Tag Archives: nasdaq

The Dry Bulk Market Is More Exciting Than You Think

by ChangMTQhgv Posted on April 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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The Wall Street Journal has an intriguing story today on its front page:

When stocks rose after last year’s presidential election, DryShips Inc. left the market far behind. The little-known Greek dry bulk carrier’s epic one-week rally pushed its shares up by 1,500% for no apparent reason. The rally quickly unwound after the shares were briefly suspended by Nasdaq, but the run-up appears to have made possible a flurry of financial maneuvers that may earn the company’s founder a huge windfall, according to calculations by The Wall Street Journal, while small investors suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. Since they peaked, DryShips’s shares are down by 99.9%.

The Journal provides a handy timeline of events surrounding DryShips. I’ve added the line in red:

Somebody was sure excited about the prospects for bulk shipping in the Trump era. This is especially mysterious since DryShips announced that it was defaulting on its loans (“suspending principal and interest payments”) right before the huge price runup.

Oddly enough, when I went looking for the performance of other dry bulk carriers at around the same time—fully expecting to find that DryShips was indeed unique—I found another carrier with a very similar profile. Right after the election, stock in Globus Maritime skyrocketed 900 percent for a day or two:

Very strange. I guess the dry bulk market is not a place for amateurs.

See original article here – 

The Dry Bulk Market Is More Exciting Than You Think

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The Final Frontier: 500 Microseconds Between Wall Street and Chicago

by DeannaDeal Posted on November 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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A couple of months ago, there was a big scandal over the fact that someone apparently learned about a Fed decision sooner than they should have. It takes seven milliseconds for a signal to travel from Washington DC to Chicago over a fiber optic cable, but a couple of big orders were placed on the Chicago exchange a mere couple of milliseconds after the Fed announcement. Shazam!

But if an advantage of a few milliseconds is so important, why bother with fiber optic cables? Why not mount repeaters on blimps or something, and then relay wireless signals? At the speed of light, it would only take about four milliseconds from DC to Chicago.

I suppose I should have guessed, but naturally someone is doing this:

Ari Rubenstein, a “Star Trek” fan who counts physics as a hobby….heads Strike Technologies, a New York company that’s part of a budding cottage industry racing to build networks of ultra-fast microwave radio transmitters linking the world’s financial hubs.

….Strike, whose ranks include academics as well as former U.S. and Israeli military engineers, hoisted a 6-foot white dish on a tower rising 280 feet above the Nasdaq Stock Market’s data center in Carteret, N.J., just outside New York City.

Through a series of microwave towers, the dish beams market data 734 miles to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s computer warehouse in Aurora, Ill., in 4.13 milliseconds, or about 95% of the theoretical speed of light, according to the company.

Remember that Keynes thing about goosing the economy by burying money in landfills and letting people dig it up? In terms of social utility, this strikes as about the same thing. It’s hard to imagine millions of dollars being spent more uselessly. Even gold plated toilet seats probably have more value to society than this.

In any case, I still think my idea for a neutrino communications network that transmits directly through the earth is a better bet. Sure, you’d need a million gallons of chlorine or heavy water or something to act as the detector, but that seems pretty trivial in order to save another 500 microsceconds. Who’s going to be the first to do this?

Link: 

The Final Frontier: 500 Microseconds Between Wall Street and Chicago

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3 Graphs That End The ‘Food vs. Fuel’ Debate

by Posted on October 22, 2013

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3 Graphs That End The ‘Food vs. Fuel’ Debate

Posted 22 October 2013 in

National

Critics of renewable fuel (chiefly the oil industry) love to claim that growing our own fuel means higher food prices for American consumers. They’re dead wrong, and there’s still a lot of misinformation out there regarding the relationship between corn and the price of food in the grocery store. Let’s take a look:

  1. The price of corn is the lowest it’s been in three years, yet food prices have not come down. This year USDA is forecasting a record breaking corn crop in the US – just this week they updated their inventory estimate by an increase of 25%! Accordingly we have reached a three year low drop in corn prices- corn traded this month at$4.41 a bushel compared to the 2012 peak of $8.49.

Source: NASDAQ.com

 

  1. Only 16% of grocery costs can be traced back to farm inputs, like corn or wheat. The rest goes to costs like energy, transportation, packaging, marketing and labor.

Source: USDA.com, foodpolitics.com

 

  1. Oil, not corn, has been driving up global food prices. While the price of corn is one of many, complicated factors that go into grocery costs, researchers at the World Bank identified crude oil as the number one determinant of global food prices. The cost of energy from oil is integral to so much of the 84% we discussed in #2 (above) that when the price of oil goes up, food prices follow closely behind.

The facts could not be more clear: the agricultural inputs that become renewable fuel simply do not have enough influence on food prices to make a meaningful difference. The only way to spare consumers pain at the grocery store is to end our oil dependence and protect policies that promote alternatives, like the Renewable Fuel Standard.

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3 Graphs That End The ‘Food vs. Fuel’ Debate

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