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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: russwinter who wrote (85355)	8/20/2007 1:39:19 PM
From: Silver Super Bull	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

Thanks, Russ... By the way, don't know how closely you have been watching some of the junior PM stocks...but the amount of dilution in many of them has been rather severe lately...I don't have cumulative figures, just IMHO from what I have been seeing...

To: russwinter who wrote (85355)	8/26/2007 1:38:58 PM
From: gregor_us	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

Big Weather as a Fat Tail Pricing Game: M. Lewis Today NYT. "His wife was pregnant with their second child, and the health plan at Brandeis University, where he had accepted a job, declared her pregnancy a pre-existing condition. He had no money, his parents had no money, and so to cover the costs of childbirth, he accepted a temp job with a Chicago trading firm called O’Connor and Associates. O’Connor had turned a small army of M.I.T. scientists into options traders and made them rich. Seo didn’t want to be rich; he just wanted health insurance. To get it, he agreed to spend eight weeks helping O’Connor price esoteric financial options. When he was done, O’Connor offered him 40 grand and asked him to stay, at a starting salary of $250,000, 27 times his post-doc teaching salary. “Biophysics was starved for resources,” Seo says. “Finance was hurling resources at problems. It was almost as if I was taking it as a price signal. It was society’s way of saying, Please, will you start solving problems over here?” ...And if there has been a theme of modern Wall Street, it’s that young men with Ph.D.’s who approach money as science can cause more trouble than a hurricane. John Seo is oddly sympathetic to the complaint. He thinks that much of the academic literature about finance is nonsense, for instance. “These academics couldn’t understand the fact that they couldn’t beat the markets,” he says. “So they just said it was efficient. And, ‘Oh, by the way, here’s a ton of math you don’t understand.’ ” He notes that smart risk-takers with no gift for theory often end up with smart solutions to taking extreme financial risk — answers that often violate the academic theories. (“The markets are usually way ahead of the math.”) He prides himself on his ability to square book smarts with horse sense. As one of his former bosses puts it, “John was known as the man who could price anything, and his pricing felt right to people who didn’t understand his math.” In Nature's Casino: Michael Lewis, 26 August 2007 Sunday NYT Magazine nytimes.com Gregor