Business

Areas to Consider Capital Markets The Central Depository and Settlement Corporation (CDSC) runs the Central Depository System (CDS) that facilitates holding and trading of shares at the Nairobi Stock Exchange (NSE). A Central Depository Agent (CDA) is a Stockbroker, an Investment Bank, or a Custodian Bank, who has been authorized by the CDSC to open accounts in CDS on behalf of investors. In 2006, an Automatic Trading System was introduced so that orders are matched automatically and executed by stockbrokers on a first-come first-served basis....

MSFT offers an ESPP, in which employees can buy MSFT stock at a 10% discount. There is a cap to the number of shares per employee per year in that one can do at most 15% of one’s paycheck. Selling the ESPP stock within the same year seems unwise because of short-term capital gains tax. That said, holding them increases exposure to MSFT (if MSFT does poorly, that affects one’s bonuses, and sometimes livelihood)....

Maximizing the Value for Shareholders Suing a company for not following its code of ethics and therefore misleading investors doesn’t fly, but Signet Jewelers settled for $240m . Signet’s 70k female employees sued for discrimination, but the class action is yet to be resolved. Tom Toro’s New Yorker cartoon : Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders....

Short Term Loans A common narrative for loan providers is financial inclusion. 69% of global adult population is not covered by credit bureaus. Using non-traditional data (e.g. text messages, location, contacts, call logs), more people can get scored. If only \(x\%\) of people pay you back, then \(\frac{x}{100}(1 + r) \ge 1 \) suggests \(r \ge \frac{100}{x} - 1 \). If \(75\%\) tend to pay back, \(r = 33\frac{1}{3} \%\)....

Product Differentiation and Price Discrimination Product differentiation seeks to distinguish a product from a competing product to make it more attractive to a specific target market. Price discrimination occurs when the same goods/services are sold at different prices from the same company. The Captain Samuel Vimes “Boots” theory of socio-economic unfairness: the rich man who bought the high quality $50 pair of boots would still be using them in 10 years, while the poor man who buys the $10 pair would have spent $100 on boots in the same time, and still be worse off....

The Trade of the Century: When George Soros Broke the British Pound. Rohin Dhar. priceonomics.com . Jun 17, 2016. Before the EU, Europe had the ERM to fix their exchange rates with the Deutschmark within 6% of the agreed upon rate. Keeping the exchange rate fixed requires governments to nudge the rate, e.g. Use reserves of foreign currency to buy up their own currency Set high interest rates to entice lenders to buy their currency Margaret Thatcher (PM) opposed the fixed exchange rates but lost the vote to Major, an ERM proponent....

Betting on Things That Never Change. Morgan Housel. www.collaborativefund.com . Jul 20, 2017. Change by itself is hard. Investors have to spot it before it’s obvious. Consumers have to change their behaviors to make it viable. These two points repel each other. Sears bet the Internet changed nothing. Beenz bet the Internet changed everything - creating a points-based currency valid only at online merchants. Amazon bet the Internet changed distribution, but rooted its strategy in selection and low prices....

Targeting Ads Based on Mood NYT’s nytDEMO launched perspective targeting, an ad product that allows advertisers to place ads based on the sentiment that the content is predicted to evoke . ESPN, USA Today, and Oracle’s Grapeshot have similar products too. How successful is this approach? Google, the largest online advertiser, does not mention it in their ads targeting help page , but Google is not in the publishing business either....

Protectionism vs. Globalization Prestige Ameritech is America’s #1 maker of surgical masks. In outbreaks, demand peaks, but when it’s all over, hospitals go back to exclusively buying cheaper masks from China. Reduced demand makes Ameritech lay off workers. Ameritech is pushing for a federal contract to stabilize demand over time. India’s Foreign Exchange Act of 1973 gave Coca-Cola an ultimatum: hand over 60% of the local subsidiary to Indian partners and the syrup recipe....

Short Selling Say $A shares are selling at $100, but I think they’re overpriced. So I borrow 10 shares, pay my brokerage interest and post some collateral. I then sell the shares for $1,000. Whoever buys my shares has no idea that I do not own them. In a naked short, I do not actually borrow or ensure that the security can be borrowed within the standard 3-day settlement period....

Consultants are not well suited for strategy (you probably have a deeper understanding). They are also an expensive way of proving your point to management. However, they are good for emergency horsepower, e.g. data analysis, and for primary research within your industry (they probably have a broader understanding). Having a competitive advantage may reduce the incentive to explore other ideas, especially ones that conflict with your chosen [successful] strategy. Additionally, having to maintain/exceed quarterly numbers dissuade incumbents from risk taking....

The Problem of Twelve: In the near future, roughly 12 individuals will have practical power over majority of US public companies. A Short History of Corporations In the first stage, entrepreneurs get money from savings, “friends, family, and fools”, and VCs. Securities law restricts this to sophisticated investors only. On generating revenue and stability, the entrepreneur takes the firm public (IPO) under oversight from the SEC. Ownership is separated from control, e....

WWW ‘21: The Web Conference 2021 REST: Relational Event-Driven Stock Trend Forecasting REST, an event-driven stock trend forecasting framework, that overcomes two limitations of existing event-driven models. Models the stock context, and learns the effect of event information on the stocks under different contexts. Constructs a stock graph and designs a new propagation layer to propagate the effect of event information from related stocks. The value of stock trend forecasting is not unanimous, e....

Motivation In 08. A New Walking Shoe: Modern Portfolio Theory , Malkiel introduced me to Modern Portfolio Theory, a technique for reducing portfolio risk, despite risky investments. It made me wonder how similar principles are applied in agriculture. This page is the result of that investigation. ~16% of Kenya’s land is sufficiently fertile and has good rainfall. In 2006, ~75% of working Kenyans are farmers (compared to 80% in 1980)....

01. Umberto Eco's Antilibrary; 02. We Just Can't Predict; 03. Those Grey Swans of Extremistan; The Black Swan [Taleb, Nicholas Nassim];

01. Firm Foundations and Castles in the Air; 02. The Madness of the Crowds; 03. Speculative Bubbles from the Sixties into the Nineties; 04. The Explosive Bubbles of the Early 2000s; 05. Technical and Fundamental Analysis; 06. Technical Analysis and the Random Walk Theory; 07. How Good is Fundamental Analysis? The Efficient Market Hypothesis; 08. A New Walking Shoe: Modern Portfolio Theory; 09. Reaping Reward By Increasing Risk; 10. Behavioral Finance; 11. New Methods of Portfolio Construction: Smart Beta and Risk Parity; 12. A Fitness Manual for Random Walkers and Other Investors; 13. A Primer in Understanding and Projecting Returns from Stocks and Bonds; 14. A Life-Cycle Guide to Investing; A Random Walk Down Wall Street [Malkiel, Burton Gordon];

Introduction; 01: Exceptional, Maybe; Prologue; The Man Who Solved The Market [Zuckerman, Gregory]; 02: Cracking Codes and Math Departments; 03: Markov Chains, Potatoes and HODL; 04: From Linear Regressions to Kernel Methods;

Objectives: low latency, high throughput & high reliability. The messages are quite brief, e.g. the ITCH protocol uses 32 bytes per message. Trading firm listens to broadcasts on buys, sells, deletes on ITCH broadcasts. Online sorting to identify profitable trades. Matching engine operates on a first-come-first-served basis. Earlier orders with better price get traded first. Markets run at 50 microsecond scales. Single market peaks at 10Gbps. Peaks are correlated, e.g. “Shit!...

Things to invest in (Least risk) Bonds, Stocks, Startups (Most Risk). Why not start a business? The Amount of Money Some investments only make sense in bulk for they have low margins, e.g. stocks The risk tolerance The higher the risk, the higher the reward The law protects investors, e.g. startup investors in the US must be accredited The Time Frame Maybe 10 years?...

Index Funds and 401(k) Accounts I assume the return is ~5% There are 4 types of retirement accounts, each with tradeoffs (en.wikipedia.org) 401(k), Roth 401(k), Traditional IRA and Roth IRA The return of lazy portfolios (set and forget) is ~6% (compounded) over 15 years as of 2018 (finpage.blog) Notes from /r/investing’s FAQ (reddit.com) The FAQ emphasizes reading books I don’t see the urgency....

02. The Madness of the Crowds; GME ✋ ... 🚀🚀🚀 ... 💎 ✋;

Fables in Service of Capitalism; AT&T to pay $60m in settlement for slowing cellphone data on unlimited plans; The Shady Economics of Buy-One-Get-One Free Deals [The Hustle]; The Wolf that Tried to Play Nice [SoECS]; The Submarine [Paul Graham];

Projects That Never Made It; Lean Startups vs. VC Money; Startup Ideation; Unorthodox Startups;