Michael J. Dillon

This is a test to see if my new setup is working.

I think I have a blogging problem. More specifically, I don’t do it
enough. But I am a voracious twitter-er. (Link.)

So as of now, I should be able to post to here just as easily as I can
tweet… by sending email from my phone.

(Click for the full size)

What happens when you talk to other people about either gambling or playing in the stock market? I’m not talking about if you do, or why you don’t, but the kinds of conversations along the lines of how the two of you are doing in either endeavor, and the words people use to describe each others situations.

Now, for the sake of argument, I’m talking about two people, who are not wagering on the same thing and especially not against each other. An example would be a roulette player who has been dabbling in financial stocks and a blackjack player who likes his tech stocks, but really, any combination will do.

Once people start talking about gains and losses, and when the gains or losses are somewhere between a nice vacation and a few months rent, I’ve always found the vocabulary rather interesting.

Think of $5,000. And think of it from the perspective of someone where thats “a lot of money” but not enough to either get evicted or buy a new car, depending on if your up or down.

If you lost $5,000 in the stock market in two days, you’d be “unlucky”, (if not very unlucky), since well, it happens, and thats just part of of the game. You can’t control it and sometimes the market just goes against you for no reason.

Compare that to what would happen if you lost lost that five grand playing playing craps. Your friend isn’t just going to talk about being unlucky but also how you’re an idiot for letting it get that bad and going that far.

But what about the other way? Make a few grand in the stock market, and the conversation trends towards how you did it, the reason you put on whatever position you did, and basically just how smart you are.

And if you won it playing roulette? You were really lucky that night.

It strikes me as interesting that when it comes to investing you’re going to end up either a genius or just unlucky, while after a long weekend in a casino you’re either a moron or one lucky son of a gun.

Same amount of money, both are largely up to chance, but they both use very different vocabularies depending on if you are up or down.

So this morning, in the wee hours of daylight, I finished my book on the history of cod. Fitting into my general history-of-finance theme largely because of the impact cod had on various country’s economies over history, and how the development of the international fish trade came about.

Actually I found out about this book because the same author later wrote a pretty good book on the history of salt. While the cod book had a larger focus on how the different cultures would preserve caught cod, and served cod dishes, the salt book took more time to focus on the economic aspects on what the salt trade did to the world.

Since you can’t transport large amounts of cod around the world without access to a large amount of salt, the two books have a great deal of overlapping areas. The great thing about the pair of books is that while the two histories become amazingly intertwined at the point where the worldwide cod fishing industry drove the need for salt, the events that got them to that point, and the later effects take the two books in quite different directions.

So in other words, I read this book as more of a follow up to Kurlansky’s excellent salt book.

Anyway, next to get swapped into my three-at-a-time book rotataion is either Dickens’s Bleak House, or Minsky’s The Emotion Machine. I haven’t really had a non-finance, non-history book in a while.

I happened to be wandering around the basement of the Strand a few weeks ago, and found a copy of Memos From the Chairman, a collection of memos written by Ace Greenberg, during his tenure as Bear Stearn’s CEO, which was later collected and published by the same people that do the page-a-day calendars.

Which, if you sit down for an hour and change, you can get through pretty easily.

It gives a number of momentary snapshots of a financial firm as it goes from being a midsized brokerage to the ginormous financial firm that just entered the history books.

Highlights include:

• Ace Greenberg completely making up statistics at whim to support any point that he might have.
• The constant reminders to cut costs, to the point that they stopped ordering paper clips and rubber bands.
• An infatuation with a bizarrely named, fake philosopher named Haimchinkel Malintz Anaynikal, who really likes to cut costs.
• The repeatedly stated preference for PSD’s (poor, smart, desires to be rich) over MBA’s

Also of note is the forward of the book written by Warren Buffet. In his annual letter to shareholders, he is entertaining and relatively verbose. Not here. His opening is barely a page, and quite bland.

I think I first heard this sometime around Christmas… And it stuck with me.

When I started this blog, all of a few weeks ago, I thought I would follow my progression through some of the CS stuff I’m doing on the side. But that’s even more boring than what I type about when I’m just filling space. So, I think, from here in, I’ll just talk about whatever I’m reading. And not topics like the fact that I keep databases on various pieces of data that I pull off the internet, which may or may not go into a future project of mine.

As to my reading, its quite disjointed; I’m usually reading several things at once. Take right now, I’m in the middle of The Prince (up to ch 23), Security Analysis (up to ch 3), and a book on the history of cod (Ch 4).

I’m usually reading about three things at once, it keeps my sanity, as I actually read quite a bit of very dry stuff that is wildly interesting in small doses. Everything I read tends to fall into three very broad categories, financial history, the political development of the United States, and occasionally a novel. Right now everything on my plate is finance, including the cod book. (Cod was one of the first internationally traded agricultural commodities.) Though whatever I finish next will get replaced with the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.

Unless I change my mind…

Lets see if I can come up with an interesting post on any of the last few books I’ve read. It might be a way to keep this interesting. (At least to me.)

A few weeks back, my aunt wrote, published, and began selling her own book on Lost Mind Games. It’s a puzzle book, not a longwided description of the TV show itself. Actually it’s pretty good. (I’m not kidding, go buy it.)

The very idea that someone can do that all without a publishing house, then directly go to the public is a pretty neat thing. Probably book worthy, in and of itself, but I digress…

Anyway, it came time to write my review for amazon.com, and the following is what came forth:

A great way to pass the time,

March 25, 2008

By Alexander Hartdegen - See all my reviews

In a fortuitous coincidence, when the great powers of the world decided to embrace madness over reason, war over peace, and to send their great weapons against one another, I found myself deep underground in an almost completed government research facility.

I was only supposed to be there to make a delivery of equipment, but once I felt the ground began to shake as the great disaster unfolded on the surface, I knew I would find myself alone in that cavernous tomb for quite some time to come. The lab wasn’t supposed to fully staffed for at least three more months and the first crews weren’t going to report the until the next week. I was just the delivery guy.

As the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into years, I began to explore my surroundings. I found a vast array of scientific equipment, banks of computers, and volumes upon volumes on every scientific theory from electromagnetism to astrophysics.

Also, in a different room I stumbled upon a well worn and dog eared copy of this volume, LOST Mind Games. I used the quizzes and games to keep my sanity as I spent the ensuing decades studying and learning all that was written in the other tomes.

I began with math, and then to physics, and from there into relativity. It was at this point that I was able to develop a solution to the Grand Unified Theory of Everything.

If you are reading this message, then I was successful in trying to send two messages back across the barriers of space and time. The first was to the leaders of the great nations of the word, telling them of what would happen should they continue down their warlike ways. The other was much further back, to the early twenty first century, a review of the wonderful book which kept my sanity through the many decades.

Thank you Anne Dawson. If you are seeing this, then your book may very well have saved the world.