rkbabang

It was bad enough when Al Gore called me " immoral, unethical and despicable". But now I learn I am a bigot! Damn, what a bad week I'm having! Oh well, it will all be over soon: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/01/al-gores-10-year-warning-only-2-years-left-still-no-warming/ I'm in the camp that there is global warming and that the evidence shows that it is anthropogenic, but Al Gore (as are many of the global warming people) is very much motivated by political ideology rather than science. Anyone who is going to make a short or medium term projection about the weather, temperature, or sea level on the order of a decade is an idiot not a scientist. Even the smartest investor on earth can not tell you what the S&P500 will be in ten years, and that would be an easier task with fewer variables.

A good read on the issue: Beware the Counterattack Against Activist Investors: The Group Trap "courts have established that the issue of group activity is a “question of fact.”1 In the leading case of Morales v. Quintel Entertainment, Inc ., the Second Circuit parroted the statute and held that the “key inquiry” is the question of whether the members of the alleged group “agreed to act together for the purpose of acquiring, holding, voting or disposing of” their stock. There, the Second Circuit also made clear that “the agreement may be formal or informal and may be proved by direct or circumstantial evidence.” Also, “the alleged group members need not be committed to ‘acquiring, holding, voting, or disposing of equity securities’ on certain specified terms, but rather they need only have combined to further a common objective regarding one of the just-recited activities.”

My gut tells me that if you are acting as a group and collectively own more than 5% of the outstanding shares you need to make it official to avoid trouble. "When two or more persons agree to act together for the purpose of acquiring, holding, voting or disposing of equity securities of an issuer, the group formed thereby shall be deemed to have acquired beneficial ownership, for purposes of Sections 13(d) and(g) of the Act, as of the date of such agreement, of all equity securities of that issuer beneficially owned by any such persons." http://www.law.uc.edu/sites/default/files/CCL/34ActRls/rule13d-5.html

Interesting idea. I imagine it shouldn't be too difficult to create some serious voting power with the purchase power of this forum, especially with those microcap or nanocap. However, how do you define a "group". Will people communicate with each other through an internet forum loosely be viewed legally as a group? Any lawyers here? I don't see how it's any different from 20 partners having a conference call or meeting at a restaurant, yet for some reason I feel the SEC or whomever may not feel the same way. One thing to consider is that when you have a meeting at a restaurant there is no public record of what was said. On an internet forum it remains there in its entirety and is searchable for anyone interested for any reason to find and read.

Shareholders can form a group and register with the SEC as "active" shareholders to attempt to drive change in a company.

Sure. I consider the basic paradigm of QM to be largely settled and very solid. This is because there is spectacular agreement between experiments and predictions. And there are thousand upon thousand of really nice experimental predictions. Also every single prominent skeptic was forced after loudly kicking and screaming to admit that QM is correct!!!!!!!!!!!!. I have a special place in my heart for QM skeptics like Bohm, Jaynes and John Bell. Bohm hated QM and you can read his book on QM to see him poke holes in it. Jaynes hated QM so much that he came up with an alternative "less quantumy" theory to explain photon emission and absorption. These guys spend their lives attacking QM and coming up with alternatives. But the evidence was too much for them and both conceded defeat. This is NOT true for climatology. John Christy, Richard Lindzen and of course many of the greatest forecasters the world has ever known, weathermen, are prominent skeptics. +1 How about dark matter, dark energy, inflation, etc. Yes, I know the evidence, but I still don't buy it. It just doesn't sound like the right explanation to me. Although I'm sure this is exactly how the anti-quantum mechanics people felt.

Yes 2 (8%) No 11 (44%) Hmm, to the 13 people on this board that believe that they can predict the immediate future: What will the winning lottery numbers be this week?

I vote Palantir for "Most disturbing profile picture." Yes can I vote Palantir change his profile pic. It has honestly tainted my perception of him, and I've never met him :) LOL I feel the same way. I don't mind Palantir's profile pic as much as muscleman's. :P You're the 2nd one to mention that you are envious of muscleman. That doesn't bother me, I wouldn't mind if I looked like that. There is just something that doesn't sit right with me about a balding fat old guy sticking his tongue out at me every time I see one of palantir's posts. Like I said before...disturbing.

In the opposite direction. To be honest, about the only thing that would be worse would be Pony the Orangutan Prostitute. http://www.freewebs.com/animalorangutan/photos/Pony-the-Orangutan-Prostitute/pony.bmp

I vote Palantir for "Most disturbing profile picture."

Market is fairly but not overvalued only if we reach the same euphoria that we did back in 2000 and 2007. Do you have the number from 1998? I think the current macro condition is more similar to 1998 than 2000 - Russian/Asian crisis, low interest rate, etc. With 1998 included: If you had $1000 do you think investing in the it in stocks would be a good idea? DATE Good Idea Bad Idea 2014 Jan 46%50% 2007 Apr50%46% 2000 Jan67%28% 1998 Apr65%28% Do you, personally, or jointly with a spouse, have any money invested in the stock market right now? DATE Yes No 2014 Jan 54%44% 2007 Apr65%34% 2000 Apr62%37% 1998 Sep60%39%

It looks like we don't quite have the enthusiasm for stocks that we had before the last two large crashes. From: Gallup.com Stock Market polls If you had $1000 do you think investing in the it in stocks would be a good idea? DATE Good Idea Bad Idea 2014 Jan 46%50% 2007 Apr50%46% 2000 Jan67%28% Do you, personally, or jointly with a spouse, have any money invested in the stock market right now? DATE Yes No 2014 Jan 54%44% 2007 Apr65%34% 2000 Apr62%37%

They don't look all that hated to me. SWHC 2yr chart

+1 Bingo!

It is usually a good idea to come off as condescending when trying to explain something. It creates the right tone and environment for explanation and learning. So you are saying sarcasm is more effective? :) But yes, you are correct (or at least the opposite of what you wrote being what you meant is correct) , I should have left all of that out of my post.

I voted 0-50. I don't invest full time. I will throw something in the too hard pile long before I spend 50 hours trying to understand it.

Well there are numbers out there, for example, "[in 2012], according to estimates from Rosenblatt Securities, the entire speed-trading industry made about $1 billion, down from its peak of around $5 billion in 2009." I dunno in my book $1 billion a year is enough that it warrants attention to see if it's actually legal or not. My own opinion is that it is probably a lot higher, and the firms involved in this have figured out ways to make even more money from this strategy that is not disclosed, but that is just conjecture. How do we know this to be true? It's not like there is a marginal cost of labour with a running computer program. What's stopping them from attacking every single spread and every single order they can get information on? Why is TD Ameritrade's order flow the most profitable? Well my point is that if you are a typical retail investor and buy $50k of a stock and lose $500 of that (0.1%) to the HFT's then you probably won't know or care very much. If you don't trade much then this is just rounding error for you. This I think is why it has gone on so long, it's an annoyance but not a deal breaker for anyone. No retail investor loses $500 on a $50K trade to HF traders. If you used a limit order you lost nothing, if you used a market order to make a $50K trade you didn't care what price you got as long as it was in the ballpark of the current bid/ask, so again, you lost nothing. The tiny spreads we see today (at least with large caps) allow you to make market orders and still get around the current price. I still don't do it though, because there is no reason to. If I want to be sure my trade goes through I place a limit a few cents above the current ask if I'm buying or a few cents below the current bid if I'm selling. And many times I get a price better than my limit. Now try placing a market order on a micro-cap stock where there is no HF Trading.

I'd just like to add a few points to the discussion. If you are the type that likes to react emotionally and not think too far past your first instincts on any issue (most people it seems), than please ignore what comes next, because it will only frustrate you, or you won't get it. In general, every complex evolved system has inner workings which are hard to understand, and at first can appear useless or even harmful (i.e. tonsils/appendix don't do anything, take them out). It is also true that any sufficiently complex system will acquire opportunistic parasites. Some of these are harmful (tapeworm), some harmless (most of the bacteria on your skin), some beneficial and can even become essential as the organism and the parasite co-evolve (the micro-organisms in your gut). For the most part what doesn't kill a system will make it stronger, so most harmful parasites should be left alone so that the system can fight them off and improve itself, or evolve defenses against it. A careful balance has to be struck between fighting the harmful things and not hurting the beneficial, while not hampering the evolution of the system itself. The problem with government regulations is that they cement in place procedures/technology and other parts of the system which can stop the evolutionary process. It is the nuclear option, which if used at all, should only be used against the most severe and deadly threats to the system. Anything we are talking about in this thread will seem so antiquated in 15 or 20 years as technology and the exchanges evolve that it will be funny to go back and read it. You don't want to make permanent changes to an evolving system because of short term "problems" unless they are gigantic and causing massive harm. HFT isn't even clearly a problem at all. It is a minor nuisance to frequent traders at worse and beneficial market making at best. It isn't worth scheduling surgery, IMHO.

There are plenty of businesses in the world that have been profitable every day for the last 5 years. "They must be cheating somehow lol" is a good summary of all the anti-HFT arguments I've seen, both here and elsewhere, in the last few days.

Good one, but not possible where I live. That airport must be easier to get into and out of than Logan. Every time I've flown it has cost me more than the cost of a lunch just to get there before my trip and back after. Not to mention the aggravation.

I know, yet I did click on it without examining the URL first as did others apparently.

There is no question of that. The management of this company is exposing the company to tremendous legal risks here. If my employer were doing such things, I wouldn't turn them in, but I would be updating my resume and looking for a more stable place to work. There are two questions here. One, do you rat them out? I'd say no. The more important question you should be asking yourself is what legal risks are you exposing yourself to by working there? Are you depending on this loose cannon of a company for income? Are you exposing yourself to risk just by being there and knowing what is going on if they do get caught? Do you have plausible deniability? There are lot's of things I have no moral problem with (breaking immigration laws, drug dealing, money laundering, gambling, prostitution, tax evasion, etc, etc, ), but I wouldn't want to have anything to do with people actually taking those legal risks.

Nice!

with this logic you would rat out your neighbour to the police for smoking some weed in his back yard. I would start to think, who is really hurt by this? If something is illegal I dont give a shit, drinking whiskey was illegal in the 30's.. Don't think for one minute that there aren't a lot of people who would (and have done) just that. Just as there will always be unjust laws, there will always be rats. Especially with something like immigration laws where the ratting is motivated by fear of losing jobs to people who will work for less.

Illegal does not necessarily equal wrong anymore than legal necessarily equals right. If you want to hire someone to do a job and some government tells you no you can't hire that person. I'd say legal or not you have every moral right to hire who you wish. Although I do understand that this argument will be completely lost on most xenophobic Americans. Your imaginary lines on a map are much more important to you than these mere human beings.