Buyers will not demand cheaper, more easily repaired body parts.
Today's cars are designed to crumple in a impact, vastly increasing the cost of repairing a car and drastically reducing the costs associated with deaths and injury. Today, even minor accidents can cause a car to total out.
Also, to meet mileage guidelines, car makers have to cram every small engines in smaller spaces with lower tolerances and higher compression, resulting in harder to maintain engines.
Don't get me wrong – I think durability has increased – but it is a lower goal then passage safety and gas mileage.
Then there is the reverse Dutch auction, people put in their bids, the auctioneer figures out the price to clear the market, and everybody who bid above that price pays that price. It works best when you have many lots that are basically the same. I would hope they would use this method – but then again I would hope that there would be more and smaller lots.
Google use this method when the IPOed their stock. Unlike other dot coms where the price pops after a IPO (implying they left money on the table), Google's price initially slumped (which implies that they did not.)
You can sell something either at retail or wholesale. Retail has higher overhead so things cost more. And I am not sure how much retail business the government should be in.
To your point, when you sell cars at wholesale you tend to do it by the car. That is the natural lot size.
The government would only be favoring the reach and well-connected if the spread between auction price and the market price was higher – which can be hard to tell when you are dumping a huge supply of something – but the principle holds. If the spread is lower than the cost of running a retail store then action it should be. (That being said, I would think more and smaller lots should be the way to go -,su)
Why would "rapidly placed and cancelled orders" by itself effect the market? It is because they are front running.
What you said was true but this is no longer true since the SEC has required brokers to operate on a best price instead of a best execution for trading. I will point you to Michael Lewis's "Flash Boys" – there are summaries floating out on the web. Because there are now multiple markets, a HFT can tease out information on a big order by offering a low price on a small lot (or, as you imply "rapidly placed and cancelled orders"). They then race ahead to other exchanges, front running the larger order.
Now, HFT is one of those words which encompass many different things. There are legitimate high speed traders that operate as market makers. Are these HFT? Langue is fluid. The front running HFTs are not adding value – they are just shaving pennies off of trades.
No they can't. Read further up the thread. Most cities, and all the cities the article cites, have a limit on the number of cabs. All of these cities have hit their limit ages ago. When new licenses are issued they are costly. Last I heard New York was selling newly minted licenses at over a million.
The entire points of the licenses are to constrain the number of cabs out there at an artificially low level – that is the limiting factor on new competitors. I am arguing it should be the free market that determines it.
Not beaning forced to buy a good makes it a market - it does not make it free market however. A free market would allow competitors to enter the market which they can't.
Maybe. Stuff like this takes a lot of digging into. Economic profit is different from accounting profit in the short run. I know a chunk of the good will was along the line of acquiring clients. i.e. they bought another firm for their clients. That gets amortized over 3 years. How long does a client last? If it takes 5 years to break even on the acquisition costs and the client last 10 then it is a good deal.
I will point out that Go Daddy was a partnership where losses flow back to the owners and can be used to reduce personal income tax. There is an incentive to front load the accounting costs. Unlike a traditional business they want to generate the maximum accounting loss possible and push profits to the future.
If you want to braid hair you need to spend 3 to 12 months getting licenses. The hair stylist association claims it is to learn health and safety. In reality it is to keep people out.
I think it is a reasonable question to ask why commercial drivers need to pass a higher standard. It can't be because they are on the road more. I know traveling salesmen who put on far more miles than taxi drivers. For example, are additional sections needed because limos and minibuses are longer and heavier than passage cars?
Economist calls it "Rent Seeking". Taxi drivers make surplus profits because there is an artificial scarcity in the market.
Barons used to give the King sacks of gold to collect rent from lands forever. Just because Barons paid big bucks does not mean it is right. Society would be overall better off if the cap were abolished. If you want to argue that taxi drivers are not nobility and should not be punished the answer is not to keep the system in place. The city could buy out the licenses and lift the requirements. Slowly flood the market over 10 to 20 years. Etc.
On the other hand, most cities regulate cab fares down, cutting into their profits. Instead of positions trying to figure out the right balance between the number of cabs and fare I would vote for the free market.
First, because commercial activity is a proxy for costs. Taxis drive more so they tend to get into accidents more. When they get into accidents there tends to be more people in the car. In theory this could be refined, for example charging insurance by the mile and not by the year.
Second, I think, payouts for commercial passengers tend to be higher. If I am at fault in an accident my passengers (i.e. wife) can claim medical but probably not lost wages. Lost wages probably would be covered for a passage however. I am sure this is highly dependent on local laws.
You are assuming that insurance companies can't discriminate. They can, where allowed by law.
Require that the insurer has a commercial or limo license (In America at least the requirements are higher). Charge higher fees for those with lots of driving infractions. Charge lower fees for those who attend certifications and take classes. etc..
The point being is that the regulations should say if you can meet the requirements you are good to go. Currently most cities issue a fixed number of licenses.
The problem is that the insider who hold the licenses (usually gained with great effort) want to keep the outsiders out. The safety issue is mostly a smoke screen.
Only a morons would want a bootleg shot with what is basically a cameraphone on someone's head.
True. And I am always surprised by the number of morons and the amount of money they have. I would be surprised if one could get anything usable today. However, give it 5 years and I am sure the quality of GG, look a likes, or hacked glasses will be sufficent to the (camcorder level) task.
I would guess the primary driver of this is not to ban annoying behavior but to prevent somebody from filming the screen to make and distribute cheap copies.
But I like your idea of subtitles via the glasses. Something that I have not thought off.
I am confused. I peaked at your link and it seems that they are just a real estate agency? Are they actually investing in any real estate? (example – buying stock is making a bet that the market will go up, buying a stock brokerage firm is making a bet that people will increase trading on the stock market.)
They are not "blow[ing] $200+ million a year being a registrar?"
They lost (revenue – expenses) 130m in 2013.
Of that, about 100m is amortizing goodwill, a nonrecurring noncash expense. This depreciation only has a minor effect on the cash returned to the shareholders and that effect is a good one because it lowers the corporate taxes they pay.
Not saying it is meaningless. Just you can't count it towards the cash "burn rate" of a company.
I don't think so – or at least in the short run. Reading the prospectus it looks like all of the funds are going towards the company – no investor is cashing out. You might see some 144a sales occurring down the road but IIRC current holders will have to wait at least 6 months to do so and only for a small percentage of the free float out there. (If they want to float more they would have another offering.)
Regulations forbid shorting stock for the first 30 days. There are some expectations for market makers and a loophole for holders of physical stock that hedge funds have abused in the past. (I think that particular scandal has been cleared up.)
I want to counter your last e-mail with advice and saying one should have a optimistic outlook but I can't do that without sounding trite.
I will try to give some practice advice – take a look at a ROTH IRA if "savings account" means "emergency rainy day fund". There are companies (banks and the big online brokers – deals rotate) out there that offer low balance low fee low risk (i.e. short term bond funds) out there. If there is an emergency any money you put in you can withdraw without penalty.
You say we are not a not a decrepit power.
Powers become decrepit powers by wasting their energy on pointless battles. Trying to line up everybody is hard - bulling little countries takes more politcal capital than you think. The EU has been spending a lot of energy to get London in line unsuccessfully and I would argue they have more clout with England on this one particular issue. Then you need to figure out what to do with Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Singapore. There small countries have large trading floors and a big incentive to "cheat" and stay out of the system. These will be hard to persuade.
“The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing” Jean Baptiste Colbert
So - lots of energy, little gain, and it does not fix the system. The energy and political capital would be better spent fixing "transfer pricing" and other dodges corporations use to get out of paying corporate income tax.
"Why was this trait considered attractive in the first place?" kind of does not matter. The choice can be arbitrary (random) as long as it is a proxy for fitness that is hard to fake and has some type of cost associated with it. Peacocks have tails; humans have square jaws and the ability to dance.
And this theory rises far above "speculation". There have been many studies on this, both in the field and the lab which have confirmed the thoery.
"Masculine" traits - the topic at hand - are driven by female choice. You are pointing at the more general "fitness" traits to thrive and survive. Going back to the peacock, sometimes "masculine" traits are more important that "fitness" traits. Its tail helps it pass along its genes but also helps it in being killed by predators.
It is not things that males have per se, but things that a male can show off. A classic example is a peacock's fan. A peacock does not grow its fan to be beautify but to show off Its health. It is saying that it is so fit as a bird it can waste its huge and limited resources on its frivolous tail. It is not the tail feathers but the size and balance of them that are "masculine".
Why did peahens chose tail feathers? Other birds and animals chose different traits but they tend to choose something that is expensive (in biological terms) and hard to fake. Once a trait is selected a feedback loop is established and that trait tends to get emphasized.
If that was true, why aren't the banks pushing "best execution" now?
They can't because the SEC changed the rules 10 years ago requiring changing the standard that brokers must use from execution to price. FYI “best price” is technically harder to do than “best execution”. Best prices involves lots of complex business rules, execution is subjective.
You then launch into a argument that transactions taxes are inevitable because they are popular. Yes, it is popular to vilify fat cats and purpose cheap populist solutions. However popular does not mean good or effective. The problem is that the tax won't fix the problem. You are confusing how HFT work (going very fast) with what they do (front running). You might cut into HFT profits but you are not fixing the issue. Better to fix the root cause.
You then ask why banks are not being more politically astute. Well, both banks and HFT have gobs of money, if the banks win the HFT lose their jobs so the HFT are going to defend their turf to the last breath, and complex technically issues don't change rapidly.
But that does not mean banks are sitting on their hands. See IEX. http://www.iextrading.com/abou... They have built in a 350 millisecond delay and have been going like gangbusters.
I don't give a shit about measures such as "liquidity" and "volatility"
You should. I assume that you have some type of retirement fund invested (directly or indirectly) in the stock market. "Liquidity" and "volatility" are measurements of inefficiencies. The higher they are, the more inefficient the stock market is. That is, returns that should be going to you are going to bankers instead.
but it's not like Airbus is gonna go bust
Well, no – but that is not a reason why we should be giving money to bankers. And Airbus is kind of off point. Trading in Airbus has shifted away from Paris to London and Germany after France implemented their tax. Start ups are also moving that way.
Moreover the government's gotten a new source of revenue,
You want to increase the complexity of the tax system by creating taxes that are hard to enforce (See trading in Airbus moving to London), does not fix the problem it is supposed to, and makes the average person worse off. No – you have it backwards. If we want to raise taxes we should raise taxes the most efficiently way possible not because something is laying around untaxed.
When a broker front runs his client it is illegal and unethical because he is working against his client, a clear conflict of interest.
HFT are not violating any conflict of interest so it is not illegal and I don't think exploiting a flaw in the system is unethical. Now the flaw should be fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
Buyers will not demand cheaper, more easily repaired body parts.
Today's cars are designed to crumple in a impact, vastly increasing the cost of repairing a car and drastically reducing the costs associated with deaths and injury. Today, even minor accidents can cause a car to total out.
Also, to meet mileage guidelines, car makers have to cram every small engines in smaller spaces with lower tolerances and higher compression, resulting in harder to maintain engines.
Don't get me wrong – I think durability has increased – but it is a lower goal then passage safety and gas mileage.
Then there is the reverse Dutch auction, people put in their bids, the auctioneer figures out the price to clear the market, and everybody who bid above that price pays that price. It works best when you have many lots that are basically the same. I would hope they would use this method – but then again I would hope that there would be more and smaller lots.
Google use this method when the IPOed their stock. Unlike other dot coms where the price pops after a IPO (implying they left money on the table), Google's price initially slumped (which implies that they did not.)
You can sell something either at retail or wholesale. Retail has higher overhead so things cost more. And I am not sure how much retail business the government should be in.
To your point, when you sell cars at wholesale you tend to do it by the car. That is the natural lot size.
The government would only be favoring the reach and well-connected if the spread between auction price and the market price was higher – which can be hard to tell when you are dumping a huge supply of something – but the principle holds. If the spread is lower than the cost of running a retail store then action it should be. (That being said, I would think more and smaller lots should be the way to go - ,su)
Why would "rapidly placed and cancelled orders" by itself effect the market? It is because they are front running.
What you said was true but this is no longer true since the SEC has required brokers to operate on a best price instead of a best execution for trading. I will point you to Michael Lewis's "Flash Boys" – there are summaries floating out on the web. Because there are now multiple markets, a HFT can tease out information on a big order by offering a low price on a small lot (or, as you imply "rapidly placed and cancelled orders"). They then race ahead to other exchanges, front running the larger order.
Now, HFT is one of those words which encompass many different things. There are legitimate high speed traders that operate as market makers. Are these HFT? Langue is fluid. The front running HFTs are not adding value – they are just shaving pennies off of trades.
No they can't. Read further up the thread. Most cities, and all the cities the article cites, have a limit on the number of cabs. All of these cities have hit their limit ages ago. When new licenses are issued they are costly. Last I heard New York was selling newly minted licenses at over a million.
The entire points of the licenses are to constrain the number of cabs out there at an artificially low level – that is the limiting factor on new competitors. I am arguing it should be the free market that determines it.
See this link for more info.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...
Not beaning forced to buy a good makes it a market - it does not make it free market however. A free market would allow competitors to enter the market which they can't.
Maybe. Stuff like this takes a lot of digging into. Economic profit is different from accounting profit in the short run. I know a chunk of the good will was along the line of acquiring clients. i.e. they bought another firm for their clients. That gets amortized over 3 years. How long does a client last? If it takes 5 years to break even on the acquisition costs and the client last 10 then it is a good deal.
I will point out that Go Daddy was a partnership where losses flow back to the owners and can be used to reduce personal income tax. There is an incentive to front load the accounting costs. Unlike a traditional business they want to generate the maximum accounting loss possible and push profits to the future.
It's High Frequency Traders, not Hedge Funds, that do the front running. If you going to slander people make sure you slander the right people.
But this is a insider's response.
If you want to braid hair you need to spend 3 to 12 months getting licenses. The hair stylist association claims it is to learn health and safety. In reality it is to keep people out.
I think it is a reasonable question to ask why commercial drivers need to pass a higher standard. It can't be because they are on the road more. I know traveling salesmen who put on far more miles than taxi drivers. For example, are additional sections needed because limos and minibuses are longer and heavier than passage cars?
Economist calls it "Rent Seeking". Taxi drivers make surplus profits because there is an artificial scarcity in the market.
Barons used to give the King sacks of gold to collect rent from lands forever. Just because Barons paid big bucks does not mean it is right. Society would be overall better off if the cap were abolished. If you want to argue that taxi drivers are not nobility and should not be punished the answer is not to keep the system in place. The city could buy out the licenses and lift the requirements. Slowly flood the market over 10 to 20 years. Etc.
On the other hand, most cities regulate cab fares down, cutting into their profits. Instead of positions trying to figure out the right balance between the number of cabs and fare I would vote for the free market.
First, because commercial activity is a proxy for costs. Taxis drive more so they tend to get into accidents more. When they get into accidents there tends to be more people in the car. In theory this could be refined, for example charging insurance by the mile and not by the year.
Second, I think, payouts for commercial passengers tend to be higher. If I am at fault in an accident my passengers (i.e. wife) can claim medical but probably not lost wages. Lost wages probably would be covered for a passage however. I am sure this is highly dependent on local laws.
You are assuming that insurance companies can't discriminate. They can, where allowed by law.
Require that the insurer has a commercial or limo license (In America at least the requirements are higher). Charge higher fees for those with lots of driving infractions. Charge lower fees for those who attend certifications and take classes. etc..
The point being is that the regulations should say if you can meet the requirements you are good to go. Currently most cities issue a fixed number of licenses.
The problem is that the insider who hold the licenses (usually gained with great effort) want to keep the outsiders out. The safety issue is mostly a smoke screen.
Only a morons would want a bootleg shot with what is basically a cameraphone on someone's head.
True. And I am always surprised by the number of morons and the amount of money they have. I would be surprised if one could get anything usable today. However, give it 5 years and I am sure the quality of GG, look a likes, or hacked glasses will be sufficent to the (camcorder level) task.
I would guess the primary driver of this is not to ban annoying behavior but to prevent somebody from filming the screen to make and distribute cheap copies.
But I like your idea of subtitles via the glasses. Something that I have not thought off.
I am confused. I peaked at your link and it seems that they are just a real estate agency? Are they actually investing in any real estate? (example – buying stock is making a bet that the market will go up, buying a stock brokerage firm is making a bet that people will increase trading on the stock market.)
They are not "blow[ing] $200+ million a year being a registrar?"
They lost (revenue – expenses) 130m in 2013.
Of that, about 100m is amortizing goodwill, a nonrecurring noncash expense. This depreciation only has a minor effect on the cash returned to the shareholders and that effect is a good one because it lowers the corporate taxes they pay.
Not saying it is meaningless. Just you can't count it towards the cash "burn rate" of a company.
I don't think so – or at least in the short run. Reading the prospectus it looks like all of the funds are going towards the company – no investor is cashing out. You might see some 144a sales occurring down the road but IIRC current holders will have to wait at least 6 months to do so and only for a small percentage of the free float out there. (If they want to float more they would have another offering.)
Regulations forbid shorting stock for the first 30 days. There are some expectations for market makers and a loophole for holders of physical stock that hedge funds have abused in the past. (I think that particular scandal has been cleared up.)
I want to counter your last e-mail with advice and saying one should have a optimistic outlook but I can't do that without sounding trite.
I will try to give some practice advice – take a look at a ROTH IRA if "savings account" means "emergency rainy day fund". There are companies (banks and the big online brokers – deals rotate) out there that offer low balance low fee low risk (i.e. short term bond funds) out there. If there is an emergency any money you put in you can withdraw without penalty.
You say we are not a not a decrepit power.
Powers become decrepit powers by wasting their energy on pointless battles. Trying to line up everybody is hard - bulling little countries takes more politcal capital than you think. The EU has been spending a lot of energy to get London in line unsuccessfully and I would argue they have more clout with England on this one particular issue. Then you need to figure out what to do with Switzerland, Hong Kong, and Singapore. There small countries have large trading floors and a big incentive to "cheat" and stay out of the system. These will be hard to persuade.
“The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing” Jean Baptiste Colbert
So - lots of energy, little gain, and it does not fix the system. The energy and political capital would be better spent fixing "transfer pricing" and other dodges corporations use to get out of paying corporate income tax.
"Why was this trait considered attractive in the first place?" kind of does not matter. The choice can be arbitrary (random) as long as it is a proxy for fitness that is hard to fake and has some type of cost associated with it. Peacocks have tails; humans have square jaws and the ability to dance.
And this theory rises far above "speculation". There have been many studies on this, both in the field and the lab which have confirmed the thoery.
"Masculine" traits - the topic at hand - are driven by female choice. You are pointing at the more general "fitness" traits to thrive and survive. Going back to the peacock, sometimes "masculine" traits are more important that "fitness" traits. Its tail helps it pass along its genes but also helps it in being killed by predators.
It is not things that males have per se, but things that a male can show off. A classic example is a peacock's fan. A peacock does not grow its fan to be beautify but to show off Its health. It is saying that it is so fit as a bird it can waste its huge and limited resources on its frivolous tail. It is not the tail feathers but the size and balance of them that are "masculine".
Why did peahens chose tail feathers? Other birds and animals chose different traits but they tend to choose something that is expensive (in biological terms) and hard to fake. Once a trait is selected a feedback loop is established and that trait tends to get emphasized.
If that was true, why aren't the banks pushing "best execution" now?
They can't because the SEC changed the rules 10 years ago requiring changing the standard that brokers must use from execution to price. FYI “best price” is technically harder to do than “best execution”. Best prices involves lots of complex business rules, execution is subjective.
You then launch into a argument that transactions taxes are inevitable because they are popular. Yes, it is popular to vilify fat cats and purpose cheap populist solutions. However popular does not mean good or effective. The problem is that the tax won't fix the problem. You are confusing how HFT work (going very fast) with what they do (front running). You might cut into HFT profits but you are not fixing the issue. Better to fix the root cause.
You then ask why banks are not being more politically astute. Well, both banks and HFT have gobs of money, if the banks win the HFT lose their jobs so the HFT are going to defend their turf to the last breath, and complex technically issues don't change rapidly.
But that does not mean banks are sitting on their hands.
See IEX. http://www.iextrading.com/abou...
They have built in a 350 millisecond delay and have been going like gangbusters.
I don't give a shit about measures such as "liquidity" and "volatility"
You should. I assume that you have some type of retirement fund invested (directly or indirectly) in the stock market.
"Liquidity" and "volatility" are measurements of inefficiencies. The higher they are, the more inefficient the stock market is. That is, returns that should be going to you are going to bankers instead.
but it's not like Airbus is gonna go bust
Well, no – but that is not a reason why we should be giving money to bankers. And Airbus is kind of off point. Trading in Airbus has shifted away from Paris to London and Germany after France implemented their tax. Start ups are also moving that way.
Moreover the government's gotten a new source of revenue,
You want to increase the complexity of the tax system by creating taxes that are hard to enforce (See trading in Airbus moving to London), does not fix the problem it is supposed to, and makes the average person worse off. No – you have it backwards. If we want to raise taxes we should raise taxes the most efficiently way possible not because something is laying around untaxed.
When a broker front runs his client it is illegal and unethical because he is working against his client, a clear conflict of interest.
HFT are not violating any conflict of interest so it is not illegal and I don't think exploiting a flaw in the system is unethical. Now the flaw should be fixed.