Two of the most amateur stock market dabblers I know have told me that there is “no way” buying Facebook can lose money. Their plan is to use all their savings and retirement money to buy Facebook stock when it IPOs, with the idea of either buying and holding or flipping it depending on its performance in the initial days. Ah, what the great American dream has become.
Well, here’s a great chart:
I spent the weekend learning NetLogo, which is a fairly easy way to write computer simulation programs. Thank heavens the language is like many other languages I know, although figuring out the low-level syntax and capabilities has been a hassle.
Zero Hedge has a second piece on high-frequency trading and the high-frequency quote (HFQ?) requests that go with it. It is interesting data, although there is no accompanying analysis. Also interesting is the post’s consideration of HFQ and what it means for the future of regulatory investigations or just making sense of it (note: the quote below is referring to the flash crash):
And what is inexcusable, is that the regulators didn’t even bother to interview the traders that ran the algorithm used by Waddell and Reed until two weeks after they published their report! Maybe it was because it took them 5 months just to assemble the data, and they ran out of time for any serious analysis. Too bad if that is the case, because the next time we have a serious market event, they will be facing at least 4 times as much data that overwhelmed them before.