http://www.diyeconomist.com/wordpress A journey into money ... and madness... Sun, 03 Aug 2008 22:47:50 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Heads up for the personal portfolio - IPE was sold in favor of SDS (the double-weighed inverse version of S&P). This is obviously due to concerns with the current state of the market, which technicals claim broke below the trend line and fundamentals claim is weak due to the dollar, ... http://www.diyeconomist.com/wordpress/2008/08/03/portfolio-adjustments/ Typically, selling your product below cost is something that they teach you not to do in Economics 101, or even before. Unfortunately, amidst our current "oil crisis", airlines have not gotten the message. My parents were complaining, after my flight back to Houston, about why the price of a ticket has ... http://www.diyeconomist.com/wordpress/2008/05/27/airlines-selling-below-cost/ Another math day today. Today we'll see what gasoline has to cost for a hybrid (modern technology) to be an economically viable solution. Let's take a rough estimate of how much hybrid technology costs - $6000 is a reasonable figure (from a slightly biased source) Consumer reports suggests a real world MPG ... http://www.diyeconomist.com/wordpress/2008/05/11/the-roi-of-a-hybrid/ Corn ethanol is all the rage, but after reading a post citing a pre-combustion efficiency of 0.13% (yes that is zero point thirteen), a post is in order to set things straight. Aldo V da Rosa's textbook Fundamentals of Renewable Energy Processes states: The 135 kg of sucrose found in 1 ton ... http://www.diyeconomist.com/wordpress/2008/05/03/corn-ethanol-vs-stirling-engine/ So after being asked by a client why his portfolio was returning way below market averages according to the "Gain/Loss" page in his portfolio, I felt that I had to bring this up. My biggest gripe with these pages is how they compute the cost basis. What do I mean? Wikipedia ... http://www.diyeconomist.com/wordpress/2008/03/30/questionable-mathematics-how-much-did-your-portfolio-return/ I made an allocation switch from DJP (commodity futures) to IPE. IPE, also known as SPDR Barclays Capital TIPS, is an inflation protecting product that is likely to be a more attractive choice to investors as worries of a stagflating (a economy in recession and inflation) economy hits the streets. ... http://www.diyeconomist.com/wordpress/2008/03/19/ipe-inflation-protection-in-a-box/ Whenever I run a blog, this happens. I don't get it updated on time. Anyways, to start off, here's a presentation from JP Morgan about the "strategic rationales" for acquiring Bear Stearns. Questions obviously arise as to the motive of this acquisition: was it just a bail-out, or was it JPM ... http://www.diyeconomist.com/wordpress/2008/03/17/sorry-about-the-lack-of-updates/ A study done by Daniel E. Goldstein, We Don't Quite Know What We are Talking About When We Talk About Volatility, show that humans beings, even financial professionals, habitually underestimate standard deviation when given absolute (mean) deviations, on an average of about 25%. CXO Advisory elaborates that: Only 3 of 87 ... http://www.diyeconomist.com/wordpress/2007/11/20/so-human-beings-dont-care-much-about-volatility/ Try magnifying this image. A pretty window should pop up. That means it works! shanghaise-log.png?cap=This is a test. Cool. http://www.diyeconomist.com/wordpress/2007/11/12/quick-test-of-thumbnaillightbox-style/ Following up on the current Shanghai bubble-mania is an interesting study done by Eric Savitz at seekingalpha. It seems that as far as bubbles go -- well, investors simply don't have patience. One market's loss is another market's gain, or something like that: Chart of the shanghai ... http://www.diyeconomist.com/wordpress/2007/11/01/money-flows-how-one-bubble-became-another/