AHFM

Recent Comments

  1. 1
    Posted 2011-11-30 11:49:07 on Chelsea Clinton’s Husband Now Accepting Investments For New Fund

    Dude was my sales coverage for a year. Loved to talk about pretty whacked out macro-oriented derivatives ideas. We'll see if one can make a fund out of ZAR/gold vs Libor-OIS correlation swaps and suchlike...

  2. 2
    Posted 2011-11-15 16:06:54 on Think You Might Be Asked About A Horrible Crime With Which You Have But A Tenuous Link Over The Course Of A Job Interview? Penn State Is Here To Help

    "Um, sir, I think you misread my resume. Pederasty is under Outside Interests, not under Education." -Overheard @ Penn State Recruiti

  3. 3
    Posted 2011-10-28 14:19:08 on If You’re Not Into Greek CDS Any More, Maybe You Can Buy This Monstrosity

    Certificate holders get paid out in EFSF bonds. So do they pay 20 cents of face value of EFSF bond or 20 cents of market value of EFSF bond at the time of event-of-default? If the latter, where do they get the reference price for EFSF bonds?

  4. 4
    Posted 2011-10-27 14:15:59 on Mandatory Greek CDS Post

    The trick is that with 98% of the debt haircut via "suasion", the authorities will probably just let Greece pay the other 2%. If you have a basis package, great. If you just had naked CDS, sorry, Charlie. The other thing is that some dealers (i.e. the ones on Greece's advisory payroll -- BNP, for instance) run around threatening holders with outlandish scenarios of how Greece could get away with not paying, yet still avoid triggering CDS. Mostly hogwash, but given that these banks have reps on the ISDA Determinations Committee, it may actually frighten some of the "jerks" into surrendering their rights, too.

  5. 5
    Posted 2011-10-26 14:44:30 on Nouriel Roubini Suggests Silvio Berlusconi Focus On The Underage Prostitutes Full-Time

    I was going to say "who asked you?" but then I realized the essence of Twitter is the suppression of this question.

  6. 6
    Posted 2011-10-26 12:40:23 on Opening Bell: 10.26.11

    America: sic semper tyranis Libya: ehh, what you say, sic semper tear anus? Ok, I do it!

  7. 7
    Posted 2011-10-24 16:43:50 on Confidential To Connecticut Commuters: Bypass Parking Lot Purgatory And Still Be Able To Look Yourself In The Mirror

    Grew up in one of the little Westchester towns on the Metro North Harlem line. Sometime around 1981, I recall, with the parking lots around the station totally exhausted, the mayor proposed decking over the railway trench with a parking lot. The NIMBYs of course went berserk, claiming that this ugly trench (hidden behind the back of Main Street stores) was of great architectural significance, that its decking over would irretrievably alter the character of the town. Went back this year for a high school reunion. Few of my classmates now live in the town...and guess what, now they take the train and they are now fighting the battle started by their parents to get more parking built.

  8. 8
    Posted 2011-10-22 09:27:53 on Groupon Stares Into Its Crystal Ball

    1999: We have an awesome business model. We sell $1 bills for 95 cents. Our revenue growth is off the charts! 2011: We have an awesome business model. We sell some small businesses $1 bill for 50 cents, of which we keep 25 cents. Our revenue growth is off the charts! I see a little bit of progress between Internet bubble 1.0 and Internet bubble 2.0. Should mean maybe 6 months longer survival time.

  9. 9
    Posted 2011-09-28 16:39:37 on CDS Levels May Not Be The All-Purpose Indicator That WSJ Thought They Were, Reports WSJ

    Good point. I'm just gonna go back to finding ways to insert some Hakuna Matata into these threads!

  10. 10
    Posted 2009-11-18 12:19:36 on Don’t Drink The Water: The Corruption Index

    @18 I take your points. On using log of spreads, that's standard for statistical analyses of credit spreads. Think about how credit spreads map onto probabilities of default and its pretty clear why one would do this. As for the polynomial fit, it doesn't really improve the R^2 much relative to a linear fit. .519 vs .508, so not really that meaningful. The bigger potential problem I see is that since the CPI is survey-based, it's possible that the contributing "country experts" have their corruption perceptions colored by credit spreads. I assume many of the respondents are market-aware.