Email addresses - a new standard

So what's with some people suddenly starting to be "super cool" or "super cautious" by writing their email addresses as name (at) domainname (dot) com . . (Good grief!!) - Ok, perhaps it does mitigate the obvious spider-ing through websites by malicious (are they any other type) spammers but, . . on business cards!

Yes, it's even beginning to crop up on business cards (yikes!).

What's worse are those uber geeks who are including web syntax to make some kind of point, such as those angle brackets to envelope their names . . (Good grief!)

It's just a name/address, and we already have a standard. It's called "simple English."

Next time I address a letter through the regular mail, perhaps I'll write . .

{capital}M {small}r {period}Joe Schmo[comma}

I wonder if it'll get through the poor postal service or more likely get shredded by the mail man.

Please don't try to be too cute.

Here's where the the paranoi stems from . . an Oxford University professor, Jonathan Zittrain, and a Purdue University assistant professor, Laura Frieder, recently studied spamming schemes and reached a suprising conclusion: they work. Spammers often make a 5 to 6 percent return in just days. The suckers who buy the stock - and some inevitably do - lose 7 percent of their investment.

There is, of course, a simple, foolproof way to protect yourself. Delete the spam. Do not buy the stock. But for those who still don’t understand or simply can’t resist, even stronger warnings are on the way. Most of the companies promoted in spam (including Voxbox) are traded on the Pink Sheets, a New York-based electronic exchange that doesn’t require companies to file financial reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Pink Sheets chief executive, Cromwell Coulson, said the exchange will create a new tier of companies in March 2007 that do file disclosures. Firms that do not will be flagged with a skull and crossbones if they are promoted in spam, he said. In the meantime, Mr. Coulson offered some simple, age-old financial wisdom: "A free stock tip is worth what you paid for it."

The battle for the last mile

Oct 26, I attended the NYSSA conference woed by the attendance of senior SEC representative talking about how they were taking steps to making corporate reporting more relevant.

. , more later

This IS rocket science . . .

So I sat down with an old friend who was literally the equivalent of a rocket scientist at a major F20 materials company for over a decade or two - now retired to run a predictive trading hedge fund. We talked about tagging and how it could play out in his trading tool. I took careful notes, and, this is in essense what he was driving at in terms of his approach to a trading strategy.

His forecasting model, like most others, is designed to increase in accuracy with the magnitude of market swings. The ability to predict accurately both "fat tails" of the return distribution is critical for developing profitable trading systems. Many current forecasting methods use total forecasting accuracy over the entire return range of the distribution.

Simple trading functions (or those that will fail consistently, such as Always Up or Always Down models) will predict one side of the return distribution perfectly, but be completely wrong for the other side. These stiff functions can be used as the basis for building adaptive, regime switching tradinig systems that are used in several trend following methods. Clever switching strategies can result in significant cumulative returns, at the expense of high volatility due to the stiffness of the function. In contrast, his approach is to develop soft trading functions that are more balanced in their ability to predict tha fat tailson both sides of the return distribution. He uses proprietary methods based on information theory and genetic algorithms to discover these functions.

In order to discover underlying market structure, he constructs a large set of features that broadly span (financial factors, time, statistical metric) space. He thinks tagging financial information will help make this intial data capture step much more reliable and robust since errors caught in this first steps can lead to signals that could be 100% off.

Not Camelot, . . still a round table

I listened to the trailing 30 minutes of this roundtable discussion and highly recommend tuning in . . .While it's clear there are a growing number of firms vying for the attention of the SEC as they seduce the marketplace into adopting interactive data, Cox spoke very succinctly and clearly for perhaps the very first time when asked the pointed questions "what is the timetable for transitioning to interactive data."

So, it's now public news that a top exec from Morgan Stanley has left to head up MSN Money, presumably to take his learnings in information mining and tagging from the big time insitutional investors to the big time retail investors via the Microsoft portal. Hmm.

The software vendor community was represented by the usual suspects: Lipper, Enumerate Solutions, Sun MicroSystems, NASDAQ, EdgarOnline, Hitachi, SavaNet, and Rivet talking about their tools and strategy for each of their organizations. While the talk was fluid, it lacked the big commercial drivers for market adoption. . . a compelling+immediate+benefit. Methinks, this motley bunch of evangelists will change hats (or disappear) at least a few times before one or two major players enter the market (such as GOOG, AMZN or EBAY).

Cox clearly wants the interactive data train to be well on its way as a legacy he leaves behind and his lasting fingerprint on the regulation of the capital markets before moving onto greener pastures as he remarked that the SEC has now committed funding to the program to be implemented and, once the taxonomy development work is complete, the SEC will be in a much better position to weigh the issuer implementation options (staged or selective by industry) against the burden of existing reporting.

I think he's finally caught the attention and imagination of the software vendor community and by reflecting on the report by a F500 CEO complementing the smooth transition to XBRL he may even have caught the attention of issuers watching nervously on the sidelines.