January 2009
6 posts
Trading stopped for 15 minutes... →
The article contains this little note right at the bottom:
“Paulo Sergio Silva, 36, a trader for the brokerage arm of the Brazilian banking giant Itaú, shot himself in the chest during the afternoon trading session of São Paulo’s commodities and futures exchange in an apparent suicide attempt in November. Trading stopped for about 15 minutes.”
Trading stopped for 15 minutes!!! Your...
2 tags
Loaning of Shares →
This article tries to absolve short selling of responsibility for the bank values crash a couple of weeks ago (it does look like institutions dumped their bank stock as soon as they found out that short-selling was being re-enabled).
But the interesting statistic in this article is that over 3 percent of Barclays shock was out on loan, even while short-selling was banned. Which begs a...
2 tags
Microsoft's World of Pain →
I’ve known for a while about this guy’s trials with trying to create the ‘Shutdown’ menu for Windows Vista, but not read his actual blog.
The section on Microsoft’s source control system looks like a world of pain. How can any software company succeed when it take months for code changes to propagate from one team to another?
Continuous Integration this is not!
4 tags
Merrill Lynch paid itself $4 BILLION in bonuses →
Merrill Lynch paid itself $4 Billion in bonuses 3 days before the bankrupt company was taken over by Bank of America?!!!!
Three questions: Where was the oversight? Surely, once it was known that bailout money was going into the banks (and Merrill, or its rescuer was clearly going to be a recipient), a method of overseeing the financial management of these companies needed to be created? Or...