01 Jan
this post was written yesterday when blog was down, so posting it now. Bob: Damn, I’ve to go to Eve’s party tonight Alice: Oh, but I thought you actually wanted to go? Bob: Nope, I have other things to do and it’s inconvenient to go. But if I don’t go, Eve will get hurt. Alice: [...]
Posted in arbit, economics, fundaes by: skimpy
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30 Dec
We Indians have a “home food” culture. Most people consider it immoral and “bad” to eat out, and more so to eat out on a regular basis. People who don’t cook food at home are termed as being lazy. I remember this story I’d read in Tinkle back when I was a kid. It was [...]
Posted in business, economics, food, fundaes by: skimpy
3 Comments
09 Dec
I spent a year working in an India-focused high frequency trading hedge fund. I used to trade stocks and equity derivatives there. We were primarily an arbitrage hedge fund, and our aim was to make money by trading on assets that were mispriced, in order to make riskless profits. For example, if the price of [...]
Posted in economics, fundaes, infrastructure by: skimpy
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06 Dec
Following a brief discussion on twitter with @deepakshenoy I’m wondering what’s preventing the RBI from making the rupee fully convertible. The usual argument for full convertibility is that it will make the exchange rates volatile. My argument is that exchange rates are already so volatile that the additional volatility that could stem out of a free [...]
Posted in economics, finance, politics by: skimpy
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29 Nov
About five years back, I spent a brief period of time working for a management consulting company. Back then, we had been told that “retail” was “big” – if not in anything else, because it was potentially going to bring a great deal of consulting business to my firm. There was a partner or two [...]
Posted in business, economics, fundaes, retail by: skimpy
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12 Nov
The Ultimatum Game is a commonly used research tool in behavioural economics. It is a “game” played between two players (say A and B) where A is given a sum of money which he has to split among himself and B. If B “accepts” the split, both of them get the money as per A’s [...]
Posted in cricket, economics, sport by: skimpy
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21 Oct
The more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that travel agents perform a very similar role to investment bankers. In the olden days, not everyone had access to financial markets. In order to buy or sell stocks, one had to go through a brokerage company, who would be paid a hefty commission for [...]
Posted in arbit, business, economics, finance, investment banking, travel by: skimpy
1 Comment
19 Oct
When we talk about the global financial crisis, one question that pops up in lots of people’s heads is about where the money went. Since every trade involves two parties, it is argued that every loser has a corresponding winner, and that most commentary about the global financial crisis (of 2008) doesn’t talk about these [...]
Posted in arbit, business, economics, finance, fundaes by: skimpy
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18 Oct
Every time we clean up our house, which is quite frequent I must say, there is a bunch of stuff that we want to throw or give away. Being rational beings, each time we look to maximize the returns we get out of whatever we don’t need, and hence go around looking for people who [...]
Posted in arbit, business, economics by: skimpy
3 Comments
16 Oct
In an article arguing why Kolkata is best placed to be India’s “best city” in another 20 years, Aakar Patel (I’ve started looking forward to his columns in Mint Lounge) mentions that there isn’t much corruption in the governments in Bengal (at both the center and city level). I don’t know the reasoning for this, [...]
Posted in arbit, economics, politics by: skimpy
1 Comment