Feb

5

Guaranteed to Happen, from Victor Niederhoffer

February 5, 2009 |

7 Comments so far

1. david higgs on February 4, 2009 2:25 am

   From what I hear, Disney has gotten oil smart, that is, they're mixing the french fry oil with their diesel engines that run their rides… let's just hope we don't have a potato famine, then we're all be screwed…

2. douglas roberts dimick on February 4, 2009 11:18 am

   Perhaps the problem faced with cross-market plays – cartoons and oil provide two, distinct statistical populations within (though not a universe but) perhaps the same cosmos – is not detecting cycles but the relativity to positions as entered, exited, and hedged.

   But for Goofy and Dopey and Ed (Lion King), could Monsters’ Needleman and Smitty generate energy strategies to fuel magic kingdoms and cruiselines by an algorithmic door-shredding cyclometer?

   If so, there’s your guarantee of guarantees. dr

3. Steve Leslie on February 5, 2009 10:45 am

   Reminds me of years back when Proctor and Gamble was sold a bill of goods to speculate in IOs and POs, CMOs and other strips to hedge their bets of foodstuffs. Never got that one myself.

   How about when Orange County California tried a similar scheme and drove their bonds to junk status.

   In the words of Everett McGill in O' Brother Where Art Thou,
   It is a fool who looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart.

4. glenn on February 6, 2009 12:25 am

   disney got fuelled.. ya all g..

5. douglas roberts dimick on February 6, 2009 10:03 am

   Steve, a movie most excellent… dr

6. Steve Leslie on February 6, 2009 11:42 am

   For the unintiated, O'Brother has more wisdom in it than we can comprehend. Coen Bros just genius work. I put it right there with The Big Lebowski. I have a general distaste for No Country for old men for the gratuitous violence. In fact, on the thread on Disney movies the reasons that they are so timeless is their incredible genius that they put into their movies. The lesson here is stick to what you know, do it better than anybody else and focus on those things. That is right out of the book of Jack Welch. Someone once said most of success is found in showing up for work each day. Reminds me of Hank Greenberg commenting on Bob Feller why Feller would throw anything but fastballs, his reply was "I don't know maybe he gets bored. My advise, is when you get bored at something have a hobby or take a time out like Edison used to do. Everyday, he would take an afternoon nap to decompress. And nobody short of the President would disturb him. sl.

7. douglas roberts dimick on February 7, 2009 11:36 pm

   After two viewings, No Country appears as a bit of quagmire for both producer and viewer.

   S’s dislike for the level of violence? No doubt about it.

   As with markets, for purposes of discussion as well as perhaps to analyze and distinguish, movie reviews are as with books: context of the story setting, within which a plot so operates as presented by the maker(s), may or may not belie intent.

   Reference: VN’s recent article on deception of the markets.

   Trivia: In the novel (but not in the movie), Sheriff Bell says of the dope-dealers, “Here a while back in San Antonio they shot and killed a federal judge.” McCarthy set the story in 1980. In 1979, in San Antonio, Federal Judge John Howland Wood was shot and killed by rifle fire by a Texas free-lance contract killer named Charles Harrelson. Actor Woody Harrelson (Carson Wells in the movie) is his son.

   http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477348/trivia

   1979-80 is a violent time period… What came to mind first…

   The Iran hostage crisis was a diplomatic crisis between Iran and the United States where 52 U.S. diplomats were held hostage for 444 days from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981, after a group of Islamist students took over the American embassy in support of the Iranian revolution

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_hostage_crisis

   President Carter made Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine his Secretary of State. George Mitchell, Maine’s former US Attorney then federal judge, was thereafter appointed to Muskie’s senate seat. Senator Mitchell would go on as Majority Leader, eventually becoming the nation’s “good offices” and finding peaceful solutions within areas of conflict and demise ranging from Ireland to baseball.

   Upon reflection, then in university and going to basic training during the summer of 1980, the horror of Vietnam subtly seemed to pervade the American psyche, evoking sensibilities perhaps similar to awaking after the day of listening to forensics testimony during a murder trial.

   We may not like it. We may not want to see it presented before us, either on a silver platter or screen. We can also dismiss such as an affront to our well reasoned mannerisms and most logical, perhaps superciliously quantified protocols.

   As the markets remind us during these recent months, algorithmic deniability does not mean, though, that it ain’t so… dr

   Ps. Albeit that many close to or constituting the new throne may not want either the reminder or the culpability, one may venture that our history-making administration would be well served to appoint Senator Mitchell to investigate and report to the nation about those 5-W’s explaining our post Glass-Steagall Act Repeal “situation”… the mid-east thing should only take a few weeks, right?

   http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2009/01/president-oba-9.html