Tag Archives | liquidity
handcuffs

Insider Trading: A Window On Our Economy

Insider trading is making more headlines than we have seen since Ivan Boesky was fitted with handcuffs back in 1986. This morning’s newspapers report the arrests of Matthew Kluger and Garrett Bauer, a lawyer-trader pair who have apparently been at it for seventeen years. A third party in the scheme is cooperating with authorities. Yesterday, [...]

exhibit_12_10_2007

Benford’s Law

Benford’s Law is a fascinating theorem from statistics that states, for most forms of data, the leading digits of numbers are not uniformly distributed among 1 through 9. Instead, any given data point has a 30.1% probability of having a 1 as its leading digit. There is a 17.6% probability of the leading digit being [...]

individual_2

Market Makers’ Dilemma

One of my clients deals in a specialty commodity. They source the commodity, process it, and then sell it in local markets around the world. In some local markets, my client is a two-bit player. In others, they are the market maker. In those markets, they largely set the price of that commodity. Unlike a [...]

toxic_waste

Hedge Funds: Who’ll Take the Toxic Waste?

Long before Mark Twain stood on Wall Street and saw it was a “street with a river at one end and a graveyard at the other,” there has been financial manipulation and scams. During the Punic Wars against Carthage, businessmen offered to ship supplies to Rome’s army on condition the state insured their ships and [...]