1. As long as there is cumulative inflation between the date you purchase the bond and the date the bond matures, and you hold the bond to maturity, the actual real Yield to Maturity (YTM) will match the real YTM quoted at the time of the purchase. It doesn’t matter whether the bond was purchased at the initial offering or purchased a few years later on the secondary market. (more…)

How Nassim Taleb turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy

One day in 1996, a Wall Street trader named Nassim Nicholas Taleb went to see Victor Niederhoffer. Victor Niederhoffer was one of the most successful money managers in the country. He lived and worked out of a thirteen-acre compound in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and when Taleb drove up that day from his home in Larchmont he had to give his name at the gate, and then make his way down a long, curving driveway. Niederhoffer had a squash court and a tennis court and a swimming pool and a colossal, faux-alpine mansion in which virtually every square inch of space was covered with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American folk art. In those days, he played tennis regularly with the billionaire financier George Soros. He had just written a best-selling book, “The Education of a Speculator,” dedicated to his father, Artie Niederhoffer, a police officer from Coney Island. He had a huge and eclectic library and a seemingly insatiable desire for knowledge. When Niederhoffer went to Harvard as an undergraduate, he showed up for the very first squash practice and announced that he would someday be the best in that sport; and, sure enough, he soon beat the legendary Shariff Khan to win the U.S. Open squash championship. That was the kind of man Niederhoffer was. He had heard of Taleb’s growing reputation in the esoteric field of options trading, and summoned him to Connecticut. Taleb was in awe.

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The power of rewriting history is best seen in how the whole world attributes the discovery that the square of the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides to Pythagoreas in 6th Century BC whereas this same thing has been written down earlier in Sulba Sutra in India in the 8th Century BC as follows The diagonal chord of the rectangle makes both the squares that the horizontal and vertical sides make separately. So most probably this insight was taken by Pythagoreus and branded as his own.

I was watching the recent PBS show on India and was infuriated given in the program for the Aryan Invasion theory making it appear as if its crystal clear that ancient Indians were primitives and it was the invading Aryans who civilized them! Unbelievable that none of the theories which oppose this was brushed aside as it suits the western propaganda. Found this interesting video on this topic. Also check out this link

The Discoverer Metadata Conversion Assistant can convert an EUL into an rpd. It cannot convert Discoverer workbooks/worksheets into BI EE Answers requests. This functionality is planned for a future release.

Take a look at “Section 11.2, “Migration of Oracle BI Discoverer Metadata”” - http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E10415_01/doc/bi.1013/e10416/general_10134.htm#BEHHADDJ

Mind blowing pics showing the numbers of cars in storage around the world. Click here

Like the Paul Simon song 50 ways to leave your lover, we have a 25 people who are responsible for the Financial Crisis we are in now.

Alan Greenspan, chairman of US Federal Reserve 1987- 2006
Only a couple of years ago the long-serving chairman of the Fed, a committed free marketeer who had steered the US economy through crises ranging from the 1987 stockmarket collapse through to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, was lauded with star status, named the “oracle” and “the maestro”. Now he is viewed as one of those most culpable for the crisis. He is blamed for allowing the housing bubble to develop as a result of his low interest rates and lack of regulation in mortgage lending. He backed sub-prime lending and urged homebuyers to swap fixed-rate mortgages for variable rate deals, which left borrowers unable to pay when interest rates rose. (more…)

The price of gold rose to $906 an ounce here on Monday, the highest level for three and a half months, on buying by specialist funds amid fresh concerns about the global economic outlook.

The price reached $906 in mid-morning trading, the highest quote since October 10, having risen above 900 dollars on Friday for the first time in three months. (more…)

Being Indians we tend to not pay too much attention and bed share with our infants, we better be mindful.

Infant deaths blamed on accidental strangulation and suffocation in bed have increased sharply in the United States, federal health officials are reporting today, reigniting a heated debate over the rising number of parents who sleep with their babies.
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As the talks of demand slowdown in the real estate sector gather steam, one of the top bankers in the country on Saturday talked about price correction. OP Bhatt, chairman of State Bank of India (SBI), the country’s largest bank, expects 50% correction in the housing sector prices in the country. “In India we may witness up to 50% correction in pricing in the mortgage markets. If that happens, it’s good news for the Indian banking system as NPAs would reduce and new business would fall-in,’’ he said at the concluding session of Ficci-IBA Conference on Global Banking: Paradigm Shift, in Mumbai on Saturday. (more…)