Law school: Test in October - studying commences hardcore in August.Grad school: I’m enrolled and entering Bellevue University’s MBA program in the interim. Since work will pay for a good chunk of it, I’m taking the plunge and going to continue my education with law school on the horizon.

Craziness: I’ve been wrapped up in learning the fundamentals and technicals of Forex trading. To be honest, it scares the living shit of me. But it is also fun to learn about many of the tools used in stock and commodities with even less of a required commitment of capital. I’m starting to trade minis (10k) in the practice environment right now.

I was partly on track - after a slight slide I got a bounce back to close out several trades with some good pips to take. However, I had other trades that were sucking a lot of wind because the overall picture was a slight downward trend going sideways when I expected a slight upward trend sideways or movement upward. What saved my butt was going back to the SMA/EMA signals I was watching for which proved to help me out and cut some losses at a better price than if I had just rode the process out as I was.At the end of the day, I took 25 pips on 10k lots using very little margin or leverage on the demo account.

Admittedly, that isn’t too bad for just an hour or two of trading. But it really wasn’t worth the couple of bucks added to the account. And I got lucky. Very lucky.I’ll make another post about my next idea to work with: 3-line moving averages with progressive buy/sell, no stops with opposing trades to limit risk. Anyway, thanks for listening.

I’ve never been much of a fan of metal. Metal is ok, at times tedious while at other times it can (but rarely does) reach anything worth noting. My new’ish roommate has a band called ‘The Clincher’ here in Omaha that is definitely worth checking out. I haven’t found anything to really compare them to. It’s not quite nu metal, not quite heavy metal, I don’t know. I just don’t want to be the ‘they just don’t fit in a category’ asshole (I hate when musicians say that). Anyway, the demos are rough, but they put on a hellacious live show. You can check them out at:http://www.myspace.com/theclincherbitches 

I’ve been toying with Io off and on for the past couple of years. Something I always forget about is that if you are building on OS X, try the following command:

sudo make port

The port directive to make tells the builder to use port to try and find all relevant libraries/downloads and build them in the process. It will save you a shitload of time trying to find everything you need for a quick, clean build.

If anyone knows anything, it’s that Wall Street is the largest house of gambling in the United States. We don’t call it gambling but certain segments of the market are nothing but betting pools. Commodities (futures, options, derivatives) are pretty much nothing more than a place to wager bets and hedge bets you have already made. Oil is no different.

When we hear of so-called “speculators” coming in and manipulating prices, we often miss the point of what the market is and why it works the way it does. This is especially true of oil. When you hear of oil trading, you may picture large barrels of oil moving from port to port every day. Yet when we’re talking about futures, what you see are “bets” on where oil will be in price at a certain point in time in the future. These bets are always “matched”. For every person who expects oil to rise in price, there is a matched bet predicting a decline in price.

While it may be a gross over-simplification, the wisdom of such bets gives you a lot of information wrapped up into a numeric value. When prices rise, you typically expect a large sentiment of “negative” information in the marketplace. When prices fall, you typically have a balance of “good” information in the marketplace.

To illustrate this point, let’s quickly look at corn. With the heavy push towards cleaner fuels and the heavy support for ethanol subsidies, farmers had the incentive to plant more corn this year. This may seem like good news, but the subtle realities were immediately apparent to the market: While there is an expectation of more corn coming to market, the corn will need to meet the needs of both the food production market and the rapidly growing fuel market. This stress is reflected in the price of corn, which has shot up in price despite the probability of having more corn coming to market this year.

But what happens when farmers plant more corn than, say, soybeans? It means the farmer grows fewer soybeans. We’re already beginning to see these effects in the marketplace where other commodities have shot up in price because farmers are planting less of these other crops.

To someone who works in an exchange, they could probably care less about the physical corn or potatoes they are betting on. What they care about is the the information in the marketplace associated with the product being traded. The trader then carefully places a bet on which direction they expect the price to go based on as much information as they can gather about the underlying product. No one person can have all of the information at hand. These gaps are filled by others who and bet according to their information which may be similar, but not always the same as the next person.

The price of oil is not necessarily the real price of the product but reflects the sentiment of what price will be based on the information at hand. Recently USA Today and other media outlets reported that drivers in the United States are driving far fewer miles this year than prior years and the number is significant. If this is the case, and the supply of oil is constant, you would expect the price to fall. However, in this case you have several other factors involved: the Iraq war, difficulties with Iran, aging refineries and the slowing ability to expand refinery production, limitations on oil drilling, government policy and regulation, a retreat from the housing market and so on.

So when we hear what the price of oil will be in the future, it is based on the information in the marketplace today. Right now. This very minute!

When politicians push to put pressure on the market and lob accusations of impropriety into the marketplace, it essentially creates a scenario where your favorite politician is working under the assumption that he or she knows more about the collective interests of the marketplace than the collective marketplace knows about itself. But you have to think big; the collective information of the market is represented by millions of bets on which direction the market is going with millions of people and automated systems all responding to information accumulated. If you think a politician can fix the so-called problem of speculation, you are grossly uninformed.

Betting is one of the oldest forms of collective wisdom, oil or not. And complaining about a short losing streak is a surefire way to cause more problems in the marketplace when you invite politics into the game.

I was reading the overview to the new public policy analysis by Cato called ‘The Public Education Tax Credit’ when a simple though struck me. I haven’t read their piece yet so this may touch on some topics they cover.

One of the rallying cries for public education proponents is that schools do not spend enough on students. Teachers are constantly out of money for classroom activities, field trips are shortened or canceled, class options have to be cut. Many people falsely use educational spending-per-student as a litmus test to determine the adequacy of the education.

However this type of measurement is flawed, and any proponent of existing, static, public education, where parents are forced to send their children to a limited number of schools (if not a single school) touting it is misleading the bodies attached to the ears listening. Here’s why:

A government-run, public education system is largely a monopoly controlled by the state. Bureaucratic systems lacking any significant competition have no larger incentive to perform spectacularly. It is rare that any school system truly stand out and above mediocrity. As is the nature of any given bureaucracy, the larger it grows, the less efficient it performs. This happens for a wide variety of reasons but largely due to simple economic constraints and laws thought of by men long retired to the daisy pushin’ industry.

Competitive markets can also have players of equal clout, nearing monopoly powers. However any given business is driven to outperform the competition. There is a constant process of innovation. Complacency kills; things that do not perform are cut as if they were fat from meat. Microsoft’s long ride on the “monopoly” train has only increased its exposure to competition making the company dominant in some areas yet spread thin in many areas. While Microsoft charged ahead on the desktop, they were blown out of the Internet pool by many upstarts who were not encumbered by the internal bureaucracy in Microsoft. Yahoo stole the search show-pony only to be eclipsed by Google. If Microsoft is to survive, it must adapt to the marketplace of today rather than the marketplace of yesterday. These constraints are not present in government-run monopolies.

Competition also has interesting effects on prices. In most cases, prices are driven down as more competition enters the market. When you leverage technology and labor resources to gain any advantage over a competitor, you seek to increase your margin and reduce costs. Any intelligent advantage you can eek out to make your product more profitable will be taken. The key tenet is that you have to drive for efficiencies wherever you can without sacrificing your share of the market and increasing your share everywhere possible.

Business management theory has evolved to recognize quality as a key motivator of clients. Where there may exist some difference in pricing, quality becomes an intangible factor of costs. Public institutions can not compete in this same way. Private schools, while they do exist, are and will remain secondary to the Public system until some form of educational freedom is extended to parents.

Another key example is the technology sector. Early CD players cost a small fortune. Yet as the technology improved and the market expanded, the price was largely driven down. While there surely were poor CD players on the market, they were eclipsed by players from competitors who drove through on quality. This offered high-quality equipment from many vendors on a downward price spiral to the point where CD players were a commodity item costing no more than $20 - $30.

Don’t read this the wrong way - $0.00 spent on schools is a bad thing as there will always be some costs associated with it. However using per-student spending as a measure of adequacy is  grossly misleading when spending is unlinked from quality and competition.

So I bought a Motorola Q9c from Sprint back in February. It is, without a doubt, the worst phone I’ve ever owned. Oh Motorola Q9c, how I hate thee, let me count the ways:

• Since March 2008, it’s been bricked at least 3-4 times. Thankfully a hard reset resolved the issue each time but no after losing a bunch of settings.
• Windows Mobile blows. It’s like Windows 3.11, just a bit prettier
• The camera takes decent shots. But its slow.
• The menu system sucks.
• When the battery dies completely, you need to have a Motorola charger. You can’t just hook it up via USB and let it charge.
• Too bad a third party software company makes a better software for syncing on the Mac than anything available on Windows. That’s pretty damned sad.

Now I’m stuck with the phone for the next two years and i want to get rid of it completely. I’d sell it and get a new one but I would pity the poor fool who bought it.

As a late bloomer in terms of obtaining my own degree, my experiences may blur the reality of most college experience. The old standard of a college education is largely on the downward slope. Not that a college education is irrelevant or a waste of time - it is not by any means - but the general process of education has largely failed to adapt to the very economics of human society. Let me put it this way:

If you are a Sophomore or Junior in high school, pick up a book on your state’s GED program. If you are a bit above average in school, you may find the material bland. However if you find that you have little problem answering the test questions on the GED, I would suggest ditching your high school advisor’s advice and get your GED if you can pass the test. The earlier, the better. This is particularly well suited to those who are smart but not quite up to terms with taking so-called “AP” classes in high school because someone just didn’t think you were smart enough. You can circumvent the public school schedule and start taking real college classes at your local community college. If you forego your Senior year in high school and take classes at your community college, you can easily build up more credits than you would sitting in your classroom with your peers.

Now I’m sure you are thinking that you will miss your friends, but you’ll be in school during the day while your friends are also in school. More often than not, you will be studying between classes and home in time to hang out with your friends in the afternoon or evening.
Another strategy that I personally took was to use the CLEP and DANTES tests to full advantage. That’s right - get college credit for testing on the materials. Some people believe you don’t learn anything by doing this but surprisingly, you do need to have some knowledge of the material. They are simply pass/fail tests and many colleges give you full credits for passing.

For example, I studied (unfortunately nowhere near as much as I should have) for about a month, took three tests over the two days and walked away with a semester’s worth of credits using nothing more than SparkNotes, the CLEP practice tests and a slightly-dated book on microeconomics. If you can, test out of as many classes you can on your degree track. This shortens the amount of time you spend in class by eliminating many of the less interesting classes.

In the one year that you would be sitting in a high-school classroom learning high-school material, or possibly even a couple AP classes, you can cram in 1 1/2 years worth of college. On your college breaks, have fun! Go out with your friends, work a little bit and make some money. Just study and plan on taking one or two CLEP/Dantes tests on your vacation. It doesn’t sound like much but you don’t have to do much more than pick up a book and read it before you go to sleep. The goal is to get your Associate Degree from your community college in 1 1/2 actual years, cutting 6 months from the defined community college time line.

With an Associate Degree under your belt, pick a University with an accelerated bachelor’s that will accept your Associates as meeting your basic requirements. Typically, you can have all of this done in a year and a half, taking two or three classes a semester. It goes fast. This means, by leaving high school early and using just a little bit of free time wisely, you can be done with a college degree by the time your friends are coming home from their first year in college at their respective universities. Where most kids are done with high school at 17/18, you can be done with college by 19/20, making good money, building up experience and then preparing for a grad school or climbing up the ladder.

My alma-mater has a new Bachelor’s degree program (C3) that allows you to have your entire degree done in three years. If you start at 16, you’re done by 19 or you can just keep going on through a Master’s program and start in the workforce with your friends a step (degree) ahead.

If you are really (really, really) motivated, you can visit the original “BA in 4 weeks” website here. Much of what I discussed as a means to obtaining an expedited degree is talked about in greater detail.