Also known as a way of buying tickets to Broadway shows that I’ve never used.
The NY Times Arts Beat blog had an interview today with Victoria Bailey, the executive director of the group that runs the TKTS booths. Perhaps next time I’m in NYC I’ll finally have a chance to use the booths.
Coming off the news of the latest Wall Street ripoff scam, federal regulation to reign in Wall Street is foundering in Congress. Hopefully the regulators, Administration, and Congress can get their act together to put through meaningful reform so banks don’t create multi-trillion dollar holes they need to be bailed out of again, all while making sure the individuals become filthy rich.
Also known as how the big Wall Street firms are like casinos.
The NY Times today had an article out today that coincidentally jives with a story I heard earlier this week from someone I work with. Wall Street trading desks have essentially figured out how to determine what buy and sell decisions investors are making in the markets BEFORE those trades are executed and trade against them, allowing the firms to reap huge profits at the expense of regular investors.
It was July 15, and Intel, the computer chip giant, had reporting robust earnings the night before. Some investors, smelling opportunity, set out to buy shares in the semiconductor company Broadcom…The slower traders faced a quandary: If they sought to buy a large number of shares at once, they would tip their hand and risk driving up Broadcom’s price. So, as is often the case on Wall Street, they divided their orders into dozens of small batches, hoping to cover their tracks.
The slower traders began issuing buy orders. But rather than being shown to all potential sellers at the same time, some of those orders were most likely routed to a collection of high-frequency traders for just 30 milliseconds — 0.03 seconds — in what are known as flash orders. While markets are supposed to ensure transparency by showing orders to everyone simultaneously, a loophole in regulations allows marketplaces like Nasdaq to show traders some orders ahead of everyone else in exchange for a fee.
In less than half a second, high-frequency traders gained a valuable insight: the hunger for Broadcom was growing. Their computers began buying up Broadcom shares and then reselling them to the slower investors at higher prices.
The result? The high-frequency traders ripped off the regular investors for $7,800 on $1.4 million in trades. As a %, not a lot, but if this happens EVERY day on EVERY trade, it adds up to billions. All because some large financial institutions have access to your orders before everyone else does, so they can bet against you to steal your money.
Barring the guy from Gartner Japan in this NY Times article, everyone wants a cool Japanese cell phone. Even the folks at NPR’s On the Media did a story earlier this year.
And why not? On some of my trips to Japan I saw color screens, text messaging, and camera phones years before they ever appeared in the US. Despite Apple’s attempts to be the uber-cool phone of the moment, Japan’s phones are still the best representation of a digital pocket-knife.
Having recently moved, my commute has now increased from an easy 25 minutes to about 65 – 70 on a day without too much traffic. With the increase in commuting time, my iPod is now getting a workout, but my music library can’t keep up. So I’m looking for Podcast recommendations.
Currently I listen to NPR’s On the Media regularly and BBC Radio4’s In Our Time (sometimes). However, those alone aren’t enough to cover the whole ride. Can anyone recommend any morning news programs (e.g. NPR Morning Edition) and any interesting music podcasts for the ride home?
A judge dismissed a lawsuit by a woman who claimed she was distraught to discover “crunchberries” weren’t real fruit.
“A reasonable consumer would not be deceived into believing that the product in the instant case contained a fruit that does not exist,” the judge said in his ruling. “So far as this Court has been made aware, there is no such fruit growing in the wild or occurring naturally in any part of the world.”
Wow, my head hurts. How exactly is the following the work of an “activist” judge? Recent Supreme Court decisions by those “beacons” of restraint, Chief Justice Roberts and his “conservative” court, are far more activist than this.
“The duty of the judge is to follow the law,” Judge Sotomayor wrote, “not to question its plain terms. I do not believe that Congress wishes us to disregard the plain language of any statute or to invent exceptions to the statutes it has created.”
“I trust that Congress would prefer to make any needed changes itself,” she added, “rather than have courts do so for it.”
In a neat-o act of exageration, the Swift Boat liars are now accusing Sotomayor of supporting terrorists.
Yes, I gave in and decided to try out twitter. You can find me at http://www.twitter.com/chrisdymek. Too many NPR stories about twitter revolutions made me give in.