Meeting timings are fraught with small games.
Here’s the logic: You don’t know when I’ll show up, and waiting is costly. If you’re early you’ll have to wait. If you’re late you won’t. So you come late. I do the same thing. Presto, we’re both late
Are you a typical daytrader.?
From the Abstract: I find that a typical day trader is a male in his late 30s, lives in the metropolitan area, and trades in larger quantities than an investor in a size-matched control group even after ignoring “day trades”. Day traders day trade stocks that grab their attention, that they own, or that they have day traded before. Market volatility increases and trading losses in the same stock decrease the likelihood of day trading. Day traders pay close attention to the state of the limit order book and are very active near the end of the trading session. Those that are about to realize a loss from a day trade are very likely to do so at the very end of the trading session. An examination of day traders’ careers shows that day traders become more confident and aggressive as they keep on day trading: they sell more often stocks that they do not own and use more leverage when day trading. Trading losses are an important determinant of the decision to quit day trading: the likelihood of quitting day trading is increasing in the magnitude of the contemporary loss. Day traders do not earn better returns than investors in a size-matched control group even before commissions. Their realized returns from day trades are high, but these returns are not representative of overall performance because of day traders’ strong reluctance to realize losses. Day traders prefer to keep losing positions if they have sufficient capital to do so. These findings on day traders’ performance suggest that day traders on average are not trading on superior information.
A case for markets and why property rights may not be that vital.
Left2Right: How Not to Complain About Taxes (III): "I deserve my pretax income": Today's post is a tribute to F. A. Hayek.... The question at stake is whether there are sound arguments for the proposition that individuals have such a strong claim to their property that the state cannot justly tax them for the purpose of funding social insurance.... The claim "I deserve my income," as applied to an individual's pretax income in free market economies, has considerable intuitive force.... But... Hayek explained why free market prices cannot, and should not, track claims of individual moral desert....
Hayek's deepest economic insight was that the basic function of free market prices is informational.... They reflect the sum total of the inherently dispersed information about the supply and demand of millions of distinct individuals for each product. Free market prices give us our only access to this information.... This is why centralized economic planning is doomed to failure.... It's a short step from this core insight about prices to their failure to track any coherent notion of moral desert. Claims of desert are essentially backward-looking.... Free market prices are essentially forward-looking. Current prices send signals to producers as to where the demand is now.... [C]apitalism is constantly pulling the rug out from underneath even the most thoughtful, foresightful, and prudent production plans of individual agents... individuals cannot count on their virtue being rewarded in the free market. For the function of the market isn't to reward people for past good behavior. It's to direct them toward producing for current demand, regardless of what they did in the past....
If free market prices don't give people what they morally deserve, should we try to regulate factor prices so that they do track producers' moral deserts? Hayek offered two compelling arguments against this proposal. First, if you fix prices on a backward-looking standard, they will no longer be able to perform their informational function.... This creates enormous waste.... Hayek focused on... any attempt to regulate people's rewards according to judgments of how much they morally deserve would destroy liberty. It would involve the state in making detailed, intrusive judgments of how well people used their liberty, and penalize them for not exercising their liberty in the way the state thinks best. This is no way to run a free society....
Several implications follow.... (a) The claim "I deserve my pretax income" is not generally true.... (b) The claim that people rocked by the vicissitudes of the market... are getting what they deserve is also not generally true.... It is in principle impossible for even the most prudent to forsee all the market turns that could undo them. (If it were possible, then efficient socialist planning would be possible, too. But it isn't.)... (d) The volatility of capitalist markets creates a profound and urgent need for insurance, over and above the insurance needs people would have under more stable (but stagnant) economic systems. This need is increased also by the fact that capitalism inspires a love of personal independence.... This fact does not yet clinch the case for social insurance... maybe private insurance would do a better job meeting people's needs for insurance in the event of unemployment, disability, loss of a household earner, sickness, and old age.... [But] no argument that people have a moral claim to their pretax incomes, sufficient to preclude taxing it for insurance purposes, has survived critical scrutiny. Certainly, "I deserve it" doesn't.
Commodities as an investment alternative.
FT.com / Markets / Commodities - Commodities lure funds investors: "This is a fraction of the money that pension and mutual funds allocate to fixed interest and equity markets. But Ms Shemilt said it pointed to growing awareness among long-term investors that commodity prices could provide strong returns. The Goldman Sachs Commodity Index has risen by 25 per cent this year although it has dropped by more than 12 percentage points from its peak in October. In comparison, the S&P 500 index, has risen by about 10 per cent this year.
Goldman Sachs estimates that the returns on the GSCI have averaged about 12 per cent a year since 1970, whilst returns from key equity and bond indices are between 8.5 and 11 per cent over the same period"
Soon the libraries will be accessible and searchable from your PC.
Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: Project Ocean: "Google's 'Project Ocean.' From an email he received: 'Harvard University is embarking on a collaboration with Google that could harness Google's search technology to provide to both the Harvard community and the larger public a revolutionary new information location tool to find materials available in libraries. In the coming months, Google will collaborate with Harvard's libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of the 15 million volumes held in the University's extensive library system. Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in the public domain. In related agreements, Google will launch similar projects with Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library.'"
