The Running (Through) of the Bulls

A futures trader (apparently still in college) loses 40K, wiping out his account, over the long weekend on Dow futures. There are some YouTube videos on there as well, with a picture-in-picture of him superimposed over his trading software, swearing a lot. From an article linked to in comments elsewhere on his blog:

From my experience, you will fare much better in the long run by implementing a daily loss limit. The numbers just work out that way. However, forcing yourself to adhere to your own rules and actually walking away from trading once a daily loss limit is reached is one of the most challenging steps a trader can take. In my eyes, this ability separates traders from gamblers. As a trader, you must accept risk, understand the risk you have accepted and construct your own parameters of risk, knowing that one single trading day is just a small piece of a much bigger puzzle. I have been assisting clients with day trading online for nine years. I have never witnessed a situation where one single day “made a trader,” but I have witnessed many single trading days that destroyed traders.

This week is going to be very interesting, to say the least.

Three Books

I’ve been reading quite a bit lately, so I figured that I would write capsule reviews or summaries of the books that I’ve read.

  • The United States of Arugula is a look behind the evolution of “American cuisine,” the popularization and adoption of local and organic foodstuffs, and how the perception of cooking in this country changed from necessity to esteemed hobby. For someone like myself who was born in the 1970s, the book serves to fill in the food history of the U.S. before my birth, as well as the culinary scene on the West Coast (a place which, like your average New Yorker, I haughtily ignored during my upbringing). It also explains the appearance of the “Blade Cuisinart” in the Wizardry games, as the Cuisinart was a marketing sensation around that time. The semi-lurid personal details of the lives of the culinary pioneers profiled may raise an eyebrow, but such discussion is actually germane to the narrative for several reasons. For anyone interested in the topic, it’s worth a read.
  • Comic Wars: How Two Tycoons Battled Over the Marvel Comics Empire–And Both Lost has an impressively long title (necessary to disambiguate it during Internet searches, I discovered). It’s a recap of the Marvel Comics bankruptcy, one of the more acrimonious in business history. The struggle between owner Ron Perelman and corporate raider Carl Icahn resulted in an improbable turnabout — the merger of the struggling Marvel with Toy Biz, a small toymaker with whom Marvel had an unusual licensing deal. The book is fairly dry, focusing almost entirely on the business aspects of the bankruptcy (and the quirks and faults of the people involved), and ignoring the creative aspect of the business. Marvel’s suffering was due, in part, to overpaying for companies like Fleer, Skybox, and Panini, whose early-90’s success would never again be duplicated.

    What’s interesting about the book in hindsight is that it post-dates the release of the first X-Men movie (a movie for which, due to a bad deal, Marvel earned very little money), but pre-dates the release of Spider-Man, which cemented Marvel’s status as an intellectual property goldmine, and sent its stock soaring. The book ends with guarded optimism about the future prospects of Marvel.

    The book is mostly a curiosity now — I would only recommend it to those interested in the business aspects of Marvel.

  • I finally picked up Game of Shadows (the book about the BALCO steroids scandal) in the bargain bin, one day after the Mitchell report was released, and gave it a read. It confirmed what I had heard and read earlier — that Barry Bonds is an execrable human being and teammate. I was also enlightened with regards to the shadowy world of track and field, which was also a big part of the BALCO scandal (and the source of the break in the investigation). The course of events described in the book lends credence to those who say that the cheaters will always be one step ahead of testing — the lynchpin of the investigation is (as frequently happens) a tip-off, followed up with diligent investigation and other human intelligence. This is not a conclusion that should bring a smile to the face of any professional sports fan — nevertheless, as it appears that actual progress may be in the pipe with regards to performance enhancers in baseball, I remain optimistic that the game’s integrity can be restored.

Apollo Justice

I saw on Rock Paper Shotgun that Capcom has released a free Flash demo of the upcoming Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney game. As someone who recently played Phoenix Wright: Justice for All (my introduction to the series — I haven’t yet played the other two installments), I find this demo interesting for a few reasons:

  • Phoenix is no longer the main character.
  • The Flash rendition looks and plays exactly like the DS version of the game, and is purported to represent about half of the first case. This is pretty remarkable. It leads me to believe that Flash is actually their development platform for the series, and that they use a “baking” process to convert it into a format that they run on their DS engine. If this is the case, their development costs for the games must have been pretty low (and even lower for subsequent entries) — and, by extension, the revenues from the 2 million copies sold of games in the series are almost pure profit.

My experience with Justice for All also got me thinking about the possibility of proving that the game can be completed. The gameplay does not allow for “retrograde motion,” so to speak, or failure (except in the case where your “health meter” is expended by frivolous objections). As such, it should be possible to test whether or not the game can be completed by simply applying all available actions (a list that is not particularly large) until “forward progress” is made. “Forward progress” could be defined as seeing new dialogue, getting a new item or contact, or going to a new cutscene.

I imagine that, if such a tool were available, it would drastically cut down on the most time-consuming part of QA that would need to be done on the game — checking to make sure that it can be completed. (Inform, about which I keep meaning to write more, has a user-built “skein” that serves much the same purpose.) The Phoenix Wright games are not short, owing to the fact that they have tons of dialogue and many cutscenes. Cutting down the amount of QA needed would mean, of course, more profit, and probably an easier development cycle overall.

I’ve inserted the embedded demo below — hopefully it doesn’t cause issues with your browser. I would say that the demo, while representative of the character and tone of the game, doesn’t show enough of the actual “gameplay” of the game, and doesn’t require much thinking to actually complete.

What Goes Up…

I noticed today that the market took another pounding today, with the Dow, S&P, and NASDAQ all giving up at least 2%. Those who are better acquainted with me will know that, for some time now, I have been convinced of the eventual collapse of the skyrocketing housing market. I do not have any real economics education background — I’ve read a few of the Motley Fool‘s books and articles, but I’ve never taken a class on the subject. I became a follower of blogs like Calculated Risk and the Housing Bubble Blog, among others, and tried to digest the steady stream of news and warning signs posted there on almost a continual basis. Even from my uneducated worm’s-eye-view, behind the Orange Curtain, I smelled funny money, as median income statistics and home prices for the area just didn’t make sense.

I thought that the demise of New Century Financial (a local high-flyer in the mortgage business) in early 2007 would be the catalyst that brought the whole mess down. Accordingly, I decided to liquidate most of my portfolio, take my dollar-cost-averaged gains, and wait patiently for a good opportunity to once again jump in. It turned out to be a temporary hiccup, though — from the beginning of March until the start of the credit crunch, the S&P went up about another 8-10%. After the first wave of panic hit and receded, the S&P closed even slightly higher in October. While I silently cursed my poor timing, the market then proceeded to get hammered in late November and late December, and the start of the new year provided no relief.

We’ve now gone below the price at which I sold my S&P index — the difference now is that the prevailing sentiment appears to be “recession,” and I agree that the markets are going to sink further before any relief sets in. I checked over my portfolio, and, on a percentage-of-portfolio basis, my timing no longer looks so terrible in hindsight, partly due to its weighting towards the index fund.

Some positive results from my March sale:

  • I unloaded AMD at $14.80 (versus the $6.12 it closed at today). After the successful dual-core Athlons, my reading indicated that their products in the pipeline were going to lag behind Intel’s Core 2 series, so I didn’t feel bad about dumping it. I’m glad that I did.
  • I sold EDS at $27.81 (closing at $17.86 today). I originally invested in them on advice from the Fool, but didn’t feel bad about dumping them because I didn’t feel that I personally had a good grasp of their business. Again, I’m glad that I did.
  • I dumped my DELL at $23 (versus the $19.75 that it’s trading after-hours today).

Some not-fully-exploited opportunities:

  • I missed potentially larger gains on AMZN (sold at $38.83, currently at $78.41 after hours), but I didn’t own enough shares to make a huge difference. (I should note that I have had past regrets with AMZN — when I first started investing in 2001, I bought a solid chunk of it at something like $7, and sold when it was a 3- or 4-bagger. Should’ve held onto it…)
  • I also missed gains on NVDA (sold at a split-adjusted $20, currently at $24.80 after hours).
  • Finally, I should have stuck around with PANL (sold at $12.76, currently at $16.82), as well.

Amusingly, I was going to include INTC in this list, but it is taking a convenient 15% dive after hours (following their earnings call), thereby saving me from embarrassment.

I should note that I never turned off my automatic investment withdrawals, so some of these “paper losses” have actually been partially recaptured, just with a smaller position. Overall, I feel okay about how things turned out — and I believe that the coming months will continue to hammer stocks and pave way for an eventual return in force for my investments. There will be money to be made amidst the carnage — in hindsight, I wish that I had picked up airline stocks when I started investing (post-9/11), because the returns would have been awesome.

The D-League Experience, Even Cheaper

I just read on the D-League president’s blog that, from now until the end of the season, you’ll be able to watch all D-League games for free as streaming video. I haven’t checked it out yet, but this explains the presence of cameras and video editing equipment at the games we’ve attended for the last month or so — I initially thought that they were being taped as 3 AM filler for NBA TV, but I guess it was really a warm-up for the streaming video experiment. If you’ve been dying to check out Arsenal basketball, now here’s your chance. It’s also quite possible that you might also be able to see me and Sandy courtside at home games, if we keep getting upgrades…

Can I Keep My Jersey?

The title of this entry is taken from the book of the same name by Paul Shirley, occasional NBA player and basketball wordsmith. It’s a very funny book, mixing insight into the sometimes surreal lives of basketball mercenaries, along with ruminations on more philosophical questions. Given the occasional crazy outburst by an NBA player, it’s easy to forget that there are hundreds of players hanging around on the periphery of the NBA (or playing internationally), still hoping to one day make it in the Association. Playing in foreign leagues offers a chance at making decent scratch — but those toiling in the minors in this country aren’t exactly breaking the bank. Shirley, a mechanical engineer by education, would seem to be one of the few that is actually well-equipped for a life outside basketball. But even though he repeatedly reminds us that he harbors kinship or friendship with very, very few of the people he has played with, he still doggedly pursues the opportunity to play professionally.

The book, which is really a compilation of journal entries kept over four years by Shirley, doesn’t dwell too long on any other individuals. There are some interesting (to me, at least) cameos, among them fan-mail-trashing Shareef Abdur-Rahim, talk of the lack of skill of ex-Hornet (and current member of the Utah Flash) James Lang, and one-time Dallas Maverick Chris Anstey (at the time, playing for UNICS Kazan — a team that was also the one-time home of another late-90’s Mavs flameout, Martin Müürsepp). Undoubtedly, though, the book is really more about Paul Shirley and his travels than anything else. That’s fine, though — his writing and wit are both worthy of praise. Strangely, I found the section of the book dealing with his time as a benchwarmer for the Phoenix Suns to be probably the least interesting (with the notable exception of an anecdote about Bo Outlaw and the “kiss cam” shtick used at sporting events).

It’s a quick read — I burned through it in a few hours after borrowing it from the library — but definitely worth a read.

OpenWrt

So I decided, on something of a whim, to replace the firmware in my trusty Buffalo WBR2-G54 router with OpenWrt, a modular Linux distribution for embedded devices. (I actually used the X-Wrt packages, which have a better web interface for configuration but are based on OpenWrt.) The WBR2-G54 is based on the Broadcom 4712 platform, and normally runs its own customized version of Linux (but which is not normally accessible to the end user).

The process of installation was a bit maddening, as the newest “Kamikaze” distribution doesn’t work out of the box with the WBR2-G54 — the wireless interface doesn’t show up in the configuration pages. It took me awhile to figure out that the problem wasn’t with what I was doing, but rolling back to the earlier “White Russian” distribution got me up and running. (I used these two sources for instructions on flashing. Note that, in Windows Vista, you’ll have to install the TFTP client manually, as it’s not part of the default packages that are installed.)

There are a few benefits (real and potential) to doing an upgrade like this:

  • Support for WPA2 security. The vendor firmware only supported WPA, and, even though my current wireless card doesn’t seem to support it (in spite of manufacturer protests to the otherwise), it’ll be good to have for the future.
  • The ability to use services like DynDNS, in case I want to access my home network while I’m on the road. This is another feature that was not supported in the vendor firmware. Couple this with Wake-on-LAN support, and it would be possible to use resources from home in almost any situation.
  • Being able to set up a VPN for home, again for purposes of working on the road.
  • Running any number of other packages to add interesting functionality to it. This InfoWorld article is a good overview of the possibilities. I have a feeling that, in order to be able to do all this whiz-bang stuff, I’ll actually need a router with more RAM and flash — the web interface for X-Wrt indicates that I’m already at about 84% RAM utilization with a default installation and a couple of other packages.

I wound up having to install the miniupnpd package to enable UPnP support (necessary for the all-important Xbox Live on the 360), but other than that, I didn’t need to do too much else. Once I actually got the firmware flashed correctly, I would say that setting it up correctly isn’t much more difficult than with the stock firmware. Granted, you’ll need to know about the alphabet soup that is the world of networking, but the configuration process is fairly straightforward.

One other possibility that I’m interested in is installing some kind of voice chat server on it, similar to Ventrilo or TeamSpeak — I’m not sure if the VOIP packages that are available would encompass this sort of thing, and the Mumble project would appear to be a no-go due to its server’s reliance on Qt. I’ll have to look into it some more.

A Little Paranoia Goes a Long Way

I read an article this morning on the theft of customer data (including credit card data) from geeks.com, a site from which I had purchased a cheap graphics tablet on a lark about eight months ago. Of course, I immediately got concerned, and checked my credit cards for any suspicious charges, but found none. (The comments on that article seem to indicate pretty widespread fraud has already taken place, to the tune of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.) Then I checked to see whether or not I had used the “secure online account number” features of my credit cards when I bought the tablet, and was relieved to find out that I had in fact done so. For the uninitiated, they’re card numbers generated for use with specific merchant accounts, linked to your normal card. They can only be used at that specific merchant, though, so they’re mostly useless if stolen. A quick phone call to Discover later, and the card number linked to geeks.com was shut down, presumably eliminating any possibility that I’ll be affected by the data theft. Pretty painless and hassle-free.

I used to think that I was being overly-paranoid by using the secure numbers whenever possible, but this incident has made me a true believer. Annoyingly, there are still some things that you can’t really use them for — cases where you need to present the original card to receive goods or services. But overall, it’s still worth using. I would urge everyone to use these secure number services whenever possible — it’ll give you peace-of-mind and potentially save you a lot of hassle when (not if) you’re affected by a security breach.

Main Site Up

So I finally got off of my duff and did an install of Drupal for the main portion of this site, replacing the old placeholder page that was there. Right now there isn’t much (any?) content on there, but I’ll be putting up some projects and other stuff soon, hopefully. I figure it’s better to use an actual content management system for this, rather than cobbling together some bare pages with links to project files…