Simplicity Trumps Complexity in Any Investment Plan (Wiley, 2015). Before I started reading it, I contemplated a host of ways in which one could write a truly awful book using the words "wealth," "common sense," and "simplicity" in its title. Fortunately, Carlson fell into none of these traps. His is an elegant, well documented account of how to become a wealth-building investor—not an extraordinary investor, not one who tries to compete with the professionals at their own game, but an investor who finds his edge in simplicity, patience, discipline, and a focus on the long-run.

Carlson's advice applies to all kinds of investors. He is not saying, for instance, that value trumps growth or that passive mutual funds are preferable to actively managed funds. There's no perfect portfolio, except in hindsight.

Some of his advice addresses ways in which we can avoid sabotaging ourselves. One suggestion: "Setting up a systematic process imposes discipline on your lesser self. You will still have to make discretionary decisions many times over the years, but just know that you are by far the easiest person to fool. Understand why you should or shouldn't do something based on your knowledge of yourself and use a plan to create a hurdle that makes it difficult to make poor decisions." (p. 152)

This piece of advice stems from Carlson's overarching model of investing: "Philosophy [your core investing beliefs] leads to an investment strategy which leads to portfolio construction which is all worthless if you don't have a process in place that allows you to follow each of these steps." (p. 89) Read that sentence again. Whether you are managing a $1,000 or a $10 million portfolio, odds are that you are missing one or more pieces of the puzzle.

Carlson exposes thirteen market myths, including "stocks are riskier than bonds," "a yield on an investment makes it safer," "commodities are a good long-term investment," and "housing is a good long-term investment." Re the last: "Think of housing as more of an asset that forces you to build equity over time than an investment that is likely to compound your savings." (p. 82)

He explores asset allocation, arguing that "it is by far the most important portfolio decision you will make. Stock picking is for home-run hitters who will likely strike out. Asset allocation is for those who wish to safely get on base time after time with a high probability for success." (p. 146)

A Wealth of Common Sense should provide value to investors at all levels of experience and net worth. It forces the reader to re-think how he goes about investing and how he can stay true to his principles, through good markets and bad.Brenda Jubinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-5279722488374266952015-07-01T05:11:00.000-04:002015-07-01T05:11:00.779-04:00Freedman & Nutting, Equity Crowdfunding for Investors

Until 2012, by law, angel investing was restricted either to the very wealthy or to the founders of private companies, along with their family and friends. Title III of the JOBS Act lifted this restriction, allowing startups and burgeoning businesses to sell equity to all investors, not just accredited ones, through online crowdfunding portals. Pending final rules from the SEC and FINRA, crowdfunding portals with unrestricted Title III offerings may launch this year.

This will be an entirely new investment opportunity for "the rest of us," one that needs a help manual, with online updates. And we get just that in Equity Crowdfunding for Investors: A Guide to Risks, Returns, Regulations, Funding Portals, Due Diligence, and Deal Terms by David M. Freedman and Matthew R. Nutting (Wiley, 2015). Freedman is a financial and legal journalist; Nutting, a corporate lawyer who is a director of the National Crowdfunding Association.

Equity crowdfunding is fundamentally different from rewards-based crowdfunding, the best known example of which is Kickstarter. If you invest in a company on Kickstarter, the best you can get is the promised reward—a T-shirt, for instance. You are not getting any equity in the company. No matter how successful the company is, all you have to show for your investment is one lousy T-shirt.

Of course, a T-shirt is better than nothing, which is probably what you'll reap from your equity investment. Ian Sobieski, founder and manager of the Band of Angels, one of the most successful angel groups in the U.S., said that they'd made more than 200 investments (actually, the authors write, 270). "If you take the top nine performing deals out of the basket, the IRR [internal rate of return] drops to zero. So only one in 20 really moves the needle. Since the average investor invests in only 10-or-so deals, the odds of any one angel being in a winner are only 50 percent." (p. 105)

The authors suggest that a person needs two qualities to be a successful investor in equity crowdfunding: judge of character and patience. "When you invest in a company that has a limited track record in terms of revenue, or even product distribution, you need to judge whether the founder (or founding team) has what it takes to succeed. Experienced angel investors commonly 'bet on the jockey, not the horse.'" (p. 114) And you must be willing to hold onto your shares. "In equity crowdfunding, under Title III, when an investor buys shares in a company, he or she must hold those shares for at least a year before trying to sell them, with some exceptions. Even after the first year, those shares may be difficult to sell—who will buy them? There may not be a ready market or exchange for them; in other words, they are illiquid. In the past, angel investors typically had to wait seven or eight years before an exit or liquidity event occurred or selling their shares became realistic, if, in fact, the companies still existed after eight years." (p. 115)

If, despite the caveats, you're still game, Freedman and Nutting lay out in great detail how to get started, how to navigate the portals as well as the law, and how to be a wise investor. As the regulatory bodies continue to write the final rules, it's a perfect time to get a head start on what will undoubtedly be an exciting new area for would-be angels.Brenda Jubinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-11106585896856452312015-06-28T06:12:00.000-04:002015-06-28T06:12:00.042-04:00Baldwin, Heroes & Villains of Finance

A recent study by Microsoft has found that our attention span is now a mere eight seconds, less than that of a goldfish (on average nine seconds). Not exactly conducive to reading War and Peace. On the other hand, this truncated attention span is perfectly matched to A. Baldwin's Heroes & Villains of Finance: The 50 Most Colourful Characters in the History of Finance (Wiley, 2015).

Baldwin devotes four pages to each of his colorful characters. The first page has only the person's name and dates. The second, and sometimes part of the third, is given over to a biographical sketch. The rest of the space displays, in large type and all caps, noteworthy quotations attributed to the person. These quotation pages are designed to be eye-catching and attention-getting. Occasionally there is white text on a black background, sometimes the type is blue, here and there the quotation is slanted.

Baldwin starts with Thales, who offers the earliest example of options trading, and ends with Dick Fuld. In between we have an assortment of economists, politicians, and financial titans and scoundrels. I would list the cast of characters, but I might be accused of copyright infringement. If I included their dates, I would have reproduced a quarter of the book.

This book is superficial, yes, but it seems to reflect a distracted "text and read" culture. Perhaps one day publishers and lovers of good books will start their own knock-off ad campaign: "Don't text while reading."Brenda Jubinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-88630355328739515492015-06-22T05:07:00.000-04:002015-06-22T05:07:00.160-04:00Griffin, Charlie Munger

Fans of Warren Buffett's sidekick will welcome the publication of Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor by Tren Griffin (forthcoming, Columbia Business School Publishing). Unfortunately, they most likely won't learn much that they didn't already know. The author relies exclusively on published material—speeches, records of annual meetings, interviews, and writings.

For those who aren't familiar with Munger's ideas, however, this brief book offers a solid introduction. It sets out quotations from Munger "in a logical order, typically followed by an explanation" by the author. It also places his thought within the context of the value investing principles of Benjamin Graham.

A voracious reader whose knowledge spans a wide range of academic disciplines (as Griffin describes him, "He knows a lot about a lot, and he knows a little about nearly everything"), Munger is probably best known for his notion of a latticework of mental models. As he said, "You have to realize the truth of biologist Julian Huxley's idea that 'Life is just one damn relatedness after another.' So you must have the models, and you must see the relatedness and the effects from the relatedness." (p. 46)

For Munger, the wise investor should read extensively, analyze like a fox (as opposed to a hedgehog), and act decisively and in scale when the right opportunity presents itself.

A corollary of his multidisciplinary approach to investing is that one shouldn't rely solely on quantitative analysis. Although Munger was a math major as an undergraduate, he recognizes the limitations of measuring. "You've got a complex system and it spews out a lot of wonderful numbers that enable you to measure some factors. But there are other factors that are terribly important, [yet] there's no precise numbering you can put to these factors. … Well, practically (1) everybody overweighs the stuff that can be numbered, because it yields to the statistical techniques they're taught in academia, and (2) doesn't mix in the hard-to-measure stuff that may be more important. That is a mistake I've tried all my life to avoid…." (p. 45) And again, "People calculate too much and think too little." (p. 46)

As for acting decisively, Munger said during the 1996 Wesco annual meeting: "Experience tends to confirm a long-held notion that being prepared, on a few occasions in a lifetime, to act promptly in scale, in doing some simple and logical thing, will often dramatically improve the financial results of that lifetime. A few major opportunities, clearly recognizable as such, will usually come to one who continuously searches and waits, with a curious mind that loves diagnosis involving multiple variables. And then all that is required is a willingness to bet heavily when the odds are extremely favorable, using resources available as a result of prudence and patience in the past." (p. 65)

Charlie Munger is a wise (as well as an exceedingly smart—and rich) man. It's worth an investor's while to know what makes him tick.Brenda Jubinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-37189090328280140142015-06-17T05:02:00.000-04:002015-06-17T05:02:00.198-04:00Lacalle and Parrilla, The Energy World Is Flat

With a nod to Thomas Friedman's 2005 book, The World Is Flat, Daniel Lacalle and Diego Parrilla envisage a time when The Energy World Is Flat and explore, in the words of the book's subtitle, Opportunities from the End of Peak Oil (Wiley, 2015).

Ten forces are flattening the energy world, helping to make energy more of an enabler and less of a constraint: geopolitics; the energy reserves and resources glut; horizontal drilling and fracking; the energy broadband; overcapacity; globalization, industrialization, and urbanization; demand destruction; demand displacement; regulation and government intervention; and fiscal, monetary and macroeconomic flatteners.

This is, as the ten forces should make evident, a "big picture" book. It looks at how high oil prices have to be for Venezuela and Iran to balance their budgets (over $100/bbl) and at world demographic trends (population growth is slowing, on average the global population is getting older). It uses estimates from the UN for population growth, from the IMF for economic growth, and from the IEA for demand growth to conclude that "a global population growth of 0.7% pa may be able to generate economic growth in real GDP terms of 3.6% pa, while increasing energy consumption by 1.5% pa. These trends are consistent with the work from Laherrere, who claims that world oil consumption and production per capita peaked in 1979." (p. 128)

How can the investor profit from the current energy revolution? The answers are complicated. For instance, the lead author believes that natural gas will emerge a winner, but, for two reasons, does not recommend buying the natural gas ETF: (1) natural gas will be a winner in volume but not necessarily in price and (2) the U.S. natural gas ETF has historically been a "financial weapon of wealth destruction." (p. 247) The reason for the latter is that "the roll yield in natural gas has been so extreme, that over the long run the shape of the forward curve has been a more important factor in determining the value of the ETF than the actual price of natural gas." At the time the author was writing this section, "the price of US natural gas was down 40% since launch, but the ETF was down 95%." (p. 268)

The key to successful energy investing is to follow capital expenditure. "The winners will be those that ignore fashionable trends and favour good old return on capital as their key guideline—without ignoring [government] policy." (p. 277)

"In the end," the book concludes, "energy will continue to be about displacement of the least competitive. And the last barrel of oil will not be worth millions. It will be worth zero." (p. 278)Brenda Jubinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-71165133800856596042015-06-15T05:09:00.000-04:002015-06-15T05:09:00.153-04:00Kase on Technical Analysis

Cynthia Kase is a veteran market technician who is an educator, author (multiple papers and a 1996 book, Trading with the Odds), former energy trader, and trading indicator developer. Her Kase StatWare package can be purchased for use on multiple trading platforms.

Kase on Technical Analysis (Wiley, 2015) is a multimedia package: a 13-part video series (online or in DVD format) with a complementary paperback, Kase on Technical Analysis Workbook. The videos run roughly 6.5 hours; the workbook is just shy of 200 pages, although nearly half the book is white space.

As one might expect, the videos highlight Kase's proprietary studies as an improvement over classic indicators, but they are more than a lengthy infomercial. Moreover, as Kase suggests, she has tried "to describe enough about [her] indicators, including the basic math, so that those who understand the concepts explained, and who have the programming capability, could, if they wanted, duplicate or at least come close to duplicating [her] work, for their personal use." For instance, unlike traditional momentum indicators, which "generally evaluate current closes relative to past closes or high-low ranges," hers "are based on statistical measures of serial dependency, normalized for logarithmic volatility, and optimized for cycle length." (p. 173) Reverse engineering these indicators sounds like a daunting task; approximating them is probably achievable; understanding their rationale should be within the reach of every trader.

Despite the mathematical complexity of the Kase studies, the videos are most appropriate for relative beginners. They explain how to forecast and estimate risk and how to enter and exit trades using chart patterns and traditional indicators such as moving averages, DMI, ADX, RSI, and MACD, as well as Kase StatWare.Brenda Jubinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-36480368681636820142015-06-10T05:03:00.000-04:002015-06-10T05:03:00.142-04:00Rouah, The Heston Model

In 2013 Fabrice Douglas Rouah published The Heston Model and Its Extensions in Matlab and C#. Now, for those who feel more at home with Excel spreadsheets, comes The Heston Model and Its Extensions in VBA (Wiley, 2015). It is a condensed and readapted version of the original book, although both books follow the same chapter outline. In the author's words, "it serves as a 'VBA cookbook' for the models covered in the original book, rather than a reference guide for the theoretical aspects of the models." (p. xvii) VBA code snippets, those that are vital to the calculations, are illustrated in the text and are available for download to those who purchase the book.

The Heston stochastic volatility model for pricing options was introduced in 1993, six years after the stock market crash of October 1987. The crash, with its subsequent "exacerbation of smiles and skews in the implied volatility surface," called into question the restrictive assumptions of the Black-Scholes model. "The most tenuous of these assumptions is that of continuously compounded stock returns being normally distributed with constant volatility." Returns are not normally distributed but exhibit skewness and kurtosis, and volatility is not constant in time but tends to be inversely related to price.

Readers of Rouah's book should be well schooled in advanced calculus. This is a book for quants, not the casual options trader. As far as I know, no retail options trading platform offers the alternative of using the Heston pricing model even though the deficiencies of Black-Scholes are well documented. In fact, one rationale for sticking with Black-Scholes is precisely that its deficiencies are so well known. The Heston model remains a work in progress.Brenda Jubinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-64851691561589089282015-06-08T05:05:00.000-04:002015-06-08T05:05:00.619-04:00Morales & Kacher, Short-Selling with the O'Neil Disciples

Gil Morales and Chris Kacher, the self-styled O'Neil disciples, have established something of a franchise. This is their third book. First came Trade Like an O'Neil Disciple (2010), then In The Trading Cockpit with the O'Neil Disciples (2012), and now Short-Selling with the O'Neil Disciples: Turn to the Dark Side of Trading (Wiley, 2015).

The authors remain true to their basic philosophy and method, which they dubbed OWL for O'Neil-Wyckoff-Livermore. Here they apply it to short selling.

They sketch out six rules, which deal with cycle timing, stock selection (in terms of price action and volume), trade timing, and setting stops and profit targets. They display chart patterns that serve as short-selling set-ups. They explain the mechanics of short selling. They analyze five case studies that occurred between 2011 and 2014—AAPL, NFLX, GMCR, DDD, and MCP.

And, in what they consider the "real meat of the book," they offer 91 "templates of doom," or "what one might consider models of the greatest short-selling plays in recent history." Studying these templates—marked-up daily and weekly charts—"can give one an edge in recognizing when a major short-selling opportunity is at hand." (pp. 175-76)

In a cautionary note, the authors readily admit that "there is nothing mechanistic or deterministic about short-selling. Sometimes these set-ups work beautifully, sometimes they don't, and the probabilities of success rely heavily on contextual factors. These contextual factors include the current action of the major market averages, the phase of the market, the overall national and global economic backdrop, industry developments, earnings news, and the occasional, random, and sudden positive news or rumors that trigger a bounce in an otherwise weak, down-trending stock. Relative to the long side of the market, my experience is that the short side tends to be far more volatile and fraught with uncertainty." (p. 176)

However potentially treacherous the short side, there are times that short positions are the only money makers. And yet many investors and traders remain squeamish about shorting stocks, not so much because they fear "the dark side" but because it's uncharted territory. Morales and Kacher have literally charted the way for them. Brenda Jubinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-71205324099491172622015-06-07T05:24:00.000-04:002015-06-07T05:24:00.246-04:00Mental toughness and mountain climbing

I recall reading that Julian Robertson took his young Tiger hires mountain climbing as a test of their risk-taking skills and their mental toughness. Well, I thought at the time, given my acute acrophobia, I would have been summarily bounced to the secretarial pool.

There are obvious parallels between mountain climbing and trading. In a paper in the edited volume Mental Toughness in Sport (Daniel F. Gucciardi and Sandy Gordon, eds, Routledge Research in Sport and Exercise Science, 2011) Tom Fawcett takes as his first case study Alex, a high-level mountaineer with over 30 years' climbing experience.

Alex said that mental toughness means different things at different times of an expedition. In advance of a trip, he identified "preparation, attention to detail, accurate risk assessment, the need to be realistic, seeing the bigger picture and having a sense of perspective and being adaptable" as important factors.

During the climb mental toughness is about having a "correct response [psychological and physical] in the moment it [whatever 'it' may be] happens." It involves risk assessment (yet again) and managing anxiety. Importantly, it means having the ability and courage to accept failure at the expense of personal achievement or ego satisfaction. "People get carried away with their own egos, and the need to summit takes control over more logical judgments. People 'lose it' and many people have unfortunately lost their lives because of their obsession to get to the top. … They gamble and forfeit their lives in the quest for absolute success and the need to avoid failure."

Being successful, he suggested, is an indication that one has not been truly tested to the ultimate limit. Failing, on the other hand, is both extremely difficult and, perhaps paradoxically, emotionally satisfying. As Alex said, "Failures are inner rewarding and not external like reaching a summit. I climb to live, not to die. The summit is optional, but returning is mandatory."

You can draw the obvious parallels.Brenda Jubinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-62939787827845089242015-06-03T05:05:00.000-04:002015-06-03T05:05:00.642-04:00Sherbin, How to Price and Trade Options

Retail options traders may remember Al Sherbin from his days as the director of research for Tastytrade. He can now add to his list of credits an excellent book: How to Price and Trade Options: Identify, Analyze, and Execute the Best Trade Probabilities (Bloomberg / Wiley, 2015).

This book is most useful for those who are familiar with the basics of options and who, following probabilities, prefer short premium trades. If your idea of option trading is buying lottery-ticket out-of-the-money calls or puts, you will either be thoroughly annoyed with this book or experience a revelation.

Unlike most options books, Sherbin's is practical. It doesn't replace the classic texts but complements them. As he says, his entire book is about pricing risk transference and subsequently managing that risk. He explains, among other things, how to choose a strategy, how to match it to the number of days to expiration, and how to trade earnings announcements.

What I found most valuable was his chapter on exiting trades. He uses a stripped-down version of the often maligned Kelly Criterion to design a positive expectancy strategy. Setting the Kelly percent to zero, he can "back off" one of the three variables—percentage of winners (or, if forecasting, probability of profit), average gain of winning trades, and average loss of losing trades—to create a winning formula. You can calculate, for instance, where you would have to take losses to break even if you sell strangles at a 90% probability of profit and take profits at 25% of maximum profit. For those who don't want to risk messing up the math, Sherbin provides—on a linked website—a Kelly Criterion worksheet.

As for logging trades, he is a firm believer in keeping records. A log serves many purposes, but its main rationale is "to be able to compare expected probabilities to actual probabilities over an extended period of time." (p. 197) From the website the reader can download a useful trading log template.

Continuing with the nuts and bolts of trading, Sherbin discusses order execution, an area where traders often stumble. He then moves on to portfolio management, which is "perhaps the most difficult area of trading." (p. 215) He delves into a range of topics here--correlation (with yet another downloadable spreadsheet), systemic risk, trade sizing (and no, he doesn't use the Kelly Criterion to size his positions), and early exercise.

Those who are comfortable with the idea of mechanical, probability-driven options trading or who want to learn more about how to be profitable following this approach will find Sherbin's book a most welcome addition to the literature. It's both smart and practical.
Brenda Jubinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-72346109799316450102015-05-28T05:05:00.000-04:002015-05-28T05:05:00.449-04:00Dawidziak, Mark Twain's Guide to Diet, Exercise, Beauty, Fashion, Investment, Romance, Health and Happiness

Over the years Mark Twain (or in some cases the apocryphal Twain) has been a source of apt quotations on every conceivable subject. Mark Dawidziak's wonderful collection—and no, I'm not going to repeat the book title (Prospect Park Books, 2015) organizes Twain's biting "self-help" humor by category, including a chapter on finance and investment. Herewith four gems from that chapter. I've intentionally omitted Twain's two most famous financial quotations—the one about the peculiarly dangerous months in which to speculate in stocks and the other about putting all your eggs in one basket—although the first piece of advice I share here probably runs a close third.

"There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can."

"I find that, as a rule, when a thing is a wonder to us it is not because of what we see in it, but because of what others have seen in it. We get almost all our wonders at second hand … By and by you sober down, and then you perceive that you have been drunk on the smell of somebody else's work."

"Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: 'I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.'"

"A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to you than the ninety-and-nine which you had to work for, and money won at faro or in stock snuggles into your heart in the same way."
Brenda Jubinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-84878092250065988452015-05-26T05:00:00.000-04:002015-05-26T05:00:00.566-04:00Thaler, Misbehaving

Behavioral economics is now mainstream, at least outside of the stodgiest of economics departments. In fact, as the author writes, "This maturation of the field is so advanced that when this book is published in 2015, barring impeachment, I will be in the midst of a year serving as the president of the American Economic Association, and Robert Shiller will be my successor. The lunatics are running the asylum!" (p. 335) How behavioral economics got to this point from its humble, academically risky beginnings in the 1970s is the subject of Richard H. Thaler's Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (W. W. Norton, 2015).

Traditional economics studies rational agents, whom Thaler calls Econs; behavioral economics studies Humans. Econs are a construct designed to fit a theory; Humans are real people whose often irrational activities provide data (supposedly irrelevant factors) for study and hypothesis formation.

Thaler's book, a personal history of the struggles and triumphs of behavioral economics, is also a wonderful introduction to the field. It recounts study after study that show just how predictably error-prone people are. And it explains how businesses can use these findings to keep customers happy and how governments can use them for the public good.

Looking back, Thaler suggests that the area where behavioral economics has had its greatest impact is in finance. "No one would have predicted that in 1980. In fact, it was unthinkable, because economists knew that financial markets were the most efficient of all markets, the places where arbitrage was easiest, and thus the domain in which misbehaving was least likely to appear." And yet these markets exhibited tell-tale anomalies, for instance the storied case of Palm and 3Com. Moreover, he notes, "It also didn't hurt that financial markets offer the best opportunities to make money if markets are misbehaving, so a lot of intellectual resources have gone into investigating possible profitable investment strategies." (p. 346)

The area where it has had the least impact so far is macroeconomics. In part, at least, this is due to the fact that the field "lacks the two key ingredients that contributed to the success of behavioral finance: the theories do not make easily falsifiable predictions, and the data are relatively scarce." (p. 337)

Misbehaving is a thoroughly enjoyable read, not quite right for the beach but perfect for a rainy Sunday afternoon.Brenda Jubinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-79279430819648280472015-05-24T11:17:00.000-04:002015-05-24T11:17:33.393-04:00Vance, Elon Musk

I just watched a couple of clips from the video of this year's Yale commencement—the awarding of honorary degrees to Janet Yellen and Elon Musk. Janet Yellen, with her marvelously warm smile, looked as if she had just been named Miss Congeniality. By contrast, Elon Musk, who couldn't quite figure out where he was supposed to stand to have the hood placed on his shoulders, seemed somehow both disengaged and uncomfortable—like a man who had about fifty places he'd rather be or fifty things he'd rather be thinking about.

Ashlee Vance's biography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (Ecco / HarperCollins, 2015) reveals just how complicated he is. He's been tested over and over and not only survives but thrives. He's a passionate man willing to take big risks, a man who wants to save humanity from itself but who works himself (and his top workers) to death. He's got a big ego, and sometimes he's a jerk. And, of course, he's brilliant.

Inevitably compared to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, Musk holds his own. Right now most people view him as either "the" or "a" guiding force of the technology industry. As for his personality, a venture capitalist said that "he's nicer than Jobs and a bit more refined than Bill Gates." (p. 287) Whatever you think of him as an individual, his accomplishments are staggering.

If you're looking for a great summer read, one that I personally found inspiring, I can highly recommend this book. Brenda Jubinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-7739463991205161592015-05-21T05:07:00.000-04:002015-05-21T05:07:00.365-04:00Hand, The Improbability Principle

I would like to say that if you've taken a statistics and probability course you don't need to read David J. Hand's The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day (Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). But even sophisticated quants often seem not to understand why black swans may not be so uncommon after all.

Hand, emeritus professor of mathematics at Imperial College London, former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and the chief scientific adviser to Winton Capital Management, has written this book for the layman. No complicated equations here, just easy to follow prose.

What Hand calls the Improbability Principle "asserts that extremely improbable events are commonplace. It's a consequence of a collection of more fundamental laws, which all tie together to lead inevitably and inexorably to the occurrence of such extraordinarily unlikely events. These laws, this principle, tell us that the universe is in fact constructed so that these coincidences are unavoidable: the extraordinarily unlikely must happen; events of vanishingly small probability will occur. The Improbability Principle resolves the apparent contradiction between the sheer unlikeliness of such events, and the fact that they nevertheless keep on happening." (pp. 11-12)

Braided together to form the Improbability Principle are several laws. First, the law of inevitability, which says that of all possible outcomes, one of them must occur. Second, the law of selection, which says that you can make probabilities as high as you like if you choose after the event. Think of the classic example of a person painting bull's eyes and targets around arrows shot into the side of a barn. Third, the law of truly large numbers, not to be confused with the law of large numbers. This one says that with a large enough number of opportunities, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. Fourth, the law of the probability lever, according to which a slight change in circumstances can have a huge impact on probabilities. And fifth, the law of near enough, which says that events that are sufficiently similar are regarded as identical.

On the face of it, these five laws may seem a peculiar way to think about highly unlikely events, and those expecting a rigorous argument in their favor will be disappointed. But I think this book serves two functions. It offers the novice an excellent overview of probability and statistics, and it challenges self-satisfied quants to reexamine their assumptions. For instance, it's common knowledge that the distribution of market fluctuations isn't normal, but even if one were to substitute the not-so-different Cauchy distribution for a bell curve the probabilities would be staggeringly different. In a normal distribution the probability of a 5-sigma event is 1 in 3.5 million; in a Cauchy distribution it's 1 in 16. Ten-sigma, 20-sigma, and 30-sigma events in a normal distribution are highly unlikely (a 30-sigma event has a probability of 1 in 2.0 x 10197), but in a Cauchy distribution they happen 1 in 32, 1 in 63, and 1 in 94 times. Fortunately, price fluctuations can't be captured by a Cauchy distribution, but despite all the work done by statisticians, we still are shocked by market movements that, if price changes followed a normal distribution, are supposed to happen only about once every 100,000 years.

The Improbability Principle explains both how our Hardyesque world works and how we do and, more important, should think about it. Brenda Jubinhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-10787498923157899862015-05-19T05:12:00.000-04:002015-05-19T05:12:00.418-04:00Palmer, Smart Money

Bankers have always been an easy target, but during the financial crisis they were vilified. Even as we claw our way back towards some semblance of economic normalcy, the reputation of bankers remains tarnished. One doesn't have to be an Elizabeth Warren to wonder whether finance is as constructive an enterprise as it should be.

Andrew Palmer, business affairs editor of The Economist, is an optimist, as the subtitle of his recent book Smart Money indicates: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our World—for the Better.

Palmer argues that what really lay behind the 2007-2008 crisis was not "out-of-control financial wizardry" but "the humble mortgage." In fact, he asks, "Could it be that the real lesson to be drawn from recent financial history is that the industry suffered from too little innovation, not too much?" (p. 65)

There is an illusion of safety about property, and "the most natural place for money to flow is where it feels safest." But, as a former chief risk officer of HSBC noted, "banks are leveraged and property is leveraged, so there is double leverage," which in a property crash turns into a double whammy. (p. 73)

Castle Trust, a British mortgage venture, tries to solve this problem of double leverage by sharing out the risks. It "offers a product called a partnership mortgage, in which the firm lends 20 percent of a property's value but asks for no monthly interest or capital repayments. Instead, when the home owner sells up, he or she has to repay the original loan amount and give Castle Trust a 40 percent share of any house-price gain. Conversely, if prices have gone down, Castle Trust will shoulder a 20 percent share of the losses." (p. 74) So far new home owners haven't responded enthusiastically to this offer. Growth in the business has come from people remortgaging, even though here the firm does not share in the downside.

Another way in which innovative finance can make a difference is through social-impact bonds, where private investors fund social programs and are paid back from public funds, with a bonus if targets are met. "The theory is that successful projects ought to translate into savings for the public purse, which can be used to pay investors without any additional public spending." (p. 80) Prisoner rehabilitation and homelessness are two areas that have been tackled using SIBs.

Palmer explores several other examples of innovative finance—a drug-development megafund, the brainchild of Andrew Lo; a retirement planning tool, SmartNest, designed by Robert Merton; equity crowdfunding; peer-to-peer lending; alternatives to payday lending using big data; prize-linked savings schemes. By the way, ZestFinance has found that "there are slight differences in the payment outcomes of people who type their names differently (that is, between those who use capitals for the initial letters and then lowercase letters, those who write their names out entirely in uppercase, and those who just use lowercase). People who write their names out in capitals for the initial letters and then lowercase turn out to be more creditworthy." (p. 160) A word to the wise.

Palmer believes that "financial innovation has made enormous contributions to society in the past, and it is primed to do so again. … The balance that regulators have to strike is watchfulness for the risks that can cause real economic damage and tolerance for the ideas that can produce real benefits." (p. 191)Brenda Jubinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-91963444836738688992015-05-14T05:09:00.000-04:002015-05-14T05:09:00.052-04:00Bronson & Merryman, Top Dog

Victor Neiderhoffer recently shared his latest reading list, and on it was a title that caught my fancy—Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman (Twelve / Grand Central Publishing / Hachette, 2013). So, while I wait for review copies of more recent releases, I thought I'd spend some time with this one. I'm glad I did. It's an intriguing investigation into competitive fire—what it is, and how to get it.

I could probably mine this book for a dozen posts. I could write about novices vs. experts (and why I get really annoyed when someone looks over my shoulder while I'm trying to solve a computer problem), warriors vs. worriers, women on Wall Street, playing to win vs. playing not to lose, positive and negative self-talk, additive and subtractive thinking, testosterone, even ballroom dancers and (something I know a fair amount about) dog handlers. But that would be unfair to the authors. Let me simply introduce a couple of concepts instead.

Most of us improve in competition, for a few competition makes no difference, and some are overwhelmed by competition. Science not only predicts which category you will fall into; it "also shows how people can improve their performance in competition, no matter which of those categories they began in."

"Success in competition requires taking risks that are normally held back by fear. The first risk is entering the competition itself—choosing to compete. Everyone has his own personal threshold where the benefits of competing outweigh the fears. Those who focus on what they'll win choose to compete far more. Those who focus on their odds of winning choose to compete far less." On balance, men fall into the first category, women into the second. "Men tend to be overconfident of their abilities and thus are blind to some of the risk. This gets men into more contests, but it doesn't necessarily help them win." (p. 20) Another gender difference: men do better at finite games—those with a beginning and an end; women at infinite games, where "there is no end to the comparisons, only a waxing and waning of competitive intensity." (p. 21)

To some extent, of course, we are our biology. We have a secondary dopamine clearer, COMT, that prevents the brain from overloading. As it turns out, there are two kinds of COMT—the hardworking and the lazy. "In people of European descent, 50% have a combination of both slow and fast enzymes; 25% have only fast enzymes; and 25% have only slow enzymes." (p. 57) What kind of COMT you have determines how you handle stress. When you're stressed, the synapses of the prefrontal cortex are flooded with dopamine. People with fast enzymes, which get rid of the extra dopamine, can handle stress; those with slow enzymes can't.

Before we pity the people with lazy COMT enzymes, the authors call attention to the downside of having fast enzymes. "When someone is not being stressed … the enzymes clear out too much dopamine." Under normal conditions, the prefrontal cortex of these people works suboptimally. "They actually need the stress (and the dopamine) to get up to the optimal level of mental functioning. They need stress to function best. Deadlines, competitions, high-stakes tests, et cetera." (p. 58) Trading would suit these folks. Investing would probably be better for those with slow COMT enzymes. "They have better memories and attention and a higher verbal IQ. They're superior planners and can better orchestrate complex thought." (p. 60) Mind you, I don't know how they would deal with severe market turmoil. Probably quite poorly, unless they are experts in reframing their thinking à la Warren Buffett.

Top Dog is not one of those vapid self-help books. Yes, it offers some suggestions for improving performance in competition, but its real value comes from providing a foundation for understanding competition and how we deal with it. It gives us tools, not a single easy answer.Brenda Jubinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-10956172476691161912015-05-10T05:20:00.000-04:002015-05-10T05:20:00.308-04:00John Bogle classics

Two of John C. Bogle's books on investing have now been designated classics. They have been added to the Wiley Investing Classics series, joining such titles as Lombard Street, The Go-Go Years, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, and The Alchemy of Finance.

Bogle on Mutual Funds: New Perspectives for the Intelligent Investor was originally published in 1993. Since then, investments in mutual funds as a whole have surged eight-fold, and Vanguard's fund assets have grown 25-fold. They are now 50% larger than the entire industry was when Bogle wrote this book.

To readers who are familiar with Vanguard's philosophy, this book may seem, as Bogle himself admits, "old hat." That is only natural. A book isn't designated a classic if only a handful of people ever read it. Or, in the case of investing books, if its message never resonated.

Bogle on Mutual Funds had two missions: to steer the individual investor in the right direction and to cajole the mutual fund industry into adopting more investor-friendly policies. On both fronts Bogle has had considerable success, even he would like to see even more reform.

His advice to the investor is pretty straightforward, but his arguments are definitely worth rereading, or reading for the first time. People have the bad habit of throwing money at the market without knowing anything about the basics of investing. So they invest in the wrong things, or at the wrong time, and curse their bad luck. No investor can be called "intelligent" who doesn't understand the principles Bogle articulates in this book. The investor may still decide to try his hand at outperforming the market, but he should know what he's up against.

* * *

John Bogle on Investing: The First 50 Years is a collection of addresses Bogle delivered, mainly at investment conferences, along with his 1951 senior thesis ("The Economic Role of the Investment Company"). The book was first published in 2001. It reprises the themes of his first volume—investment strategies for the intelligent investor, taking on the mutual fund industry, and economics and idealism: the Vanguard experiment—and adds a section on personal perspectives.

Bogle wrote some of these pieces in the midst of dot.com bubble. The one he delivered at a conference in April 2000 was titled "Risk and Risk Control in an Era of Confidence (Or Is It Greed?)." As he said, "Even as 'it is always darkest before the dawn,' … it may well always be brightest just before evening begins to fall. When reward is at its pinnacle, risk is near at hand." (p. 47) He went on to delineate the four key elements of investing: reward, risk, time, and cost. Investors, as he explained, can control all but the first.

Throughout the book Bogle elaborates on what he considers his most important contribution to the investing community: "the majesty of simplicity in an empire of parsimony." I can't think of a better legacy.Brenda Jubinhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-706772597530050449.post-58342407618668348212015-05-05T05:05:00.000-04:002015-05-05T05:05:00.167-04:00Luna & Renninger, Surprise

Type "tilt" or "skew" into the Google search bar and be prepared to be surprised. What happens (if you're observant) is unexpected.

Tania Luna and Leeann Renninger have written an engaging introduction to an under-researched psychological phenomenon—Surprise: Embrace the Unpredictable and Engineer the Unexpected (Perigree/Penguin, 2015). Part analysis, part self-help, the book is a worthwhile quick read.

Anyone who invests or trades is faced with surprises, both upside and downside. Too much surprise—"brought on by change, uncertainty, and ambiguity"—"triggers anxiety: a vague mixture of fear and dread. It is the sensation of our brains working overtime to predict the future." (p. 33) And so anxious investors listen to financial forecasters and fortune-tellers, trying to get a peek into the future. They want to reduce the element of surprise.

At the other end of the spectrum lies a lack of surprise, which triggers hypostress, "the near opposite of anxiety, … the stress of understimulation. … It's boredom." (p. 33)

We want to be in control, to avoid surprise. And we have more tools to give at least the semblance of control—cell phones, air-conditioners, better models for predicting the weather, big data algorithms to figure out our wants and needs. But change is happening rapidly. "Our future is increasingly unpredictable." And so we seesaw between anxiety in the face of unpredictability and boredom as we try to get rid of surprise by controlling the future with routines and safety nets.

The authors discuss ways to deal more constructively with surprise. One of my favorites is "cool is the enemy of growth." Here's a brief excerpt: "Before age six, kids use the word surprise almost exclusively to describe positive events. As we get older, surprise takes on a more negative connotation. Why? One reason is that surprise makes us vulnerable, and as we get older, we associate vulnerability with embarrassment and shame. We internalize all those moments in which we looked foolish. And we take note of the times we looked pretty darn cool. We like those times. At some point, we decide to avoid feeling foolish and aim for cool instead. That's when the trouble begins." (pp. 63-64) Another reason that the most creative people are often described as childlike.Brenda Jubinhttp://email@example.com


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I need a wiring diagram. I bought the car needing a clutch and previous owner already pulled the tranny and some wires are unplugged everywhere so I need a little help
6 Answers
Try to find a repair manual. They have many schematics and instructions you will need to put it back together. Ebay is a good place to look.
1 out of 1 people think this is helpful.
http://www.2shared.com/document/MjtQvucf/BMW_325i_wiring_diagram_pdf_19.html...but tenspeed has a better answer, a book is better
Alright thanks
All the connectors in bmw don't connect if they are the wrong one. Just be careful with the connectors of the oxygen sensor because those are the same plug.
You can also look at tha cable colors sometimes they are the same on both sides of the plug
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School of Medicine
Showing 1-20 of 39 Results
Dan Elison Azagury, MD
Assistant Professor of Surgery (General Surgery) at the Stanford University Medical Center
Current Research and Scholarly Interests .
Frederick M. Dirbas
Associate Professor of Surgery (General Surgery) at the Stanford University Medical Center
Current Research and Scholarly Interests My research interests are focused on minimizing the impact of breast cancer from a diagnostic and therapuetic standpoint. Breast MRI is a powerful tool to facilitate the screening for and staging of breast cancer, and can be valuable adjunct to guide breast surgery. Oncoplastic surgical techniques optimize cosmesis after breast cancer surgery. Accelerated radiotherapy after lumpectomy decreases radiotherapy treatment times from 6 weeks to just 1 to 5 days.
Monica Dua
Clinical Assistant Professor, Surgery - General Surgery
Current Research and Scholarly Interests Technical aspects of minimally invasive pancreatic and liver surgery
Minimally invasive strategies for the management of pancreatic necrosis
Management of severe acute pancreatitis – academic vs community treatment
Multidisciplinary treatment of HCC; institutional barriers to appropriate referral/ care
Endocrine/exocrine insufficiency after pancreatectomy; volumetric assessment
Natural history and management of pancreatic cysts
Dan Eisenberg
Associate Professor of Surgery (General Surgery) at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration Health Care Center
Current Research and Scholarly Interests Minimally Invasive Surgery
Metabolic-Bariatric Surgery
Ralph S. Greco
Johnson and Johnson Professor of Surgery
Current Research and Scholarly Interests Application of Micro/Nanotechnology to Biological Systems.
Stefanie S. Jeffrey, MD
John and Marva Warnock Professor
Current Research and Scholarly Interests Dr. Jeffrey led the multidisciplinary team from the Schools of Medicine, Engineering, and Genome Technology Center that invented the MagSweeper, an automated device that immunomagnetically captures live circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from cancer patient blood for single cell analysis or culture. Her lab also works on microfluidic technologies for tumor cell capture, characterization, and growth - with the goal of defining individual patient response to newer biologically-based cancer therapies.
James Lau MD FACS
Clinical Associate Professor, Surgery - General Surgery
Current Research and Scholarly Interests My personal mission is to contribute to the overall care of the surgical patient through clinical practice, training, and education. My research interests, as they pertain to this mission, are the surgical management of reflux, minimal access surgical techniques, evidenced based surgery, surgical skills acquisition, and surgical education.
Dana Lin MD
Clinical Assistant Professor, Surgery - General Surgery
Bio Dana Lin, M.D. is a board-certified, fellowship-trained surgeon who specializes in the surgical management of endocrine tumors of the thyroid, parathyroid, and adrenal glands, as well as malignant melanoma. Her clinical practice is based at the Stanford Cancer Center. She also serves as an attending surgeon in endocrine surgery at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System.
Dr. Lin earned her bachelor of science degree in biology at Stanford University and medical degree at the State University of New York School of Medicine. She then completed a residency in general surgery at the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey, where she was awarded the Gallo Award from the Cancer Institute of New Jersey for outstanding cancer research in melanoma.
To further hone her clinical interest in endocrine surgery, she completed a dedicated endocrine surgery fellowship at the Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital. She has expertise in mini-incision thyroid and parathyroidectomy, lymph node dissection for thyroid cancer and melanoma, and laparoscopic adrenalectomy.
Dr. Lin is the author of multiple peer-reviewed publications related to endocrine disease and melanoma. Her ongoing clinical and research interests include the multidisciplinary treatment and outcomes of patients with benign and malignant tumors of the thyroid and parathyroid glands.
Dr. Lin is certified by the American Board of Surgery and is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons. She is an active associate member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists and American Association of Endocrine Surgeons.


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Panaji Residency
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TripAdvisor Reviews Panaji Residency
Travel Blogs from Panaji
Goa & Kerala - Peaceful India
... one it had plenty of space- complete with double bedroom and bathroom, lounge/sitting area with dining table and chairs and an area at the back for the two man crew and kitchen to knock up some pretty decent meals for us. We both had a go at driving the boat for a short while (nothing to it and Hannah certainly got the seal of approval from our captain...) and we did find some lovely quiet areas to peruse the surrounding countryside and snap a few decent photos before mooring up ...
Another bus ride today....
... a coffee shop and had the most amazing mango cheesecake...with a pretty good coffee! obviously not Costa but not had a proper one for nearly 3 weeks!! Maybe not very Indian, but that's ok. Last full day tomorrow in Goa and cannot believe that 2weeks has gone so quickly. However, time to get excited about the next stage of the adventure...Off to Delhi on ...
... a scooter. Very few people wear helmets, the women in saris ride on the back sideways without holding on to anything. Whole families on a bike. What makes India unique is there seems to be an absence of fear and an attitude toward life that fate is left to karma or God. So no point in worrying, or taking precautions. It was so exhilarating to ride again- last time I was here my driver picked me up ...
On to Panji
... Manage to get to the other side, drive and have look at Aquada Fort, Coco beach ( locals ), Sinquerim beach, ( Water sports and Russians ), Cadolim beach ( Russian ), Baga beach( Blackpool and Russians ), Arjuna beach, backpackers very nice. The Russians have taken over much of Goa ( there were quite a few in Palolem). Apparently the visa cost for Russia is £30 and UK £92. There is something like 160 charter flights from Russia a month compared to ...
Introduction and Our first few days in Goa
... train track. Now, not only was this tiny little run skinny as you like, but it was also Stoney and filled with obstacles. I'm talking railway sleepers, metal triangle structures that they just blazed through the middle off, very lose stones and a whole heap more. Not to mention that this was also 2 way traffic. So every now and then someone would come the other way so we'd have to basically hug a hedge. They sped along at complete ridicules speeds. Every single bike ...
Other places to stay in Panaji
Goa Marriott Resort & SpaPost Box No 64, Panaji | 4 star hotelfrom $146
- Loved the goa marriott
- What a wonderful hotel!!
- Its a Goa!
Vivanta by Taj - PanajiOff D. B. Bandodkar Road, Panaji | 5 star hotelfrom $96
Ginger GoaPlot No. 37, 38, Panaji | 3 star hotelfrom $32
Bambolim Beach ResortNunes Beach Properties, Panaji | 3 star hotelfrom $49
Sun N Sand GoaBairo Alto Dos Pilotos, Jose Falcao Road, Panaji | 4 star hotelfrom $102
Hotel SolmarMiramar Beach, Panaji | 1 star hotelfrom $23
WelcomHeritage Panjim InnE-212, 31st January Road, Fontainhas, Panaji | Hotelfrom $43
Afonso Gues HouseNear Saint Sebastian Chapel, Panaji | Hotelfrom $15
Hotel Fidalgo18 June Road, Panaji | 2 star hotelfrom $78
Hotel MandoviD.B Marg, Panaji | 3 star hotelfrom $59
Casa ParadisoGhanekar Building Jose Falcao Road, Panaji | 2 star hotelfrom $17
Hotel DelmonCaetano de Albuquerque Road, Panaji | Hotelfrom $26
Hotel Park PlazaOpp Azad Maidan, Panaji | Hotelfrom $90
Hotel Aroma ExecutiveRua Cunha Rivara Road, Panaji | Hotelfrom $31
Hotel Nova GoaDr Atmaram Borkar Road, Panaji | Hotelfrom $34
Hotel MiramarMiramar Beach End, Panaji | Hotelfrom $11
Hotel Manvin'sMunicipal Gardens, Panaji | 3 star hotelfrom $22
Hotel BlessingsM. G. Road, Lane II, Behind Niyaaz Restaurant, Next to Lokmat Newspaper, Panaji | 2 star hotelfrom $13
Hotel ManoshantiBehind EDC House, Panaji | 3 star hotelfrom $30
Hotel RajdhaniDr Atmaram Borkar Road, Panaji | Hotelfrom $34
Hotel La CapitolMG Road, Panaji | Hotelfrom $48
Ashok Plaza HotelSamrat Ashok Theater Complex 18th June Road, Panaji | Hotelfrom $177


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20 December 2010
1 May 2010
Something and Calico Skies. I think he did a beautiful version of George's song, and in my opinion, he improved the second one.
Another favorite to be in the concert, Let 'em in
6 November 2010
mithveaen said:
Something and Calico Skies. I think he did a beautiful version of George's song, and in my opinion, he improved the second one.
I saw him live in December! Yeah I did love Something on the ukulele, it was beautiful.
Thinking back, the songs that I just fell in love with all over again were Magical Mystery Tour (which he opened with), Here Today (at which point I think it was impossible not to get emotional!), Blackbird, Get Back and and Got To Get You Into My Life. He also sung Wonderful Christmas Time which was pretty special! It's so hard to pick favourites though, that whole night was just incredible!
"When I cannot sing my heart, I can only speak my mind."
19 September 2010
25 November 2010
9 June 2010
"I'm Down."
Honestly, that song only improves when performed live.
If that doesn't work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....fvA6luvdAg
If I seem to act unkind, it's only me, it's not my mind that is confusing things.
19 September 2010
MeanMrs.Mustard said:
"I'm Down."
Honestly, that song only improves when performed live.
If that doesn't work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....fvA6luvdAg
Very True
As if it matters how a man falls down.'
'When the fall's all that's left, it matters a great deal.
17 March 2010
When I saw Paul in Miami last April, the individual songs that really jumped out unexpectedly were "Something", "Ob La Di, Ob La Da", and "Blackbird". But the section that was just overwhelming was the regular set closeout with "A Day In The Life/Give Peace a Chance", "Let it Be", "Live and Let Die", and "Hey Jude."
I don't think there was a dry eye in the house during "Let it Be." I know I could barely sing along, I was so choked up.
Interestingly, you wouldn't think a James Bond shoot-em-up score like "Live and Let Die" would be a good followup to the plea for love and understanding of "Let it Be", but it somehow works. "Live and Let Die" comes off more like a third-party confession of failure to follow the ideal of peace when paired with "Let it Be."
Ahh, who am I kidding? It was the pyrotechnics, man!!!
26 January 2010
19 September 2010
26 January 2010
19 September 2010
9 June 2010
19 September 2010
9 June 2010
19 September 2010
mr. Sun king coming together said:
MeanMrs.Mustard said:
Celebrated_Mr_K said:
Ahh, who am I kidding? It was the pyrotechnics, man!
Disagree about the agreement
Disagree with last comment of Mine
As if it matters how a man falls down.'
'When the fall's all that's left, it matters a great deal.
31 January 2011
Live and Let Die was amazing in concert! I wasn't expecting the pyrotechnics at all. Something was really amazing with the photo montage, a lot of the pictures I had never seen before. Also one that really stuck with me was the one he sang in tribute to John Lennon Here Today, had me bawling my eyes out in the first verse!
9 June 2010
21 May 2012
If you're talking about recorded "live" versions than it's gotta be Coming Up or it could be The Mess or Soily since we only get "live" versions of those great tracks. But, seeing him live...Let Me Roll It just brings it home, baby. 1985 was pretty kick ass as well with everyone stomping and clapping with the piano intro to every verse. Letting Go worked really well live also but Live and Let Die is that point in the show where everything explodes (pyro, lights, collective minds)!
1 May 2011
Hey Jude when everyone is singing along to the coda - the joy and togetherness between everyone at that moment is something special. Hey Jude is a fantastic example of how music can bring people together for a brief moment in time and let everything go.
Even people who hate the beatles music with a passion get caught up in the chorus and start singing along.
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Op-Ed: Why summer attendance was down at the movie theatres this year
Andrew Moran
Sep 9, 2012 in
Los Angeles
- A lot of film buffs like to complain that modern era motion pictures are not like what they used to be back in the Golden Age of cinema. They have a point, which could explain as to why summer attendance was the lowest since 1993.
Earlier this week, I
on estimated figures of this year's summer box office. Although there were two films that each captured more than $1 billion in the global box office, the number of tickets sold was down four percent, box office revenues dropped more than $100 million and overall summer attendance was on the decline.
Why was this? The summer produced some decent blockbuster pictures, such as "The Dark Knight Rises" and "Prometheus" – not so much a fan of other comic book movies, like "The Avengers" and "The Amazing Spider-Man." But for those seeking a respite from $250 million movies, there wasn't much of a selection.
First, let's compare 1993 to 2012:
Summer of 1993: "Hot Shots: Part Deux," "The Firm," "Jurassic Park," "In the Line of Fire," "The Fugitive," "The Man Without a Face," "Cliffhanger" and "Sleepless in Seattle."
Summer of 2012: "Men in Black III," "Snow White and the Huntsmen," "Rock of Ages," "Magic Mike," "Ted," "The Watch," "Total Recall" and "Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days."
Comparing these two years, which one do you think was the superior summer? I'd have to go with option one.
Here are two reasons as to why movie studios are having a difficult time filling the seats not just in the summer but all year around: cost and quality.
Of course, youth like to spend $12 of their parents' money at the movie theatres to see anything. However, is the average individual in the 18-64 demographic willing to throw their hard earned money at something as mundane as the films produced today? Even if a film is slightly interesting to me, I do not feel like spending $15 on a 3D movie if I'm not expecting excellent escapism or superb filmmaking.
In Toronto, the cheapest cinemas to head to are the ones operated by
Rainbow Cinemas
. A Tuesday picture costs $5 (up from $2 a decade ago) and the weeknight showing is about $8. At most picture-houses, though, it's upwards of $13!
It can be understood that movie chains keep close to half of the ticket sales, but lowering the ticket prices wouldn't hurt, especially if Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox or Universal Studios want more eyeballs on their product.
Unfortunately, since the Hollywood studios like to produce safe motion pictures that are rather banal and prosaic, a moviebuff, like myself, doesn't expect an Alfred Hitchcock level of filmmaking during the year. As of late, I've realized if you have seen at least a dozen films since 2000 then you have seen them all.
Indeed, there are exceptions to this thought, such as the films of Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson, but overall, they are pretty much the same. With all due respect to Meryl Streep and Helen Mirren, how many times do I need to see them portray an iconic figure? I want some originality, please.
"Prometheus" was a picture that was excellent, but did it meet the excellence of "Alien"? "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" was a solid picture that came out earlier this year, but was it on par with "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold"? Many consider "The Campaign" to be a funny picture, but is it as funny as a Leslie Nielsen, Groucho Marx or even Rodney Dangerfield movie?
The paucity of ideas from the major studios in the United States doesn't help either. How many reboots, remakes and reimaginings do we need? There have been some minds in the neoteric age that have given us original material, (again) including Nolan and Anderson.
Even foreign films aren't producing high-quality pictures like they used to. Remember back in the day when those in Canada and the U.S. were given gems on a regular basis? "The Seventh Seal," "The Bicycle Thief," "Diabolique" and "M" just to name a few.
In conclusion, there are many causes for a bleak summer 2012: a weak economy, piracy and talentless people (heck, Burt Lancaster wasn't talented but he was in some decent films). At least we do have a handful of saviors who can deliver us from the trenches of all of the Michael Bays, Judd Apatows and Tyler Perrys.
When it comes to cinema, all I have to say is a Howard Beale (Peter Finch) quote from the 1976 Sidney Lumet movie "Network," "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!"
When I need my entertainment needs, my fiancée and I will just head on down to
Bay Street Video
and watch the stuff from the 1920s all the way to the 1960s. Upon inserting the disc and the picture begins, I quote Judy Garland's Dorothy Gale in the 1939 movie "The Wizard of Oz," "There's no place like home."
Note to Hollywood: I do not want to see a film based on an inspiring true story from the makers of "Pride and Prejudice" starring the nauseating Channing Tatum, Keira Knightley, Nicolas Cage and Zac Efron.
This opinion article was written by an independent writer. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily intended to reflect those of DigitalJournal.com
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Hazel Park
Fire Open House pancake breakfast to benefit resident with cerebral palsy
By Andy Kozlowski
October 10, 2013
HAZEL PARK — Various groups in Hazel Park have joined forces to pay for a new porch at the home of a local family, so a young woman with cerebral palsy can spend time outside with her family and friends. The new porch will also allow for the construction of a wheelchair ramp that will make it easier for her to get in and out of the house.
"Hazel Park will always help people," said Hazel Park Mayor Pro Tem Jan Parisi. "As soon as someone has a problem, it seems like the whole community just wraps their arms around the individual."
The woman is Mariah Loughry, 20, and the groups helping her include the local Lions Club, of which Parisi is a member, as well as the Knights of Columbus, the Hazel Park Police Department (HPPD) and the Hazel Park Fire Department (HPFD).
The benefit is a pancake breakfast at the Hazel Park Fire Department, 22830 Russell, from 9-11 a.m. Sunday, Oct. 27. The cost is $10 per person. The menu will include pancakes, sausage and drinks prepared by the firefighters themselves.
Following the breakfast is the Fire Open House, from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. The event features free cider and doughnuts, a Jaws of Life demonstration (for cracking open crashed cars), arts and crafts for the kids, a moonwalk, and an opportunity to try out fire gear, tackle a firefighting challenge and go through a smoke-training house. Firefighters will spray the hoses and let people climb inside the fire engines. There may even be a survival flight helicopter on display, if available.
Loughry, who is unable to walk or use her arms, requires assistance getting around. The Michigan Department of Community Health and the Macomb Oakland Regional Center (MORC) helped pay for a $13,300 lift to get her in and out of the car. Now, MORC has offered to pay for the construction of a wheelchair ramp leading into the house, provided the porch is fixed first.
The Lions Club, Knights of Columbus, HPPD and HPFD all agreed to raise the funds to pay for the porch. All four endorse the pancake breakfast at the HPFD.
"The firemen will do the cooking, and we'll have red roses, Mariah's favorite flower," Parisi said. "It's the cutest thing, seeing these big brawny guys (the firemen) fawning over (Loughry). They've really taken her to heart. I'm very emotional about it. My husband and I have known the Loughry family for a while, and we're really excited and hope everything goes well."
Peggy Burleson, secretary of the Hazel Park Lions Club, shared this sentiment. She's lived in the city for 40 years and considers it a "family city" where people care.
"Hazel Park is a city that supports its residents," Burleson said. "We always have."
The pancake breakfast benefitting Mariah Loughry will take place at the Hazel Park Fire Department, 22830 Russell, from 9-11 a.m. Sunday, Oct. 27. The menu includes pancakes, sausages and drinks. Cost is $10 per person. The Fire Open House is 11 a.m.-2 p.m. and free to the public.
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Iver & Langley residents must forget the consultation, and petition on depot.
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We've not only put together those clips, but added some from when the pair first came out against HS2.
Besides holding the post of Chancellor, Darling had previously been Secretary of State for Transport, and as such he warned back then that if so much money went on HS2, there wouldn't be the money for the rest of the rail network.
These words from almost two years ago now seem extremely prophetic, given the recent 'pausing' of Network Rail projects.


text:
SOCHI, RUSSIA – FEBRUARY 11: Russian tennis player Maria Kirilenko and her fiance, Russian hockey player Alex Ovechkin attend the Figure Skating Pairs Short Program on day 4 of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics at Iceberg Skating Palace on February 11, 2014 in Sochi, Russia. (Photo by John Berry/Getty Images)
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"The local paper needs the football club more than the football club needs the local paper."