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Trading the Markets With FOSS Software?
from the free-markets-deserve-free-software dept.
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The best tool... (Score:5, Funny)
is a dartboard.
It's unfortunately not available on most distros, but building yourself isn't too hard.
The dependencies are merely a wall, and Newton's three laws of motion.
The NYSE runs linux (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The NYSE runs linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The NYSE runs linux (Score:5, Informative)
That's nice, but I think he's more interested in analysis and management tools rather than actually running a stock market...
I think you're right. Here's a list of apps from something I just googled. [linuxlinks.com]
Re:The NYSE runs linux (Score:4, Insightful)
That's nice, but I think he's more interested in analysis and management tools rather than actually running a stock market...
In a gold rush, the ones who sell mining tools are the ones who are guaranteed to make a profit.
Lehman, Merrill, AIG, HBOS all used lots of FOSS IIRC.
Screw automated trading; screw Ben Bernanke, screw McCain-Bush. I'm going to be foreclosed because I lost my job in the operations dept at Merrill and I can't refinance my mortgage. Why should they get a bailout? Quants screwed over my life and I want them to pay.
Did you lose billions of dollars in the stock market? Don't have enough cash to cover your debts? Call the Federal Reserve hotline! You could have $85bn in your checking account by tomorrow, no collateral or responsibility required! 1-800-FED Call now and we'll start a commission to get investors off your back for free!*
*offer applies with enrollment in triple advantage and is subject to a vote for John McCain
no collateral or responsibility required!
Ummm...please check your facts. AIG's assets are collateral and the loan is 11%+. I pay a lot less than than that on the equity lines and mortgages I have with my real estate investments. Sure, it's a bail out, but AIG's going to spend some big bucks paying it back or lose big time.
Financial Literacy is most people's problem, thus their finances are a problem.
Maybe Man U can get Uncle Sam to assign an Apache gunship to defend their goal during matches. God knows they need it.
You do know a 3-month T-bill was, at one point earlier this week, yielding less than par value? People were buying US government bonds guaranteed to lose money because of the fear that everything else would lose more value.
That's the rub. Many businesses go out of business, some of them more spectacularly than others, and there was no mention of a government bailout of them now was there. It is the same asshats that scream "Free Market" when they perceive a wrong against the corporation that are now screaming to not allow the market to work as it should. AIG knew the market risks when they offered their IPO. Investors knew the risks when they purchased the stock. The company certainly knew the risks when it lobbied Congress to change the laws and lastly the Congress knew the risks when it deregulated everything at the behest of the company. Why should the public be forced to take on the risk these same asshats assumed solely because the asshats screamed "free markets" to get the regulations that would have protected the public voided and the agencies charged with oversight gutted? You didn't see AIG investors protesting the profits they were getting when times where better so why protest when they go belly up? It is corporate welfare pure and simple.
The federal reserve isn't owned by the US taxpayers. It's a private company.
not really (Score:5, Informative)
It's a complicated public/private structure, and basically anything less than a book-length explanation of it oversimplifies in one way or another. It's the de facto U.S. central bank, and the main federal agency regulating banking, but also has significant private components. Its funding sources are technically ownership and fees by various private banks, but restricted in such ways that it's de facto more like government regulation and bank taxes than ownership and fees between private entities. Its board of governors are appointed by the President, and confirmed by the Senate. It's also effectively an operational arm of the U.S. Treasury for everything from tax collection to paper-money supply to treasury-bond issuance and interest payments.
More to the point, its solvency is implicitly guaranteed by the U.S. government, much like that of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were (and those two quasi-private entities were actually de facto considerably more private than the Fed is).
Wake up and smell the fascism ??? How about, wake up and smell the socialism?
Uh, how about, "Wake up and smell the Crony Capitalism"?
All the little stockholders at AIG are getting the shaft.
Uh, I think that was a foregone conclusion when they hired inept management.
It was essential that every stockholder in AIG lose virtually everything they invested. Otherwise it becomes profitable to mismanage your company and let Uncle Sam buy you out.
I think that some of these resuces were necessary for the good of the greater economy. Sure, they shouldn't be necessary, but regulators messed up and now for the sake of not collapsing into a depression we need to clean up.
If I were in charge the only thing I'd do differently when doing bailouts like these would be:
1. Company is 100% taken over.
2. Stock is declared void. Stockholders get a 1-time eminent domain payment of (value of company assets)-(cost to taxpayers for bailout)/(# shares outstanding). Frankly the stockholders should be happy they don't end up owing money which is what the math certainly will work out to.
3. Corporate officers arrested and face heavy criminal penalties. Costing the taxpayers billions of dollars needs to be made a serious crime. It is certainly worse than robbing the corner store.
4. Government runs company in such a way to preserve the general economy.
5. Eventually company is either dissolved or IPO'ed - with all proceeds going to taxpayers.
If this were how bailouts worked you wouldn't see too many executives asking for them.
Don't get me wrong - the preference is in general to let companies just go bankrupt and not interfere. But, if interference is needed for the greater good than this is how it should be done.
You can blame a lot on Bush, including the terrible budgeting since that's an executive job, but the economy, not so much. Not unless you're a tool of Nancy Pelosi and Reid. I know it's popular around here to blame everything on Bush, but get the facts. Be enlightened.
Well, you have some facts skewed and some misplaced causality.
In 1999, Republicans wanted less regulation, causing investment banks to make create financial derivatives to hide risk and gain back their margins and bonuses, where normal banks could now compete.
Second of all, remember Bush touting the "Ownership Economy" where the sub-primes had artificially elevated the percentage of citizen's who lived in homes they owned?
Hardly sounds like a left-wing plot of the Democrats altering private banks attitude of lending via mind-control.
Less regulation, market forces, and human animus(greed, aggression, and fear), which if totally unchecked/balanced by other concerns can spell disaster.
Read this 2003 NY Times article [nytimes.com] about Republican efforts to increase regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. There is plenty of blame to go around. Here's a little snippet from the article:
Among the groups denouncing the proposal today were the National Association of Home Builders and Congressional Democrats who fear that tighter regulation of the companies could sharply reduce their commitment to financing low-income and affordable housing.
''These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis,'' said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ''The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.''
Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.
''I don't see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing,'' Mr. Watt said.
I'm not a proponent of either party - and so I think it makes it easier to see that they are both grossly incompetent for the most part.
Bush is still culpable (Score:5, Insightful)
That, most definitely, happened on Bush's watch. The "laissez-faire" philosophy of the republicans sounds and looks a lot like Hoover right now. They have, literally, let Wall Street run itself. And you can see the end result on the front pages everyday. Whats the saying? Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Look, I am no regulation lover but even the staunchest of conservative economists recognize free markets must have some regulation to insure a fair playing field. Under this administration -- there has been NONE.
Do you realize that many firms were allowed to leverage up 30 to 1? Let me break down what that means for the
That is totally fucked up and should have never happened. End of story.
Re:Bush is still culpable (Score:4, Interesting)
What we have had has not been proper regulation, but it has not been "laissez-faire" either because the politicians have been butting in and urging the big boys on Wall Street to make money available to people who couldn't afford their houses! That was the point which I made. As you can see, that's not laissez-faire; that's government meddling with the markets as usual, but this time in a form that isn't regulation.
So you see, we both agree with each other that there hasn't been proper regulation, but it's unfair to say that "laissez-faire" has failed when it hasn't even really been applied.
I mean, think about it. It's no coincidence that all of these huge firms which have lasted decades upon decades and have withstood countless trials, including the Great Depression, are now all failing at the same time right now. Under a "laissez-faire" market, that would be one big coincidence.
Yes, I do realize it (Score:5, Informative)
Management of the leverage is what is missing here. NO FIRM should be allowed to leverage up 30:1. (30x your collateral)
You are comparing apples and oranges.
And since you went there with LTCM [wikipedia.org]....allow me to quote you a figure, "At the beginning of 1998, the firm had equity of $4.72 billion and had borrowed over $124.5 billion with assets of around $129 billion. It had off-balance sheet derivative positions with a notional value of approximately $1.25 trillion"
Management of leverage was obviously missing there. 1.25 trillion? That is absolutely totally fucking insane. But because Merriweather was a "smart guy" --- the investment banks let him do this. And it put the entire system at risk.
That's not supposed to happen. Ever. Yet it did. Do we learn nothing from history?
You need to inform yourself. First of all, the housing bubble was primarily fueled by errors on Wall Street, not Washington. The explosive growth of the mortgage-backed security industry created an environment that gave people lots of incentive to do really stupid things, like loan people money without requiring them to invest significantly in what they were purchasing or demonstrate that they had the money to pay back the loan. Secondly, here [businessweek.com] is just one of many available articles explaining that the really big hit has come from borrowers with good credit ratings and sufficient cash flow who simply do not wish to continue to pay the mortgage on a house that is no longer worth nearly what they paid for it. It turns out that you can default on your mortgage and all they can take is your house, not your other assets (who knew?).
Anyway, it's certainly not "authoritative," but here [google.com] is a funny and true cartoon that does a pretty fair job of explaining how the screwed up incentives turned normal people in financial fuck-up machines.
Predicted in 99 (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting speech from Senator Dorgan when the bill, Financial Services Modernization Act, was being discussed '99. Those who don't know history...
"I remember a couple of circumstances that existed more recently. I was not around during the bank failures of the 1930s. I was not around for the debate that persuaded a Congress to enact Glass-Steagall and a range of other protections. But I was here when, in the early 1980s, it was decided that we should expand the opportunities for savings and loans to do certain things. And they began to broker deposits and they took off. They would take a sleepy little savings and loan in some town, and they would take off like a Roman candle. Pretty soon they would have a multibillion-dollar organization, and they would decide they would use that organization to park junk bonds in. We had a savings and loan out in California that had over 50 percent of its assets in risky junk bonds.
Let me describe the ultimate perversion, the hood ornament on stupidity. The U.S. Government owned nonperforming junk bonds in the Taj Mahal Casino. Let me say that again. The U.S. Government ended up owning nonperforming junk bonds in the Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City. How did that happen? The savings and loans were able to buy junk bonds. The savings and loans went belly up. The junk bonds were not performing. And the U.S. Government ended up with those junk bonds.
Was that a perversion? Of course it was. But it is an example of what has happened when we decide, under a term called modernization, to forget the lessons of the past, to forget there are certain things that are inherently risky, and they ought not be fused or merged with the enterprise of banking that requires the perception and, of course, the reality--but especially the perception--of safety and soundness.
Last year, we had a failure of a firm called LTCM, Long-Term Capital Management. It was an organization run by some of the smartest people in the world, I guess, in the area of finance. They had Nobel laureates helping run this place. They had some of the smartest people on Wall Street. They put together a lot of money. They had this hedge fund, unregulated hedge fund. They had invested more than $1 trillion in derivatives in this fund--more than $1 trillion in derivatives value.
Then, with all of the smartest folks around, and all this money, and an enormous amount of leverage, when it looked as if this firm was going to go belly up, just flat out broke, guess what happened. On a Sunday, Mr. Greenspan and the Federal Reserve Board decided to convene a meeting of corresponding banks and others who had an interest in this, saying: You have to save Long-Term Capital Management. You have to save this hedge firm. If you don't, there will be catastrophic results in the economy. The hit will be too big.
You have this unregulated risky activity out there in the economy, and you have one firm that has $1 trillion in derivative values and enormous risk, and, with all their brains, it doesn't work. They are going to go belly up. Who bears the burden of that? The Federal Government, the Federal Reserve Board.
We have the GAO doing an investigation to find out the circumstances of all that. I am very interested in this no-fault capitalism that exists with respect to Long-Term Capital Management. Who decides what kind of capitalism is no-fault capitalism? And when and how and is there a conflict of interest here?
The reason I raise this point is, this will be replicated again and again and again, as long as we bring bills to the floor that talk about financial services modernization and refuse to deal with the issue of thoughtful and sensible regulation of things such as hedge funds and derivatives and as long as we bring bills to the floor that say we can connect and couple, we can actually hitch up, inherently risky enterprises with the core banking issues in this country.
I hear about fire walls and affiliates, all these issues. I probably know less about them than some others;
the housing bubble was primarily fueled by errors on Wall Street, not Washington.
There were three important Washington errors. Washington allowed banks to loan federally insured deposit money to companies with only securities (e.g. securitized mortgages) as a collateral. This put taxpayers on the hook and led to the Bear Stearns bail out.
The second Washington error was that even with the housing bubble, Washington left the reserve rate (how much banks have to hold of their deposits) at 15% rather than raising it. If they had raised the reserve rate, there would have been less money for loans and banks would have been more careful to whom they loaned it. As it was, banks were over capitalized and desperate to loan money.
The third Washington error was to make it more difficult to take bankruptcy. As a result, banks were more willing to loan money for over priced houses (figuring that they could grab other assets instead).
At the worst of the bubble, house prices were sixty percent over priced (using rental values for a comparison). House prices are still thirty percent over priced. They have more to fall before the market stabilizes. Unfortunately, most of the programs that are being launched are aimed at stabilizing house prices. This won't work until houses stop being over priced.
What Washington should be doing is helping house prices fall. One way that they could do that would be to amend bankruptcy laws back to their previous difficulty and add the ability for judges to adjust the principal of the loan down to the current value of the house. This would allow people to sell their houses after declaring bankruptcy (rather than taking a foreclosure). Too many people can't sell their houses because they owe more than the house is worth.
Quants screwed over my life and I want them to pay.
That's the thing. They can't!
Web-based vs Desktop vs Palmtop (Score:3, Interesting)
I've started looking at this too as i've picked up some stock recently, and it is a difficult proposition (given that i'm not really willing to pay for a commercial solution).
Personally, I absolutely love the interface of Google's stock ticker - the interface is nice, the information is top notch. The problem being of course that there's way in any of the nine layers i'd trust google with my portfolio information. The big advantage of a local program in my mind is that the information you put in, even if it is only "I want to track these stocks" is kept wholly to yourself and not stored on some remote server where you have to trust the hoster not to take a peek.
In the end i've been using the default stock program that came on the iPhone to watch the stock prices. Thats all it will do, that and a short graph history, and it uses the yahoo info instead of the google, but it's close to realtime and it's stored (I hope) on the iPhone. Course, Yahoo can still see which stocks i'm requesting, so maybe in the end it makes no difference.
Ideal would be a device-based solution that could draw down the information, either from google/yahoo or direct from the *sx, and hold information regarding you portfolio too - but locally, so theres no worry of the monetary values being shunted across the net to the infovores.