Days when jestie didn't take his anti-depressants (or "fuckin' anti-depressants" as he might say) and days when RickyBoy hasn't had his whiskey yet and is drowning in his shame of failing to be Gordon Gekko:
stock market isn't open today, thus Dougster is bored. I got Dougster figured out. However one of these days I may have to read about this system to go out with a stripper in as little as two years using the system. It sounds like a pretty fast operating system.
Seriously, there are some aspects of the stock market which I know little about, lots of aspects actually lots of aspects. Aren't people speculating in futures when the market is closed?
Is the opening price just a continuation of the closing price, until a transaction is made? Or are there new outstanding offers when the market opens which create the opening price?
Futures markets close on Friday evenings and open again on Sunday evening (NYC times). They are generally open all of the rest of the week.
Opening price is generally different from closing price. Sometimes significantly so if there was a major news event in between. Chart guys calls such occurrences "gap ups" or "gap downs".
This is why I was never comfortable having sell with limits orders in overnight. The broker, one of Dougster's opposite numbers, said of the night time, "Nothing is happening."
I took exception to that. I told him that pesticide factories explode and oil tankers run into rocks.
I hadn't known about the futures markets closing. But I suspect that that is fairly meaningless. Once you have some official futures market, then you can have endless unofficial futures markets. All it takes is for someone to write a contract to buy or sell at a price. Can this be stopped? I would think not.
So even though there is not a ticker tape announcing these transactions, Dougster has opposite numbers on other continents and they will be paying attention. They will try to capitalize on major news items. There could even be people who try to plant news items to cause "gap ups" or "gap downs".
I remember at the start of Bush 41's Kuwait war there was a news item about a new extra light crude oil find in Saudi Arabia. They described it as almost like gas you could put directly into your tank coming out of the ground. I suspect that it was a CIA news plant.
So not being comfortable with these intervals when the buy and selling is off the exchange, like off track betting, I took to making sure all of my transactions were concluded during the open hours. It is not that the risk is actually any lower, it is just that the open time interval when I would have to worry is less.
I don't think it's legal to trade equities off the exchange (with the exception of alternative trading system which have strict reporting requirements). I guess people could do it after hours and then promise to make the trade on an ATS once they became available, but if you are dealing with people breaking the law, who is going to enforce it if they don't honor?)
But yes, equities are quite unique in their transparency and the US is particularly transparent relative to the rest of the world. If futures isn't liquid enough for you can trade Forex or bonds or other OTC instruments. What to do if a bad news item comes out when all these markets are closed? Better hope you were hedged going into the weekend...
Even if it is not legal to trade equities off the exchange, are contracts to trade at a price valid. Will courts enforce them?
Even if not, we could set up an after hours promise to trade system, and we could publicize the contracts, just like the exchange ticker. Even if courts won't enforce the contracts, we could still make honoring them a condition of membership.
You see how strange this could get. But really, it is already that strange. It is beyond the scope of most people being able to understand it, or being willing to take the time to try to.
There is this Lion and Compass restaurant in Sunnyvale CA
It is the place the movers and shakers go. At least decades back it had a display which was a blown up stock ticker. It looked like a ticker, like holes punched in a paper tape, but it was large enough to read from anywhere in the room.
As far as I can see, it was just to make the people feel important. They don't work for a living, they invest.
So the President of our company used to like to take people there. Mostly it was just to impress them, impress and intimidate them.
I remember reading that it belonged to a sister of Nolan Bushnell, the founder decades back of Atari.
I did not like the place at all.
But you know what, in San Jose's Viet Coffee Shops they always have at least one of their big screens set to financial news, either CNN or FOX. The screen is set to the channel, even though the sound is turned down and the closed captions are off. So what you hear is the music video that another one is set to, while you watch the conformist power worshipping and usually female talking head.
I wouldn't do anything like this.
The rules for stock are always changing and are very complicated. KP seems to like Wilson and Sonsini, in the Stanford Industrial Park, next to HP. These guys are jerks. I mean lots of people need lawyers. Usually it is the most poor and disadvantaged people, those least able to pay, who need one the most.
But no matter, Wilson and Sonsini lawyers are there to do nonsense. Like for example put on show type meetings, like telling the people in a startup company what is being planned, asking them how they would vote on it, and then telling them the anti-climax, that the investors already approved the plan with a majority of the proxies.
I mean really, this is what people go to law school for?
Wilson and Sonsini are known for working their paralegals extremely hard. Not fun to be in that position. Not fun to deal with such a law firm at all.
One practice was to sell shares to new employees at a very low price, but with a buy back option at that same price, subject to a vesting period. So the new employee is asked to sign that they understand that the shares cannot be used as collateral, wagered against, or sold.
Again, this gets very complex. Suppose someone did do these things. Does that mean they are guilty of fraud, or is it just buyer beware?
The whole thing is just a game and it has very little to do with the actual work. It is more about manipulating the basic concept of ownership. They have learned all sorts of tricky things to do with unregistered private company shares.
And of course the VC's are built upon these principles themselves, because they have the same sorts of convoluted relationships with the people who put the money into their funds. They have figured out an endless variety of ways to manipulate the system.
They have a 90% failure rate, but they still provide a much better return to their fund investors then they could likely get any other way. But within their companies they have a 100% waste of good talent rate, and they also undermine people who try to start more legitimate and straight shooting types of companies. They have gained control of the direction that things go, but it is a bad direction.
They don't promote innovation, they interfere with it.
The quality of work done as part of the Apollo Program, government directed, was radically higher. We would be nowhere without that today. But we could do very well without the VC's.
I've posted before how it went with the VC's in Silicon Valley. A large portion of the microchips, like some say 70%, always went to government procurement. But as this did not fit with the free market ideology, it was down played.
But eventually people grew tired of the Reagan defense budget and the development of post Vietnam military systems, and then with the 1986 stock market crash, things changed. So during Bush 41's Presidency there was a big slowdown.
But what really scared the VC's was what was happening in Asia. As they explained it, $1 Billion fabs were going up. I think it was Taiwan, and maybe Singapore and Japan too. So the VC money stopped dead.
It was still there, it was railroad money, gilded age money. But investor confidence dried up.
So there was nothing, then the dot com hype started and soon you had companies with $1 billion outstanding share values which did not even have a plan for how they would reach black ink. No matter, the dot com hype was huge.
But so what happened to silicon micro chip fabrication, without the VC money?
It did GREAT! Billion dollar US fabs were built, financed without the VC's. They were financed by companies that did good work and sold products. They moved to 12" wafers and did very well. It was not in California, it was in Right to Work and anti-Environmental states. But they did it, with their own money!
In my opinion more progress was made:
1. Move to sub micron geometry, very sub micron.
2. Corresponding vertical scaling to get the speed up.
3. Greater move to RISC architectures
4. Greater move to co-processor based systems, to break the Von Neumann electro magnetic computer speed bottle neck ( an Intel objective from back in the early 80's )
5. Serious design of circuit boards and interconnect, treating them as guided wave phenomenon instead of just interconnect, necessary to get into the 100's of Mega Hertz and beyond.
I mean these were all things that people knew were necessary for many years. They just aren't flashy. You can't do stuff like this when all you are concerned about is short term stock price and getting your money out. It is all hard work, very hard work. You can't do stuff like this when you waste your best technical people in huge quantities by having them operate in tail chasing mode.
Without the VC's, much more was accomplished than ever had been with them!
I am sure that the same is going to prove true in other areas as well. The dot com NASDAQ Ponzi Scheme was even worse, as also I am sure that Dougster's 2015 boom will be.
Get the speculators out, and then good work can be done!
Silicon Valley has been left a mess. All that seems to go on is consumer media stuff now. Worthless in my opinion. Empty factories being converted into empty office buildings. But at least actual electronics are being made, without these Sand Hill Road speculators, just in other states.
17 comments
Latest
Dougster, can we still speculate in futures? Is it legal to do that when the markets are closed?
Is the opening price always the same as the closing price? I don't think it is.
SJG
Is the opening price just a continuation of the closing price, until a transaction is made? Or are there new outstanding offers when the market opens which create the opening price?
SJG
Opening price is generally different from closing price. Sometimes significantly so if there was a major news event in between. Chart guys calls such occurrences "gap ups" or "gap downs".
I think he's obsessed, but then he does have a lot of free time.
I took exception to that. I told him that pesticide factories explode and oil tankers run into rocks.
I hadn't known about the futures markets closing. But I suspect that that is fairly meaningless. Once you have some official futures market, then you can have endless unofficial futures markets. All it takes is for someone to write a contract to buy or sell at a price. Can this be stopped? I would think not.
So even though there is not a ticker tape announcing these transactions, Dougster has opposite numbers on other continents and they will be paying attention. They will try to capitalize on major news items. There could even be people who try to plant news items to cause "gap ups" or "gap downs".
I remember at the start of Bush 41's Kuwait war there was a news item about a new extra light crude oil find in Saudi Arabia. They described it as almost like gas you could put directly into your tank coming out of the ground. I suspect that it was a CIA news plant.
So not being comfortable with these intervals when the buy and selling is off the exchange, like off track betting, I took to making sure all of my transactions were concluded during the open hours. It is not that the risk is actually any lower, it is just that the open time interval when I would have to worry is less.
SJG
But yes, equities are quite unique in their transparency and the US is particularly transparent relative to the rest of the world. If futures isn't liquid enough for you can trade Forex or bonds or other OTC instruments. What to do if a bad news item comes out when all these markets are closed? Better hope you were hedged going into the weekend...
Indeed. IME, 90% of market rumors turn out to be false. High frequency traders in particular love new items to trigger their algorithms.
Even if not, we could set up an after hours promise to trade system, and we could publicize the contracts, just like the exchange ticker. Even if courts won't enforce the contracts, we could still make honoring them a condition of membership.
You see how strange this could get. But really, it is already that strange. It is beyond the scope of most people being able to understand it, or being willing to take the time to try to.
There is this Lion and Compass restaurant in Sunnyvale CA
http://lionandcompass.com/
It is the place the movers and shakers go. At least decades back it had a display which was a blown up stock ticker. It looked like a ticker, like holes punched in a paper tape, but it was large enough to read from anywhere in the room.
As far as I can see, it was just to make the people feel important. They don't work for a living, they invest.
So the President of our company used to like to take people there. Mostly it was just to impress them, impress and intimidate them.
I remember reading that it belonged to a sister of Nolan Bushnell, the founder decades back of Atari.
I did not like the place at all.
But you know what, in San Jose's Viet Coffee Shops they always have at least one of their big screens set to financial news, either CNN or FOX. The screen is set to the channel, even though the sound is turned down and the closed captions are off. So what you hear is the music video that another one is set to, while you watch the conformist power worshipping and usually female talking head.
I wouldn't do anything like this.
The rules for stock are always changing and are very complicated. KP seems to like Wilson and Sonsini, in the Stanford Industrial Park, next to HP. These guys are jerks. I mean lots of people need lawyers. Usually it is the most poor and disadvantaged people, those least able to pay, who need one the most.
But no matter, Wilson and Sonsini lawyers are there to do nonsense. Like for example put on show type meetings, like telling the people in a startup company what is being planned, asking them how they would vote on it, and then telling them the anti-climax, that the investors already approved the plan with a majority of the proxies.
I mean really, this is what people go to law school for?
Wilson and Sonsini are known for working their paralegals extremely hard. Not fun to be in that position. Not fun to deal with such a law firm at all.
One practice was to sell shares to new employees at a very low price, but with a buy back option at that same price, subject to a vesting period. So the new employee is asked to sign that they understand that the shares cannot be used as collateral, wagered against, or sold.
Again, this gets very complex. Suppose someone did do these things. Does that mean they are guilty of fraud, or is it just buyer beware?
The whole thing is just a game and it has very little to do with the actual work. It is more about manipulating the basic concept of ownership. They have learned all sorts of tricky things to do with unregistered private company shares.
And of course the VC's are built upon these principles themselves, because they have the same sorts of convoluted relationships with the people who put the money into their funds. They have figured out an endless variety of ways to manipulate the system.
They have a 90% failure rate, but they still provide a much better return to their fund investors then they could likely get any other way. But within their companies they have a 100% waste of good talent rate, and they also undermine people who try to start more legitimate and straight shooting types of companies. They have gained control of the direction that things go, but it is a bad direction.
They don't promote innovation, they interfere with it.
The quality of work done as part of the Apollo Program, government directed, was radically higher. We would be nowhere without that today. But we could do very well without the VC's.
This mentions people I have worked with. They are imbeciles.
http://www.amazon.com/Money-No-Object-Ve…
SJG
But eventually people grew tired of the Reagan defense budget and the development of post Vietnam military systems, and then with the 1986 stock market crash, things changed. So during Bush 41's Presidency there was a big slowdown.
But what really scared the VC's was what was happening in Asia. As they explained it, $1 Billion fabs were going up. I think it was Taiwan, and maybe Singapore and Japan too. So the VC money stopped dead.
It was still there, it was railroad money, gilded age money. But investor confidence dried up.
So there was nothing, then the dot com hype started and soon you had companies with $1 billion outstanding share values which did not even have a plan for how they would reach black ink. No matter, the dot com hype was huge.
But so what happened to silicon micro chip fabrication, without the VC money?
It did GREAT! Billion dollar US fabs were built, financed without the VC's. They were financed by companies that did good work and sold products. They moved to 12" wafers and did very well. It was not in California, it was in Right to Work and anti-Environmental states. But they did it, with their own money!
In my opinion more progress was made:
1. Move to sub micron geometry, very sub micron.
2. Corresponding vertical scaling to get the speed up.
3. Greater move to RISC architectures
4. Greater move to co-processor based systems, to break the Von Neumann electro magnetic computer speed bottle neck ( an Intel objective from back in the early 80's )
5. Serious design of circuit boards and interconnect, treating them as guided wave phenomenon instead of just interconnect, necessary to get into the 100's of Mega Hertz and beyond.
I mean these were all things that people knew were necessary for many years. They just aren't flashy. You can't do stuff like this when all you are concerned about is short term stock price and getting your money out. It is all hard work, very hard work. You can't do stuff like this when you waste your best technical people in huge quantities by having them operate in tail chasing mode.
Without the VC's, much more was accomplished than ever had been with them!
I am sure that the same is going to prove true in other areas as well. The dot com NASDAQ Ponzi Scheme was even worse, as also I am sure that Dougster's 2015 boom will be.
Get the speculators out, and then good work can be done!
Silicon Valley has been left a mess. All that seems to go on is consumer media stuff now. Worthless in my opinion. Empty factories being converted into empty office buildings. But at least actual electronics are being made, without these Sand Hill Road speculators, just in other states.
SJG