ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

Hi! Just a reminder that George Sinkler will be playing at Jim and Sue McCauley's this Sunday evening from 6 to 10. Bring your drinks, a snack to share and don't forget something for George. DIRECTIONS: From Buckingham, at the intersection of Rts 263 & 413: Take Rt 413 south toward Newtown. Go 1.5 miles. Look on the right for the entrance to "Village of Buckingham Springs". Go in the entrance. At the stop sign turn left, then the first left again onto Juniper Circle. The 6th left is Elder Ct. Hope to see you! Art (Suzie Bartel's Assistant!!!!!!!) A tomato and sunflower stall on the PA side of the Delaware opposite Frenchtown Shad festival, Lambertville NJ The bridge across the Delaware at Stockton,NJ Old-fashioned Truckstop near Coopersburg PA The bridge that links Lambertville NJ with New Hope PA A street in Doylestown, Bucks County PA Farmer's market, Doylestown PA The email above, from a friend who did not know that I had moved back to Singapore, bring...

* image of a complex system taken from http://www.necsi.org/ , the New England Complex Systems Institute.Nassin Nicholas Taleb's book The Black Swan [ see http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ ] is about the great impact that highly improbable events can cause in financial markets, in history, in natural events, on our working life, in our personal relationships etc. Taleb makes us aware of and fear black swans. But not all black swans are bad. There are good black swans too. In life, highly improbable events can lift you up to heights never imagined in your wildest dreams. The obscure writer/musician who was 'discovered' and rose to stardom. The small businessman who had a lucky break, a chance meeting that led to success. That first job interview with an interviewer who liked you. The lonely Blog or the YouTube video that, by word of mouth,and being in the right place at the right time drew a million visitors a day. These are all examples of riding to the sky on a black sw...

Dry Bulk shipping companies are those that carry raw materials such as coal, iron ore, grain, fertilisers and chemicals in their specialized ships. The demand for dry bulk shipping is a good leading indicator of the health of the world economy. The Baltic Dry Index is an index of freight rates for dry bulk shipping as compiled by the Baltic Exchange in London. Since October, the BDI has gone down by 40 %, and with it the share price of the dry bulk shippers. In this experiment, using the Self-Organising Maps [SOM] in http://www.viscovery.net software. [for more on Self-Organizing Maps see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organizing_map ] we took the data for 156 stocks from the Transportation Sector. The data included the output of ValuEngine's quantitative models and covered variables such as Valuation, EPS growth, 1 year-forecast retrun %, 1-month forecast return%, P/E ratio, Sharpe Ratio, 1 yr return %, 5 -yr return % etc. There were more than 30 variables. For more on ValuEn...

* This article was actually written about a year ago. The year of the Pig is now coming to an end, and Chinese New Year on Feb 07 will usher in the year of the Rat. The Pig is an animal, as useful as can be An icon of happiness and prosperity They say that the Pig is most intelligent I can vouch that it is not belligerent Pigs are productive and breed like rabbits Though I can’t say much about their mating habits What I like most about pigs is not what they do What I like most about pigs is a bowl of pork rib stew Pigs ear, pig’s tongue, pig's brain and pig’s tummy The last when cooked with white peppercorn is real yummy Pig’s liver, snout, kidney, skin and even pig’s tail Does something good for appetite, they never fail This year it is, the Year of the Pig This year, I think I’ll make it big And the reason is as clear as a Fig For I was born in the year of the Pig Not just any Pig, but a pig of Gold 600 years in waiting, lo and behold The Golden Pig has come to my door Not much...

Click on Table for full-size and details Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "The Black Swan" (Random House, 2007) has attained cult status with the hedge fund crowd. His book is about the enormous consequences of highly improbable events. The essential points are: 1. Black Swans are the highly improbable events that have had enormous historical impact- like the current credit crunch caused by the sub-prime crisis, 9/11, the Latin American debt crisis of 1982, or the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990. Though very rare, Black Swans have many times more impact than more predictable, more frequent events. Black Swans are by definition unpredictable. 2. Black Swans are not as improbable as conventional statistics theory would have us believe. This is because the way we calculate probability has always been, and continues to be based upon the Gaussian [Bell Curve] distribution, where anything beyond 3 standard deviations is considered to have a probability of less than 1 %. Black Swan dis...

Pictures from top: 1. The Confederate flag 2.Manatees: Malabar, Central Florida 3. My good friend Steve Thorpe with NASCAR racer. 4. Welcome to Georgia signboard 5. A Sunday aftertoon blue grass jam. 6. Carwash girl Melbourne, Florida 7. The Desert Inn at Yeehaw Junction near Kissimmee 8. Deep-fried duck with black-eyed peas and collard greens 9.Menu at the Marsh Landing restaurant, Fellmere, Florida 10. Barbecue joint in Mount Doro, Florida I moved to Princeton, New Jersey recently, after a year's stay in Melbourne, Florida. Melbourne is on the east coast of the Florida peninsula, right in the center between Jacksonville in the North and Miami in the south. Florida north of Fort Lauderdale is pretty much Southern USA. Not the caribbean culture of Miami and The Keys. Central Florida is more like Georgia and the Carolinas, though with some differences due to it's geographical features and climate. The land of alligators and swamps, cattle ranchers and cowboys called crackers, ci...

Sea change, a fundamental, profound change, a regime-switch in modeling terms, not a gradual process as in Shakespeare's The Tempest where Ariel sang: Full fathom five thy father lies Of his bones are coral made Those are pearls that were his eyes Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. Your Sunny Day and Rainy Day Screens is an auto regime-switching model. * for reference on Sunny Day and Rainy Day screens see http://valuengine.blogspot.com/2007/10/sunny-day-and-rainy-day-screens.html James D. Hamilton of the Department of Economics, University of California, San Diego is one of the pioneers in work on regime-switching models. To explain "regime-switching models", we first quote from the introduction of his paper " Regime-Switching Models" (May, 2005) prepared for the Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. "Many economic time series occasionally exhibit dramatic breaks in their behavior, associated with eve...