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- Doc Skala's Old-Time Variety Hour, episode 3
In glorious mono from Roncesvalles, Toronto, and Hilo, Hawaii, it's Episode 3 of Doc Skala's Old-Time Variety Hour, brought to you by Sailor Jerry's Spiced Rum, and PC New Wave Cola. In this episode, I continue the travelogue, and give the whole Internet advertising thing really a deeper analysis than it's probably worth. Don't miss it.
(17 January 2010)- Risk-seeking advertising
While mentally drafting an email message to someone who'd written to me about my advertising efforts (and if that was you, sit tight - I do plan to reply eventually), I thought of something interesting. It's embedded in this statement, which is basically true: "I'd pay $100 for 10,000 clicks, but I'd only pay $0.50 for 100 clicks." That's a mouthful. It's a surprising statement with important causes and consequences both.
(6 June 2008)- Banyan Tree Foundation
- Some thoughts on the recent news about the Toronto-based charitable foundation (3 June 2008)
- PimpMaster C explains pump and dump scams
Yo, PimpMaster C here, to tell you all about the pump and dump. I know you ladies in the audience probably have a thing or two to say about that shit too, but this is not a romance advice column; I'm talking about the financial concept. It's a way to make serious bling by basically just convincing other foos to give it to you. UPDATE: Check it, my academic homies Frieder and Zittrain have wrote a paper about those pump'n'dump stock spams you get. Go read it (you gots to have Javascript to download the PDF), and don't be falling for that shit, yo.
(22 January 2007)- Currency exchange rates
- Automatically-extracted exchange rate RSS feeds. (1 January 2006)
- PimpMaster C explains call options
Yo, this is PimpMaster C again. Today I'm gonna tell you about call options, which are kind of like a financial version of the coupons yo momma might clip from the supermarket flyer. A call option is something you can buy that lets you buy something else later at a guaranteed price, if you want to.
(23 September 2005)- PimpMaster C explains the simple moving average
Yo, I gots a way of understanding the price of shit without seeing the short-term fluctuations that could confuse you. This is PimpMaster C telling you about the simple moving average.
(1 September 2005)- PimpMaster C explains isoutility curves
Yo, it's PimpMaster C again. I sent my homies around the hood to round up a bunch of pimps, and I lined them up here to give you a really clear type of description of how isoutility curves work. Check it, that term sounds a lot like "isoelastic utility", which I told you about before, and the two concepts are indeed related, but it's important to keep straight that they are two different things. Anyway, here are the pimps, arranged on a chart according to how happy they are with their investment portfolios.
(18 August 2005)- PimpMaster C explains the efficiency frontier
Yo, this is PimpMaster C, with a little help from my homies in the graphics department of the PimpMaster C enterprise. We managed to solve our Etch-a-Sketch problems and get the images into the computer. I don't wanna go into too much detail on that because it was boring as Hell, but let me just say that only a real foo buys a low-riding parallel port scanner without checking the hydraulics first. Anyway, it's time to tell you all about domination. That's a way of saying when one investment is better than another, and it leads to a thing called the efficiency frontier.
(12 August 2005)- PimpMaster C explains stop orders
Yo, PimpMaster C here. Sorry about the long time since my last posting; business has been pretty good and I kinda forgot. Also, I was writing up a lengthy article on domination for the portfolio theory series, and I put Letitia to work making some bitching graphics of risk versus return, and everything was going pretty well until the Etch-a-Sketch broke. Check it, all the grey powder fell out on the floor, and that shit is difficult to replace. We been trying all kinds of grey powders down here and so far none of them have worked properly. While Tish continues with the research, let me tell you about stop orders.
(9 August 2005)- PimpMaster C explains market and limit orders
Yo, this is PimpMaster C. I know you all want to hear more of that portfolio theory shit, but that is some pretty difficult shit and so while I work on perfecting the next installment, here's a note on something much simpler, namely market orders and limit orders. These things come up when someone is acting as your agent or broker to buy or sell shit on your behalf. You and the dealer can make whatever deal you want, but there are certain kinds of deals that are pretty common and that have special names.
(19 July 2005)- PimpMaster C explains isoelastic utility functions
Check it, some foo said he didn't believe I'd be able to explain modern portfolio theory in words even yo momma could understand, and I admit, that's going to be difficult, but it's just going too far to say that it's entirely impossible. Yo, this is PimpMaster C, starting right in with the isoelastic utility functions, which are important in utility theory, and that in turn is one of the first things you or yo momma gots to learn to understand portfolio theory.
(11 July 2005)- PimpMaster C explains triple witching hour
Yo, this is PimpMaster C. You may have heard the term "triple witching hour". Check it, I'm going to explain that shit. Triple witching hours basically turn up when you have a lot of people trying to make deals before deadlines, and the different deadlines happen to coincide.
(1 July 2005)- PimpMaster C explains diversification
Yo, PimpMaster C here with the straight deal on diversification. Diversification is a very simple principle which occurs throughout finance and in many other places, and it could be summed up as "Don't put all your hos on one corner." You foos will probably find it more convincing if I describe it with numbers, however, and so let's consider the situation of a fixed horse race.
(27 June 2005)- PimpMaster C explains value investing
Yo, PimpMaster C here to talk about value investing. Value investing is great stuff if you're good at it, and it's the strategy used by many famous pimps who have made great amounts of bling through its careful application. Value investing is based on what is called fundamental analysis, and to understand how that works, you only gots to remember one simple fact, namely that "fundament" means "ass".
(21 June 2005)- PimpMaster C explains arbitrage
Yo, PimpMaster C here to dish the story on a little concept called arbitrage. Let's say the hos on 2nd Street are offering blowjobs for $25, but up on 12th Avenue the same service of the same quality is available for $30. That situation provides the opportunity for a pimp who is quick on the draw to make a risk-free profit, by exploiting the difference in price for the same goods between two different markets. That's what the big-time pimps call "arbitrage".
(19 June 2005)- PimpMaster C explains hedge funds
Yo, I gots a very simple explanation of hedge funds here. A hedge fund is where some gangsta thinks he is the shit, and tells you he can make you a whole lot of money through some complicated financial shit he has going. So you give him your money, and then maybe he really is the shit and you get rich, or maybe he blows it and you're screwed. That's a hedge fund. Check you later!
(15 June 2005)- PimpMaster C explains dollar cost averaging
Yo, PimpMaster C again. Check it, I gots the goods on dollar cost averaging.
(15 June 2005)- PimpMaster C explains haircuts
Yo, PimpMaster C here, taking a break from my usual business to post what's planned to be the first of a series of articles on finance. Today: the haircut.
(15 June 2005)- MMORPG economy problem solved?
- So, this afternoon on the bus I was thinking about some of the MMORPG economic problems raised by James Grimmelmann in his law review article. Look, the problem is that players accumulate too much value, right? There's a lack of "drains" in the economy. You need to come up with some way of reducing players' accumulated wealth. Grimmelmann talks about how games try to get players to give up their wealth by selling them superfluous things like hair dye. But there's an easier way. Players have too much stuff? So why not just take some of it away? Problem solved! To be more precise, what I propose is an MMORPG with a tax system. As far as I know, no current system implements that on a significant scale. (11 March 2005)