| Separated by a common language |
[19 Nov 2009|02:18pm] |
Last week while I was on holiday and earlier this week I suffered a large number of "refused deliveries" of the newsletter. I kludged round it on Tuesday by turning the delivery to the bouncebacks from Blind Carbon Copy to Carbon Copy, and then sending the publication out in small batches. But I also notified IT to see if they could discover which dastardly spam filterer was generating false positives. (Incidentally, if any company tried to sell me software, I would test it by putting through an "ok" image/email and seeing if a false positive was generated -- the sales staff of these products are much better at showing how good it is at stoping stuff, but not so hot when it comes to showing you how good their product is at letting innocent stuff through).
Anyhoo, when I opened up Word 2007 this morning, things looked odd. To whit, the default text had reverted to Calibri, the paragraph spacing had returned to default, and a few other changes. Odd, I thought, but then carried on. Perhaps IT have been loking at my computer to see if any settings are causing the rejections.
It was only when I came to send out the newsletter that I realized the horror of my situation. I clicked the custom macro button on the toolbar and ... nothing. I opened up the macro box and ... nothing, no macros at all. I checked my settings - enable macro was on. I phoned IT. They denied having anything to do with it.
Luckily I found a three-year old Word document that had the most important code in it. I had a complete back-up on the home machine, apart from one small part that took me ages to fix.
But I was still puzzled. How had this happened?
I Googled away until I found the following, which happened to someone else:
• I opened Word 2007 to find all my custom keyboard shortcuts and macros had disappeared.
It appears to have happened after I changed the Primary Editing Language from English (UK) to English (US) and quit all Office programs (using the Language Settings button under Word Options).
•
I checked the Application Data\Microsoft\Templates folder and found there is no Normal.dotm file there. There is a file called Normal.dotm.old that, judging by the timestamp, was modified when I quit all Office programs.
I tried saving a copy of Normal.dotm.old as Normal.dotm. This did not restore the shortcuts or macros.
• Follow-up on this. I just conducted an experiment.
1. With no Normal.dotm in Application Data\Microsoft\Templates, I opened Word and created a new keyboard shortcut.
2. I quit Word, and as expected, a Normal.dotm appeared in Application Data\Microsoft\Templates.
3. I opened Word and used the keyboard shortcut. It worked.
4. I quit Word. Normal.dotm did not disappear from Application Data\Microsoft\Templates.
5. I opened Word again and changed the Primary Editing Language back to English (UK).
6. I quit Word. Normal.dotm was still in Application Data\Microsoft\Templates.
7. I opened Word. Normal.dotm disappeared from Application Data\Microsoft\Templates.
• I guess this explains it: changing the Primary Editing Language causes Normal.dotm to disappear. I guess I won't do that again
And, guess what,the previous day I had been doing some "tidying up" and, because I type on a US keyboard using mainly US spelling, I changed my "primary editing language" from English (UK) to English (US).
As far as Word 2007 is concerned, this is the same as changing the default language from Finnish to Serbo-Croat. The old normal.dotm is renamed and a new normal.dotm is created. So, obviously, when I opened up Word the following day, all shortcuts, all macros, all preferences, had been wiped.
Unlike the chap above, I eventually discovered that my "old" Normal.dotm still had all of my original macros. A bit of file renaming restored my position to that of an English (UK) primary editing language, but all shortcuts, customizations and macros intact. Only cost me an hour or 90 minutes. Microsoft is shit.
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About eight years ago I went to a lunchtime seminar on asbestosis, its various incarnations, symptoms (or, in the case of pleural plaques, lack thereof) and other matters medical. One of the research guys there (who had pissed off to an American institution because, basically, the institutions here just didn't have the funds needed) said that one of the major problems over the next decade or so would be the "magic bullet" cancer cures that were currently being developed, but which would impose incredible costs on the world's health services (or insurers).
Today the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence decided that one such drug -- Nexavar -- was far too expensive thank you very much, even though it is likely that it would extend the life of liver cancer sufferers significantly.
Liver cancer, of course, isn't "sexy". If it had been breast cancer, or prostate cancer, I reckon the drug would have been nodded through. But liver disease is as associated with drinking as much as lung disease is associated with smoking.
But the conflicts that this situation brings up (and it will be repeated again and again over the next 10 years) raise uncomfortable questions that people just don't want to ask. NICE seems to think that the drug developers should give away for nothing the drug that has cost them fortunes to develop. Or, if they don't give it away, at least charge no more than it costs to produce. "Research and Development" costs have no place in the NHS canon, and the fact that unless Bayer can make a lot of money on this drug then it can't afford to spend lots of money on researching future drugs that will help other cancer sufferers survive --- well, like I say, it's an issue that no-one seems to want to address.
But, well, there's another issue here. Life isn't fair. We seem to have an odd attitude to money. It's quite reasonable for money to be used to buy some things (things that "don't matter"?) but when it comes to stuff that can extend life, the concept of "nice if you can afford it" goes out of the window.
Except that it doesn't. If you or I could afford bi-monthly full physicals, an early stage of cancer would be far more likely to be detected than it is at the moment. And yet I neither see nor hear demands that such medical checks should be available on the NHS. But once you've GOT the disease, then capitalism goes out of the window. Capitalism applies to prevention, but not to cure.
Such a division strikes me as needlessly foolish, not least because of the old saying that prevention is better than cure.
And the NHS has never been "fair" anyway. The entire system is structured in such a fashion that money is distributed to the wrong people at the wrong time in an inefficient manner. Get a "lucky" illness in the right place, and your treatment will beat anything that the private sector has to offer. But suffer from a non-sexy disease (any mental health issue, for a start) and your chances improve dramatically the more money that you have.
So, for sure, say that everyone, rich or poor, should be entitled to a £3,000 a month medical treatement if they need it. But don't then procrastinate on why the same sort of money isn't available to help those who are unable to help themselves -- the mentally disturbed, the plain socially inadequate --- where the main line appears to be "well, if you are prepared to go private, there's The Priory..."
I think our NHS is, in the main, great. I wouldn't swap it for any other system, with the possible exception of France/Germany. It's hopelessly inefficient in many places, it's overburdened with targets and non-medical staff, but despite all that it's a bloody brilliant system. However, it was designed for a different era, and the fact that its precepts no longer function today (is infertility really something that merits NHS treatment? To be honest, I don't think so? And wouldn't it be better for people to embrace diversity than for cosmetic surgery to be provided for free?) is something that politicians and people within the NHS system don't want to look at. Someone, sopme day, will have to draw very uncomfortable boundaries.
The weird thing is, it's already been done (overdone, some might say) in the Dental service. A system where the "cosmetic" lines were drawn has resulted in a situation where the basic care that should be within the NHS has virtually vanished. It's now cheaper for me to actually buy most medication directly from the chemist than to get it from the same chemist on an NHS prescription. Go figure.
So, should that £3k a month be handed over to liver cancer sufferers, or should it be a case of "now, if you were richer..."? It's oh so easy to say "yes" (of course, it's easier to make the drugs company out to be the bad boy here -- that being the drugs company that developed the drug, would it?) but that money has to be diverted from somewhere (although I suppose we could increase QE....). So, I suggest diverting it from infertility treatment clinics. Oh yes, I can see how well that would go down.
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| Asset valuation, 20% ROE |
[18 Nov 2009|01:26pm] |
A new unwritten law of economics has occurred to me. If the chairman of the Federal Reserve says "it is inherently extraordinarily difficult to know whether an asset's price is in line with its fundamental value", then you can be fairly sure that assets are, in the main, overvalued.
Well, Ben Bernanke said that this week, so I think we can safely conclude that assets are overvalued and are heading for a fall.
This reminded me of the insane valuations in the dotcom era (remember? "New parameters", all that gumph) when, and this is no lie, I remember one investment manager saying that he preferred investing in stocks that were at all-time highs because that meant that there were no resistance points on the upside. Marvellous.
As the FT observed, "if Mr Bernanke has no idea what a bubble looks like, China reckons it does, suggesting this week that US policy is causing a speculative rise in asset prices".
Even the FT seems to me to make the mistake of assuming that we are now in a correction period, that the bubbles that were constructed over several decades and particularly in the early period of the Bush presidency are now in the process of slowly being unravelled over time.
An alternative view is that the final aspect of the bubble is now in place -- printing money. And an addition to this view is that one imbalance is still roaring ahead with the co-operation of both sides -- the huge trade balance deficit between the US and China. Neither of these can last forever and both must, eventually, end somehow -- either with tears for the creditors (i.e., savers and China) or for the debtors (i.e., past borrowers and the US/UK).
That there has been nothing learnt from the past decade's madness was evinced this morning by Oswald Gruebel, head of UBS, who said that the bank was aiming for 20% return on equity. Now, you can (and he will) dress this up in all kinds of smoke and mirrors about how it will and can be done. But the question remains, where does this monty come from? What wealth is actually created?
And that's where it gets a bit difficult. Because (and I assume that even Gruebel would admit this), the world economy is not going to grow at 20% a year. So, if you are going to generate 20% RoE there are only a few options open to you:
1) You manage it at the expense of other financial institutions.
Well, UBS has hardly been covered in glory in the past here. There's no reason to see why UBS should succeed instead of the other banks that didn't fuck it up last time round
2) You manage it at the expense of the general economy.
In other words, a small business grows 25%, and UBS takes 20% of it. This is the classic "sucking money out of the system" that will, eventually, lead to alternative, cheaper options.
3) You manage it by inventing profits
The usual answer and the technique used by banks in the past decade. Lend out money to people you shouldn't lend it to. Insure the default with a financial institution you shouldn't insure it with, and book the profit this year, worrying about the disappearance of your capital, your borrower and your insurer when it happens.
In other words, to promise 20% RoE is irresonsible in the extreme -- verging, I would posit, on the criminal -- because it cannot be genuinely achieved by a run-of-the-mill bank in an economy that is hardly growing at all and which over the next decade is unlikely to average more than 2% a year.
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| "I'll take 98¢." "No, we'll only give you a dollar" |
[17 Nov 2009|12:55pm] |
The report is out on the behaviour of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, led at the time by Timothy Geitner, when it came to discussing how much of a haircut Goldman Sachs, Soc Gen, Deutsche Bank and others should take on the CDS deals they had with AIG.
Neil Barofsky, the special inspector for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) concluded that the NY Fed only made "limited efforts" to negotiate discounts.
Apparently the French regulator would accept no discount at all unless AIG went bankrupt. Goldman Sachs took the same line. UBS said that it would take 98%, provided all the other counterparties did the same.
The problem, as Barofsky astutely observes, was that you can only get counterparties to take a haircut if the possible alternative is that they will get even less -- and that possibility only remains if bankruptcy is not ruled out. But the NY Fed had already committed to not letting AIG fail. Once that fact was publicly stated, the counterparties said "oh, good, then we'll take 100%, please".
AIG had been negotiating, with the "strength" of a threatened general default (i.e. Chapter 11, or even a fully fledged "going bust"), for haircuts in the region of 40%.
In essence this was a fine display of the massive difference between the private sector and the public sector and the attitudes intrinsic to each.
Of course, there's no reason for us on this side of the Atlantic to moan -- the US taxpayer effectively bailed out Europe to the tune of six or seven billion dollars. TYVM, guys. But if I were a US voter I'd be vaguely curious how people at the top of the US regulatory tree could be so hopeless when it comes to playing hardball in negotiations.
Bob Benmosche, still the Birks nomination for Time Man of the Year, seems to be showing the regulators what for, although even Benmoscge seems to be having his patience tried by Feinberg.
But Feinberg's line (as well as that of Darling and others in the UK) is less of a "this will get us out of the mess" and more of a "we need a symbolic sacrifice". It's a lot easier (or, rather, it was, until Benmosche arrived) to slap massive restrictions on payments than it is to get to grips with real solutions. As I've written before, the vast bonuses that banking executives and ( a very few) AIG executives (the ones at AIG Financial Products, plus the guys at the very top) pocketed were commissions on debt. In other words, they had to hand out $10m to make $500,000 in bonus on the loan. So, while the executive profited to the tune of half a million, someone "out there" who didn't repay the loan, benefited to the tune of $10m. Many of us are, in effect, still walking around with that cash in our pocket, as it trickled down to us via huge asset inflation.
But that doesn't make for comfortable headlines. So, blame the lender, not the borrower who failed to repay.
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| Betimes |
[13 Nov 2009|06:44pm] |
Well, stone me. I got my act together and was at the bus station by 9.15am for the 200 bus to Antibes. Here followed one of the unwritten rules of travel -- you never know which buses are going to be crowded without direct experience thereof. This bus was virtually empty compared with the 11.15am bus that I caught to Canes on Tuesday.
But it still took 90 minutes to get to Antibes. This was partly caused by an old favourite -- the broken-down bus. France's traffic system in the south is quite efficient, until a bus breaks down. This will block all known routes to other buses. But the police were on hand fairly quickly.
The police were also on hand quickly when a toytown van crashed into the car in front of it. Toytown vans (you know the type -- the size of a Fiat Panda, but in the shape of a van) are not good things to crash. The driver's head is so close to the windscreen that he couldn't stop his head hitting it.
There was no post yesterday because all I did was make another trek around Cap Ferrat -- easily one of my favourite walks. They are rebuilding the track, which I think will spoil it a bit, although it will make it easier. And you have to give the Nice authorities credit for stuff like this. It must cost a fair amount of money to maintain this path, but they know that doing so is good for business in the metagame sense.
Now, here's a poser. Shouldn't French guide books have place pronounciation names? After all, English guide books have them for Americans (e.g., Lester Square, Barkshire, usw..) For most people I guess that this isn't a problem, but I've just realized that many of my pronouciations are up the creek, simply because I have never heard anyone pronounce the names before (or, if I have, I haven't associated that place with the place in my mispronouncing head). I always saw Antibes as a corollary of litotes. I could just have easily have seen it as a corollary of inscribes or imbibes. It is, of course, none of these things. Its corollary is endives (i.e., Onteeebs). I daresay that all of you knew this and are immediately mocking my ignorance. But, hey, I've learnt something today; you haven't.
First impressions of the town were not good. The centre (Place General de Gaulle) looked very sad. However, things picked up in the walk down to the port.
I then decided to go to the Picasso Museum. Except that by now it was 11.35am, and the museum shuts from noon to 2pm. Hmm, I thought. I know. I'll walk round Cap d'Antibes.
This was a brave thing to try without a map. But what, I thought, could go wrong?
Well, actually, nothing did. I followed my nose and walked all the way to the southern tip of the cape. What I hadn't realized was how far it was to get to Hotel du Cap. And, when I finally got there, I was ready to get the bus back. However, luckily there was a map at the busstop. And, looking at this, I saw that the walk back up the other side was far more direct. It was still a long way (and the walk from Juan Les Pins back to the centre of Antibes was an unwelcome addition) and I reckon I covered six or seven miles. I was definitely getting weary by the time I got to the museum.
Which perhaps meant that I wasn't in the best frame of mind to appreciate it. The Picasso bit alone (on the top floor) makes it worthwhile, and there are two or three special pieces (the Miro, the Amano ((??) violins), but most of the rest seemed to consist of "good second-tier" artists mainly noted for local talent. One notable exception for me was Pierre Souages, of whom I had not previously heard. Here's a guy who is definitely out of the top drawer. I must seek out more of his stuff.
Having got off the bus in the middle of a one-way system, I now had the problem of finding where to get the bus back (without a map, as I said). I followed the one-way system back, but found myself at the railway station. Not sure how that happened, but by now I was getting seriously knackered, so I got the train back.
A far superior choice! Only EUR 3.90, 29 minutes, and a quick hop onto the tram southwards to Place Massena. I'd been slightly thrown by the destination of "Vintmille" put on the front of the train, but I asked a young chap if it went to Nice, and he said yes. As soon as I was on the train I realized that Vintmille was, of course, Ventimiglia.
While on the train I checked my emails on the Palm and discovered that I had a leak in the stopcock in the flat downstairs. A quick phone call back to the estate agent's, a go-ahead to bring in the plumbers on Monday, and the whole thing sorted and suited from a train travelling from Antibes to Nice. Modern technology impresses me sometimes. The GBP185 bill impressed me less but, so it goes.
Oh well, time to start packing. Will upload some pictures. I've just realized that there were a couple that I meant to compress for uploading but missed. I'll do a proper update from the proper computer in the next few days.
( pictures of Cap Ferrat, Antibes )
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| Early |
[11 Nov 2009|08:25pm] |
I wish I could get going earlier in the mornings. With the sun going down at about 5.30pm, I've wasted much of the daylight hours pissing around in the apartment. Yet again I only made it to the bus station by 11am. This time I decided to visit Menton, which is a shorter trip than the one to Cannes.
I sat on the correct (shaded) side of the bus. I had my Creative Zen to ward off the wittering Irish lady sitting in front of me. She was one of a pair -- a strangely non-Dublin rural Irish confection (Kerry? Athlone? Mayo?) of an elderly 60-something lady (often short, never wearing make-up, probably either widowed or many years ago having failed nun examination) and a much younger woman, somewhere between 35 and 40, often "big", rosy-cheeked, short "sensible" dark hair and, sad to say, having slowly realized that she is not going to find a husband.
So, the pair of them go on holiday together. How do they get to know each other? Who knows? But the elderly woman will do the talking, and the younger woman will do the listening.
Menton is a nice little town. The lunch was not exciting, but was edible, and was enlivened by one young waitress who was clearly looking to join the Frank Skinner school of incompetence. A large parasol/sun umbrella was rammed into a large plant pot. It blew over. Girl comes over, shoves it back in and perches it on some lights. It blew over again. Then she dropped a large number of plates and cups. Great crashing noise..
These restaurants all have seats on the other side of the road, right by the beach. Great to eat at (I chose the quieter shade indoors) but also rather exciting for the waitress carrying the food across a busy road.
After the meal I set off in search of two graves. The first was Jean Cocteau and proved easy to find. The second was William Webb Ellis, and that took me about two hours to find. This delay was mainly due to an atrocious map in Lonely Planet (the only guide that I could find in the shops -- the far superior Rough Guide having been too difficult to get hold of at short notice). The map indicated roads which were steps, and paths which were roads. And then it got its directions wrong, and put road names in that were, in some cases, downright misleading. And then I got my churches confused (or, rather, I think that Lonely Planet did), which made things even worse.
However, the good thing about getting lost in strange towns is that at least you are bound to end up somewhere, and in this case it was the Vielle Ville, which I didn't even know was there (no sign off it on Lonely Planet map).
Finally, after much toing and froing, I found the obscure route to the cemetery that I sought.
After that I headed further north (i.e., up), before finding myself on a road that LP didn't even accept existed. Eventually (very high up) I decided to turn round and retrace my tracks, just in case I found myself in Italy by mistake.
Tomorrow I wanted to get a bus northwards, but this is, to be frank, insane. Even the TAM (Transport Alpes-Maritimes) web site comes with warnings about unpredictability. Only one bus each day goes to any of these places, and only one (presumably the same one) comes back. They are way up in the back of beyond and there probably isn't much to see in return for two-hours-plus in each direction, apart from an avalanche if things go wrong.
So, where to? A day's hopping onto ligne d'azur buses at random might be fun. Or possibly St Paul de Vence. Then again, I still have to get the energy together to get myself out of bed tomorrow.
( more pictures )
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| Bat toe |
[10 Nov 2009|08:23pm] |
Well, I made it to Cannes, and thence to Ile Sainte Marguerite. Unfortunately, first thing this morning I got a little too interested in the heads up of the World Series of Poker (broadcast live on radio by Bluff). I had a nice win with Betfair if Darvin Moon won it, but he came second after ballsing up one hand rather badly. Still, he nearly got Joe Cada to lay his hand down in that turning point (Moon overshoved with an an under-straight draw on a board of TT59, and Cada called with J9; River was a three).
That meant that I didn't get a bus until 10.45, and this took forever to get to Cannes. My advice to you is, it might only be one euro to travel by bus to Cannes from Nice, but the more expensive train is worth the extra.
The upshot of that was that I only had a couple of hours on Ile Sainte Marguerite. That was enough time to see the museum and walk to one of the viewing points, but nowhere near enough time for the 8km beach track circumnavigation, which is now one of my ambitions.
While on the island my camera's batteries ran out -- well, I have used it a hell of a lot this year. This necessitated a long walk of Rue d'Antibes, the main shopping thoroughfare. I can now solemnly inform you that there are no camera shops on Rue d'Antibes. On my walk back I resorted to side streets, and I finally found a camera shop, but he didn't have my batteries (CVR3s). He recommended another camera shop, and he didn't have them either. So I bought the "back-up" set of four lithium energizer AA batteries. They'll get me through a couple of months.
I then got the 6pm bus back, and treated myself to a French kebab on Ave Jen Medicins. And delicious it was too. No chili sauce in France, obv, but they did have barbecue sauce.
( some pictures )
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| Di-latelyoraly |
[09 Nov 2009|11:29pm] |
I've been very lazy. When I only had three days here (in September), I had to hit the ground running. Since I got here, er, nearly three days ago, I've done precisely nothing except a bit of shopping for provisions (thus discovering that the French for wet-look gel or mousse is neither gel nor mousse, which are other things entirely) and get mad at my computer for being so out-of-date. I knew that I shouldn't have hung on for the second GBP250 voucher from Stars.
I've sorted out the laptop with a few irritating exceptions. I can't get PostgreSQL to connect at all, which means I can't run Hold Em Manager. And Party Poker just eats up the CPU on this ancient beast. At Stars they have better programmers, and the tables run perfectly smoothly. I vaguely attempted to get 50FPPs on Party as part of the Gladiator challenge, but all it cost me was about $50 in disconnections at inconvenient times. Well, not disconnections as such -- I could see my QQ, I remained connected, I heard the sounds. But the screen remained resolutely frozen and unresponsive to my mouseclicks or keyboard actions. Most annoying when the flop came KQ4!
Anyhoo, enough is enough for the laziness. Tomorrow is Birks up early, get to bus stop and wait for a number 200, book in hand (or, at least, in shoulder bag) for long bus ride to Cannes. "Avoid rush-hour", the guide book says, without actually saying when the rush-hour actually is. A bit like Microsoft time and those bars indicating "progress" when you are installing updates and the like. When will someone tell these morons that a bar that moves half-way across in 10 seconds, and then doesn't move for half an hour, is not really much use to anyone? I also noted that Microsoft ALWAYS puts after any update that "after you have installed this update, you may have to restart your computer". Now, surely, sometimes it's going to be "it's unlikely, but vaguely possible", while other times it's gong to be "more likely than not". Putting EXACTLY the same sentence at the end of each update description is a sign of, well, I don't know what, really, but I know it when I see it, and it has Microsoft IT written all over it. Laziness (see the unimaginary error messages you always get) bureaucracy, "job-for-life" mentality, and an abysmal lack of imagination.
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| En France |
[07 Nov 2009|03:03pm] |
Well, getting up at 3am is not something that I would like to do every day of the week, even if I had got five hours' sleep.
The journey was relatively smooth. The N47 bus arrived on time; the train left London Bridge on time (although I noted that the next train, the 5.05am, was cancelled, so it's clearly best to allow the extra time that early in the morning) and Gatwick was relatively civilized. It struck me that, three or so hours later, a large poker contingent would be turning up for the V43 flight to Las Vegas, what with the WSOP final table kicking off soon, with James Akenhead the short stack.
I was wise enough this time to head for the Bus ticket booth at Nice airport, picking up a Touristique pass for EUR 15. Since the fare on the airport bus is EUR 4 in both directions, this makes the marginal cost of a week's travel just EUR 7.
Unfortunately I was not wise enough to do this in time to catch the 98 bus. Instead I caught the 99, which goes to the train station in Nice rather than the bus station. This made for a rather longer walk than I would have liked to get to the apartment.
However, it all got sorted out, and I found myself happily knackered and resting in a rather nice 1-bedroom apartement on Rue de Hotel des Postes. Wi-Fi is functional and, after some experimenting, I managed to work out how the three doors worked that I need to pass through to get into the flat!
It's obviously a conversion of an older, very large flat, into three one-bedroom apartments. I was idly thinking that, as a single apartment, it would be awesome. Coincidentally, a quick glance in the estate agent's nearby showed just such a flat, for EUR 714,000. Well, that shouldn't be a problem.
My guess is at this place, probably about 36 sq metres, would be something like EUR 190,000 to EUR 220,000. It has a balcony, is very central, has high ceilings, but is on a busy road (this doesn't impinge at all for me, living as I do on Lewisham Hill!). The windows block out the sound very well, but on a warm day, with the french windows open, it might get a bit loud.
I could happily spend a winter month here if I could wangle a "work from home" deal and also a decent rental rate. I doubt that a flat like this would be more than EUR 1800 for a calendar month in January or February.
I made my way to the local small store to stock up on provisions -- Bread, cheese, margarine, paté, milk and Granola chocolate biscuits (oh, and a pizza and some fresh ravioli). It may sound a bit strange, but this is exactly how I love it. Just getting away from London relieves me of 95% of the shit that weighs down my life. I guess that if I were here for a month then, gradually, that shit would start to seep back in --- I'm savvy enough to know that all I am doing is psychologically thought-boxing stuff into "that doesn't apply this week -- I'm on holiday" rather than solving the problems. But, hey, go with the flow.
( Read more... )
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| Out |
[06 Nov 2009|08:46pm] |
Off to Nice, Cote d'Azur, Not Here, France, tmw morning at the unholy hour of 7.15am -- that being the only plane available from Gatwick to Nice that I could book a seat on. Clearly the number of people going to Nice falls off dramatically in "low" season.
I've rented an apartment in central Nice, away from the Vielle Ville (or is it Vieux Ville?). It's only about £460 for the week, about 40% of high-season rates.
Luckily I "chose" today to start running good again. Three big-stacks all-in pre-flop with AKs vs KK and KJo (!!) slapped into a flush on the river. Then my AA on the button found KK in the CO. Opponent carved it so badly. He failed to four-bet, but still managed to stack off on a flop of Axx.
So, that's paid for the holiday.
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Another £25bn of helicopter money this week. This is kind of another quarter percent cut by proxy (because you can't actually cut), but does it necesarily imply the QE will be unwound before interest rates go up? That seems to be the macro-economists' assumption, implying that interest rates will stay super-low for another two years at least.
This is not necessarily true. "Last in, first out" strikes me as a less than 50% likely scenario here. That said, I'm hedging a bit by putting some money into equities (defends against gradual increases in inflation with producers maintaining pricing power), some into index-linked (defends against a sudden shooting up in inflation) and some into paying down the mortgage (defends against five years of low interest rates, low inflation, followed by whatever). I've decided that debt doesn't psychologically suit me, even if it does make financial sense. I just want to get it out of the way.
+++++++++
With luck, will be posting pics next week....
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| Swongo |
[05 Nov 2009|01:55pm] |
The downswing continues -- the last 21 days on all sites show me to be down about $250 in some 28,000 hands, with an EV of plus $2,250. Still, it seems to be a general rule that all high-volume winningplayers have two bad months a year. With luck, mine will run from Oct 10th to Nov 7th.
Once again, I'd reiterate that the EV calculator is helping me here rather than hindering -- it's stopping me panicking, although I am reconsidering some plays.
The key at $1-$2 at the moment is how to beat tables where the VPIP% is about 16%, because there are so many tables that follow this pattern.
There's another typical pattern on Stars where 95% of hands follow these routes:
a) passed round to BB who gets a walk.
b) raise comes from player, wins pot uncontested.
c) raise comes from player, gets reraised, first raiser folds.
Now, the test here is to calculate ranges without ever seeing cards. It seems to me that a number of these players (the full-stacked ones) are something like 18/16. That gives their late raises a very wide range, probably 30% of all hands.
Depending on the size of the range (3x is dispiritingly standard these days -- I remember when pot was standard and we 3x raisers were oddballs), you can probably reraise with up to 20% of your hands on the button (if first raiser is in cut-off) and maybe 10% in small blind/big blind.
But, like I said, all of this is standard. The question is, how do you beat players who are following these rules?
Varying your bet size according to non-standard rules is one way. Playing about with your ranges is another way. But none of it is easy.
A "shock tactic" is the overshove. The theory is this. In these tight games, players gradually loosen their raising standards in late position. This means that the blinds gradually loosen their reraising standards to such raises. The "shock tactic" goes something like ... raise to 3.5BB in late ($7 in a $1-$2 game). Big Blind (assume a minimum of 50BB) reraises to $22 (11BB). Initial raiser now shoves for 100BB.
Shock tactics only work when only a few people are trying them, but I leave it to the reader to ponder what range might be profitable in the long run in the current $1-$2 full ring games on Stars, assuming 10 full stacks and all players playing 18% VPIP /16% Raise
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| Greed=self-interest squared |
[04 Nov 2009|11:49am] |
An excellent quote from Professor Michael Sandel, quoted by his ex-pupil Stephanie Flanders on Monday:
"Citizens generally who looked at this - at the bailouts and the bonuses and been outraged - they believe there is a difference between greed and self-interest. But there's no way of capturing that intuition in economic analysis because, according to economic analysis, in any case one is deploying self-interest or greed, which is simply self-interest squared, to serve a social purpose. "
To move off at a slight tangent from this, I was reminded immediately of the book "Crimes Against Logic", which talked of "Hooray Words", such as "justice", "fairness" etc.
This week I saw the keyword behind David Cameron when he gave one of his "big" speeches. That word was "change". The strange thing is, while politicians on both sides argue for "stability" (a hooray word) they also argue for change (another hooray word). I eagerly await some marketing guru advising a political party that its campaign slogan should be "Change with Stability".
Politics, economics and the tabloids have become so loaded with loaded words that they have, effectively, lost their meaning. They just become "negative" or "positive" words. This allows people who don't understand topics (usually politicians, sometimes journalists, occasionally economists) to blather on about them in emotionally loaded terms without having to worry about such things as logic.
I heard a speech yesterday in the Commons where a Member of Parliament (speaking of which, there's the loaded word "Honourable" there) who objected to the new bonus system at RBS, which basically tells them to wait three years before the bonus is paid. The Member said "I don't see that there's any difference between getting paid this year or getting paid in 2011. It's still a bonus".
One felt like saying "if you don't see the difference, you are a fucking moron", except that (a) I am fortunately not in the House to hear such idiocies and (b) if I were, I think it would be considered unparliamentary to use such language.
(Although I know there is no need for me to point out the difference -- apart from the obvious one of making the bonus earner wait for his or her money -- I'll mention in passing that the point of the delay is quite simply that it gives you the chance to find out whether the apparently profitable decisions made in 2009 were really profitable after all.)
But politicians, lobbyists, et al, just love hooray words; they are easy to use, they genereate an emotional response, and they obviate the need to do any thinking.
In this sense, "Wall Street" and Gordon Gecko both uttered a profound truth and did us all good service. "Greed is good", he said. Of course, Oliver Stone's aim was to make Gecko look bad, by using a negative word in a positive way. But look at it another way. What if you said that "self-interest is bad"? Well, for a start, you'd generate a lot of blank stares. That's the interesting thing about hooray words, and it's a good way to discover them. Just try saying the opposite to a phrase used by a politician, and then try to imagine anyone saying it. If you can't, then the original phrase is probably using a hooray word.
The thing is, all political campaigns can now consist only of hooray words, because the marketers don't want to upset anybody. If you banned words like "fairness", "justice", "reasonable" "forward" "together" and many others which don't occur to me at the moment, then you couldn't have a political campaign at all. To bring forward another bete noire of history who had the courage to say something that was not a hooray phrase, there was Margaret Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society". Now, you may disagree with this strongly (I certainly do), but, give her credit, at least there's something there with which to disagree.
In this sense, I think that my disgust at the recent economic disaster differs enormously from that felt by the general public and exploited by the politicians. As DY has pointed out, the credit bubble of the past 10 years might have generated some undeserved earnings and questionable business practices (not to say downright fraud in some cases) but it also put a lot of money into many people's pockets, some of which is still being spent. The first boom of 1996 to 2000 probably helped to push up property prices sufficently to make me a mortgage-free homeowner by 2003. Unlike most people who were lucky enough to benefit in the same way, I don't think about how "clever" I was to invest in buy-to-let in 1997. Or, if I was "clever" (in spotting that property was underpriced relative to yield), my cleverness was not "worth" £130,000 or whatever profit it was I made on the deal. But no-one is screaming at me to pay back my "bonus".
The boom encouraged by cheap credit (to stave off the recession caused by the bursting of the dotcom bubble) was wrong because it was unsustainable; it was borrowing from tomorrow to pay for today. The reason that bankers' bonuses are being picked on is because this "correct" analysis is (a) difficult to understand and (b) if you do understand it, makes uncomfortable reading, because it effectively says "we, all of us, have stolen from our children". In this sense, I quite liked Osborne's "the game's up" speech, although I have no doubt that it will be tempered back in the not-too-distant future. Meanwhile, Darling and Co are desperate to keep the focus on the banks and the bonuses, because the current plunging of money into the economy has seriously discomfiting implications.
The collapse of the Irish economy (rather than the more extreme Icelandic collapse, which I accept is an outlier) is perhaps the best measuring stick, although Spain might run it close. In Ireland the property market has virtually fallen apart, with new builds now on sale at less than cost, and probably 40% off their peak. Staff employed in the industry has fallen 90%. No-one is building. Meanwhile, the government is pushing forward with regulations that will make it virtually impossible to build a house at a profit. Your land might cost £100k, putting up the building would cost £100k, and additional regulations (including the new carbon emissions rules) would add another £100k. On the plus side, it would keep more regulators and inspectors in work -- that being the great growth economy.
So, in an attempt to get some of the reputation of macro-economists back, what IS the future? Well, France's Scor this morning reported a reduced investment yield for the first nine months compared with last year. How so, given the surge in equities? well, Scor explicitly stated that its investment strategy was now based on a forthcoming surge in inflation, and if it waited until everyone else knew it was coming, it would be too late.
Secondly, there has to come a time when the UK doesn't have the backing to put more money into the economy. Or, rather, there has to come a time when investors realize that the UK doesn't have the backing to put as much into the economy as it is already doing. As I've said before, that means the end of triple A ratings. In a sense, I have been here before. I remember when all of the major reinsurers were triple-A rated; now only one of them is. Indeed, the reinsurers now dream of double-A ratings, never mind triple-A. Leading country ratings have been triple-A not because countries are intrinsically less likely to default (remember Mexico, remember Argentina, remember Russia) but because the developed world has experienced an unusually golden era. Unfortunately it used that golden era unwisely, meaning that, if the situation were to return to the late 1970s but government liabilities were to remain as they are today, any chance of a triple A-rating would vanish in a puff of smoke.
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| October |
[31 Oct 2009|08:19pm] |
It seems unusual to call a +$3K month frustrating, but it has been. It's even weirder to call it that when all of the targets have been hit:
1) 30,000 hands [x]
2) Avge of $30 an hour [x]
3) 100 hours live play [x]
Mind you, all three were only courtesy of a short final session on Stars this evening where I won $150, and all three were reached by the skin of my teeth -- 100.90 hours, $3,033 profit at $30.06 an hour.
So, why was it frustrating? Because after 10 days I was $3,000 up after 30 hours. The rest of the month was one of solidly moving sideways, and kept on an even keel only by the occasional bonus.
As I wrote a few days ago, this was caused by a most unusual "month of two halves", where for the first 10 days I ran like God and for the last 20 days I ran like shit. That the second part of this month included one day where I won $1,206 kind of indicates how awful the rest of the period was.
The thick line is actual winnings. The thin line is "EV" as measured by Hold Em manager in all-in situations. That is a good example of how volatility can be a cruel mistress, and not just at 6-max.
Thankfully I'm off to the South of France for a week fairly soon, and after that I'm only back at work for four weeks before I take my traditional long Christmas break. No desire to go to Las Vegas any more (at the moment) because, well, to be honest, I quite like the break from non-stop poker that I can get if I'm in France. I'll still play a few hands, obv, but I'm more looking forward to getting the Transport Alpes Maritimes buses to other parts of the Cote d'Azur.
The loneliness gets even to me at times, which I never thought it would. I have plans to overcome this next year and I'm confident that the plans that I have will wipe away a lot of the sadness (which should not be confused with depression! Different things entirely.)
++++++++
Today's news was typically pathetic. Alan Johnson sacks drugs adviser David Nutt -- Johnson unavailable on Radio 4 this morning (although sacked adviser was, and he made Jim Naughtie look a bit of a fool when Naughtie stated that Mr Nutt was being "naive" if he thought that politicians were going to take scientists' advice. Naughtie has been dealing with politicans for too long. He's gone native. (Of course, Alan Johnson looked an even bigger dick for not appearing at all.)
Gordon Brown is such a kiss of death these days that Tony Blair probably put his head in his hands when Brown endorsed him for the Presidency of the EC. Sure as eggs is eggs, within hours, Blair's "candidacy" had unravelled to nothingness. Well done Gordon. Someone referred to "The Brown Years" on Radio Five this morning, and for a second I thought that it was a comment on their hue rather than a historical description.
Naughtie and Humphreys were almost masturbating with glee at the "Young Parliament" that sat in the Commons yesterday -- a collection of political wannabees who had me reaching for the sick-bucket. One particular tosser was backing compulsory "current affairs" education in school, apparently on the grounds that it didn't matter if pupils weren't interested, because he wasn't interested in physics, but he still had to do it, even though he would never need it.
Presumably this was because he planned to grow up to be a politician like Alan Johnson who would see "scientific fact" as something that was a matter for negotiation.
Already, at these tender young ages, they had the spin of "kids don't like politics in the main because we aren't getting the message across properly". NO. The message is coming across loud and clear. The reason that kids in the main don't like politics is because it's full of tossy windbags talking about things that don't matter to them and not even doing anything about the things that they do talk about.
+++++++
Elsewhere, the US Securities & Exchange Commission was mysteriously silent at Bernard Madoff's comments that he could not believe that he wasn't caught in 2006, when the two inspectors from the SEC (one of whom Madoff said reminded him of Columbo) would have snaffled him if they had undertaken the most cursory checks. I've written before that regulators are renowned for employing people who can't make it in the real world -- the two SFA inspectors we saw during my short time at City Index couldn't have found anything that we didn't want them to find (but then, like auditors and accountants, I presume they would say that "we can't be expected to catch people who lie to us").
Elsewhere, BaFin, the German regulator "declined to comment" on the case of Helmut Kiener, a man alleged to be at the head of a hedge fund fraud. Outside of regulation, IG Index has declined to comment on its legal action against Harry Levene, who managed to spunk off nearly a million quid on a single 20-20 game between the West Indies and South Africa. I didn't think the games lasted long enough to lose that much. IBM, too, "declined to discuss" the departure of very-senior-executive Robbert Moffat, who has been charged with illegally passing on insider information.
The point here is that all of these parties are only to keen to push information that they want to the newspapers -- the shit churned out by the PR guys for free publicity when there is "positive" stuff is never-ending. Journalists can live with that; indeed, it makes our lives a lot easier. But there's a quid pro quo here. If the good stuff gets repeated, you can't just shut up shop with "no comment" when the bad stuff hits you.
These days, this "play the game" rule of "we'll push out the good news, but we need responses during the bad times" has become ignored. A bit like one Diplomacy player I recall who would never, ever, offer anything in return. It was always just "will you do this please? I'd be very grateful" but whenever you mentioned something about negotiations being a two-way street, some kind of blank incomprehension descended.
Oh well, fuck em all, the Naughties, the Johnsons, the IBMs, the Microsofts and the SECs. Once again the only guy who emerges with credit from the weekend is a non-politician non-businessman. Rock on David Nutt.
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| With age, comes wisdom (sometimes) |
[29 Oct 2009|01:23pm] |
Two interesting posts recently by the good Doctor Channing and by Clarkatroid, the 6-max 9-table grinder at $2-$4 and $3-$6 on Stars (he whose 1m hands a year, at 30 cents a hand, is in possession of one of my eventual targets, with 'eventual' being the key word).
Although the posts aren't ostensibly related, at heart they are about the same thing.
Clarkatroid writes of how to cope with the downswings:
Meet success and failure with equal measure
Train your mind to accept a good month and a bad month with no emotions. Feel nothing when you win a pot, nothing when you lose a pot. If you can train your mind to do this, then you will be a much much better player. Eradicate the emotional apsect, and you have arrived as a player. Bigtime. Constantly focusing on each decision. Cold, calculating poker decisions, no emotions involved. Not forcing the issue when your stuck, not getting it in high variance spots when your winning, total control.
Thats what the really good players are good at, and where im aiming to be eventually. In a state of grace. Permanently in the zone. As near as you can get to a pokerbot i suppose.
Now, there are slight problems with this "aim". The same point was propounded by James Feeney. Play like a computer. And what happened? Feeney quit the game. He quit as a winner, yes, but he quit the game. He just couldn't maintain his interest after achieving his target of eliminating all emootional reaction to the results of individual hands, or sessions.
If you don't have a bit of emotion involved, if you don't react in at least some way to winning or losing, then the poker becomes an unbearably boring job. One that can be very well-paid, admittedly, but very boring nevertheless. You need "a bit of interest", not to play at your best, but to be able to carry on playing for a long time (years and years) at near your best. That emotional involvement might work against you some nights, but if you don't have it, you won't be able to keep going, night after night, month after month, year after year.
But it's at the end of the post that Clarkatroid gets to the nub of the matter and really hits the nail on the head:
The point is, there is no room for your ego in poker. If your ego isnt in check, then it suffocates your progress as a player, it blinds your decision making progress from table selection to hand analysis. Ultimately, prevents you from maximising your true potential.
This is absolutely spot on. If there were one metagame flaw that I would say that most of the "young guns" suffer from, it's a "need for recognition". "What's the point of being one of the best in the world if no-one has ever heard of you?"
Well, the answer to that question is, clearly, the fact that you have a lot of money in the bank and can live very comfortably. But I suspect that, for most of these young guns, poverty has never really been an issue. And although the money is a serious part of the poker ambition, the need to be respected by their peers is just as great. They want to be Tom Dwan, not because he is a multi-millionaire (I assume that he still is and that he didn't have a bad session yesterday, in which case, "not because he is busto") but because he is, in the vernacular of Wall Street in the 1980s, "a big swinging dick".
Which brings me onto the Good Doctor, who has no desire to be a big swinging dick. If Neil has a metagame flaw, it's one that perhaps he shares with a number of old-timers -- an inability to cope with investments that offer 5% a year returns. If you have a bankroll of $30k and can generate $30k a year earnings from it, then, once your bankroll rises to $100k, you want to generate $100k a year earnings from it. But it ain't that easy.
But Neil's recent post on Blackbeltpoker (can't access that from here, so I will have to paraphrase what he said) showed that he doesn't let ego get in the way of his bread and butter. He was invited to a game of multi-millionaires and top players, including Ivey, Dwan, and one other top pro. On arrival, Neil reported that "the millionaires obviously weren't as dumb as people thought, and declined to get skinned". Neil was invited to start the game short-handed. Neil quietly reported that he did not wish to be dessert for these guys, and left.
There's no drive in Neil to beat Ivey or Dwan. Unlike many players, he feels no need to crush others' egos as he takes their money. Indeed, he massages those egos. Result, they queue up to lose to him.
Compare this with poor Ben Grundy (I use the term "poor" very loosely indeed), who cannot find opponents at PLO. He is perhaps realizing, a little too late, that people will not queue up indefinitely to lose vast sums of money to a better player. To be a long-term winner at non-liquid stake levels, you not only have to find rich losers, you have to massage their egos while they are losing. While Ben would never stoop to such stupidity, I never cease to be amazed how some players, even at $1-$2 NL, will say stuff like "Man you suck" after a particularly bad player has LOST a hand. Hell, it's indefensible enough to hand out abuse when a bad player wins a hand he was wrong to be in in the first place, but to rub it in when the guy has just been stacked off. Well, I was going to write, "baffling". But it isn't baffling. Because "winning" for this kind of player isn't about taking someone's money; it's about crushing their ego.
Whenever you hear about players saying that they love to mess with other people's heads when they take their money, you are hearing players with too much ego in their game. For them it is not about winning, the joy is in dominating, emotionally and intellectually. One of two things will happen top players such as this.
1) They will run into players who are better then them, and/or
2) No-one will sit down to play with them.
How many "fish" are there compared with the number of grinders at $1-$2NL on Stars these days? Not many. Indeed, as I sit down at these games on a Wednesday afternoon, I mutter to myself "Ahh, just like the old days in Vegas", when midweek there'd be seven regulars passing chips back and forth (pity the dealers in those games, because the tips were terrible) waiting for a single live one to appear. And this would be at $3-$6 in the El Cortez.
I think that this is the right attitude to take in the online game. Don't sit down, say "shit, there's no value", and leave. You just have to sit there, along with the other regulars, waiting for a live one. The addition is that you need to be good enough to win snippets from the other regulars. In my experience, the tables that allow short-stackers are better value to do this than the 50BB minimum tables.
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| Fan, shit, hit, duck |
[27 Oct 2009|01:13pm] |
Way back in March I posted a couple of small pieces on the AIG debacle, noting with astonishment that AIG had paid off many banks (including non-American ones) for CDSs at par. (see March 9 2009).
Well, today Bloomberg has published "the back story", including the headline "How the Fed cost the American taxpayer $13bn". The true story is actually worse than I thought at the time.
Apparently in the months leading up to the collapse of Lehman in September 2008, Elias Habayeb, who was CFO for the division that oversaw AIGFP, the division that caused the disaster at AIG, was negotiating with the banks on how much of a haircut they should take on the $32bn in credit default swaps on $62bn of CDOs that they (Goldman Sachs, Soc Gen, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch and others) had bought from AIG. Bloomberg says that Habayeb was looking for a 60 cents on the dollar. Let's assume (pessimistically, see below) that the net result would have been 80 cents on the dollar. That's $6.2bn at least that AIG would have saved on its debt.
Then Lehman went under and AIG was close to following suit. The US government stepped in and took over nearly 80% of AIG, throwing it an $85bn credit line.
Now, one of the problems with the government taking over a company is that one of your most powerful weapons when negotiating with creditors goes up the swanee -- you can no longer say that you will go bust if the creditor doesn't take a haircut on the deal.
In early November, Habayeb was shunted aside and Tim Geithner (head of the New York Fed) took over, along with Ben Bernanke (chairman of the Federal Reserve). After a week of negotiations with Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Soc Gen, and Merrill Lynch (the main players in this), the New York Fed (one of 12 regional reserve banks that are part of the Fed) told AIG to pay the banks at par, at 100 cents on the dollar. It was a staggering decision, and one which surely raises questions about Geithner and the negotiating ability of Geithner and his team. Or (see below), other forces were at work.
AIG paid $32.5bn to retire the swaps, inherited the CDOs, and plonked them into Maiden Lane III, a special-purpose entity run by the Fed.
As I pointed out at the time, AIG paid $18.5bn to Soc Gen, $14bn to Goldman Sachs, $8.5bn to Deutsche and $6.2bn to Merrill. More interestingly, Stephen Friedman, chairman of the board of directors of the New York Fed in November, bought 50,000 shares in Goldman Sachs following the government takeover of AIG. A shrewd market decision, that. Friedman resigned in May this year.
Bloomberg noted that, at about the same time, Citigroup accepted a 60 cents on the dollar deal with Ambac to retire protection on a $1.4bn CDO. A guy from Gradient Analystics said that "in cases like this, the outcome is always along the lines of 50, 60, or 70 cents on the dollar".
So, why pay 100 cents on the dollar?
The obvious answer to this was that (discounting complete incompetence on the part of the New York Fed negotiators), if some of the banks (let's say, to take a simple example, Merrill Lynch) did not get 100 cents on the dollar, then they would fail. And it would be hard to pay Merrill 100 cents on the dollar and not pay the same to Deutsche Bank or Soc Gen "because they weren't American", or to Goldman Sachs "because it wasn't broke".
But the net result of it was, so that the US could avoid a "second Lehman", it had to transfer somewhere in the region of $26bn in US taxpayers' money to foreign banks and got back somewhere in the region of $20bn in illiquid CDOs in return (market value at the time, about $13bn, I guess)-- something which must have caused much pain during New York Fed meetings when the decision was contemplated.
Another, perhaps not uncurious, fact about this whole affair is that the Fed is notoriously reluctant to publish the minutes of the meetings covering precisely this area. News organizations are suing under the US Freedom of Information Act for disclosure of the details, but the Fed is stalling. The matter is currently with the Second Court of Appeals. The issue might well end up in the highest possible court.
However, Neil Barofsky, inspector general at the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is preparing a report on whether AIG overpaid the banks (to which the response is "well, at 100%, d'uhhh, I think so"). It might be released next month. It might reveal something we don't already know. I'm not holding my breath.
But it all seems rather unfair on AIG, which appears to have generated significantly greater losses than it really made, because it was used as a conduit to save the entire US financial system and to give a nice boost to European banks as a side-effect. Indeed, AIG was actually pressured by the Federal Reserve NOT to file certain documents with the Securities & Exchange Commission, because those documents would, apparently, have made it possible for the number hunters to work out some of the grimy details of that fascinating six weeks from September 16 to November 8 or thereabouts.
One analyst observed that the banks had already written down the value of the CDOs for which they later received full payment -- a sweet bonus. Goldman Sachs said precisely this in a conference call in March. Curiously, Merrill Lynch remained silent on this matter.
*Later: It occurs to me that the remaining AIG minority shareholders might well have a strong legal case here that many billions of AIG's "losses" were not losses at all, but hidden Government subsidies to other financial institutions. With the Government as de facto majority shareholder in AIG, this would be the equivalent of a majority shareholder defrauding minority shareholders, a serious offence under US financial law. This could lead to a very long-running legal dispute (on the grounds that, the more money that is at stake, the longer the matter will run). It might also make AIG stock an interesting "play", because any kind of victory in that case would be worth several billion dollars to AIG shareholders.
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| Swonginess |
[26 Oct 2009|01:38pm] |
I've had the oddest of months online. For the first 10 days or so I ran like God, knocking in at about $100 an hour. Then there were three days of so-so, and then for 10 days I ran like Dog (God reversed). This showed up clearly in the Hold Em Manager graph, with actual wins being about $2.5k when my EV was $1k. By the 23rd October my actual win was $2k with an EV of, yes, $2.3k. These included such all-in joys as 55 v 65 on a board of K65 rainbow. Six appears on the river. And two AA v QQ -- both all-in pre-flop to maximum buy-in -- where opponent's QQ proved far too good. Plus, needless to say, the standard AA v AA where opponent hits flush.
Over the past seven days I've had an EV of plus $1300 and an actual profit of about $25.
But, no worries. One of the good things about being your own boss in the poker world is that you don't have to worry about being unlucky. If you are a trader with a boss, the chances are that your boss will be an idiot who just wants traders who are lucky. Solid logical arguments about EV on various trades will get you nowhere.
Now, running bad is not just about EV in all-in situations. Hold Em Manager can reveal other areas of running bad.
1) You get crap cards. Evidenced by a lower VPIP than usual,
Comment: This is probably one of the least bad of the running bads, although it has a greater impact at 6-max. If you are folding 25% more often, you are only increasing your loss by about 25 hands a thousand.
2) You get good cards, but can't hit a flop to save your life. Evidenced by lower Went To Showdown percentage.
Comment: Probably the most expensive of the "running bads", and is evidenced by a sharply declining red line in Hold Em Manager. You keep getting AKo, you keep raising, and you keep getting J87ds flops. You continuation bet gets snapped off, and you walk away.
3) You get good cards, you hit the flop, but opponent hits it better. Evidenced by a lower win percentage at showdown and a declining EV line.
Comment: Although probably slightly less expensive than perpetually missing flops (because, to be honest, these "winner on winner" hands don't actually happen that often; it just seems that way) these are far more "hurtful", because your expectations have been raised twice (good cards, hitting flop). These are basically "cooler" situations. Sometimes you even do the best you can and keep the loss to a minimum, but it's still dispiriting.
4) You get good cards, you hit the flop, your opponent hits it as well, but worse. All the money goes in, and he outdraws you. Evidenced by increasing EV line, decreasing "real win" line.
Comment: The EV part that Hold Em Manager recognizes. An addition to this would be the times that you get your money in bad (having been coolered, see 3), but fail to suck out.
It's very rare that you walk into all four of these at once, but just three of them is enough to produce a rapidly declining real-win line -- one of those shit days when, even at full ring, you can see yourself four buy-ins down without feeling that you have done anything wrong.
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| Pensions |
[22 Oct 2009|01:06pm] |
For a topic that could bring about the end of civilization as we know it, it's remarkably hard to find out concrete facts when it comes to pensions.
One reason it's hard is that "pension" is not so easy to define. For example, some money that I have saved is my "pension", but it's not categorized as such by any UK economist.
So, much of what follows is necessarlily accompanied by the caveat "Birks's best guess".
First, how much have people put away, either formally or informally, for their retirement? Paradoxically, the best way to find "funded" pensions is to work from the unfunded sector. If the private sector makes up about half of the GDP in the UK, and if the private sector (best guess estimate here) is about 50% below the public sector in allowing for the amount of money it needs for retirement, then there's about £550bn stuck in various formal and informal pension schemes. Let's not worry about shortfalls within individual company pension schemes, because that's likely the least of our worries.
So, that leaves about a £550bn "shortfall" in provision for our old age amongst current workers. With the government looking to postpone paying pensions to men until the age of 66 (saving about £3bn a year?) this effectively means that the working population are going to have to provide £550bn divided by the average number of years of retirement (because the money won't be paid as a lump sum). And the sum left over will give us the extra years that people should work to bring things back into balance. Looked at more simply, it seems to me that people will need to produce about £20,000 each extra (i.e., above what they are spending from day to day) to bring the private sector back into balance. Even given an optimistic analysis of people saving £4,000 a year, that seems to indicate to me that the average retirement age needs to be five years higher to get the private sector back in sync.
That, of course, is as nothing to the liabilities in the public sector, where talk of a shortfall is nonsense because it's all shortfall. The unfunded pensions liability is about £1,120bn, which at the moment means that every working person will have to pay about £40,000 of their wages to keep the unfunded pension system going. That's 85% of GDP, by the way.
In a way this paints too rosy a picture. Oh, the innocent might say, well, 85% of GDP isn't too bad a number. But, well, it is, especially when it's getting worse every year. Because just look at the percentage of GDP that you can't in any way save. Notwithstanding the multiplier effect (which makes things even worse) you can't shut down hospitals, the police force, the schools, or not eat. Just looking at the current government's pathetic attempts to balance the books shows how hard it is even to shave 1% off a deficit, let alone 85%. In other words, getting the unfunded pensions sector back into self-funding balance is plain impossible. Much though I would like it to be done, it can't be done. The best that can be hoped for is to stop the deficit getting worse as a percentage of GDP.
Every government's answer to that is, inevitably "let's grow GDP then!" But that's no long-term answer, particularly since, historically, increasing GDP hasn't actually seen any success in getting the pensions deficit back into any kind of balance.
In this sense, the "we must increase the pension age" argument is the right one -- and not just the state pension age. It needs to be done across the board, and more severely than is being proposed at the moment. The one good thing about the recent conference season is that some people, at last, seem to be realizing this, and that the "it's not fair" argument (we don't have high-paid jobs, we've contributed to the (public authority) funds all our working lives, we were promised this when we started and thus it's our right) don't hold water. The answers are simple:
1) Everything one pension person gains is taken from someone else's pocket, probably equally hard-up.
2) Any promises made in the past were unintentional lies, because they were unfulfillable.
3) If we carry on as we are, the entire political system will disintegrate (a la Russia in 1990s) and all pensioners will end up with nothing. That, at least, has the merits of treating all old people equally.
There's obviously a balance that needs to be struck here, and the major argument is, in effect "other people should take more of the bad medicine and I shouldn't take any". In Russia in the 1990s it was basically only the old (the savers) who suffered. The still-producing classes benefited greatly. In the UK at the moment it's the old (the already retired) who are benefiting, at the expense of the still-producing classes.
Provided you have a relatively stable society, there's quite a gap in the middle, where you can set down a "policy", and the collapse of society does not result. One side could favour the still-producing, while the other could favour the already-retired. There'd be a bit of grumbling, but we'd carry on. Provided the issue is not, once again, "swept under the carpet", a solution can be found.
But the longer you deny that there is any problem (or, rather, admit that there is a problem, but fail to do anything about it), then the narrower that "solution" gap becomes, because the solution becomes that much harder to bear. Eventually it gets to the stage (and we might already be there) where any solution that would work would result in the disintegration of the system. And once you reach that point, it's just too late.
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| Hands |
[21 Oct 2009|04:58pm] |
Just a few hands. Not really much of interest here, TBH, but just an indication that, every so often, you do get some easy money coming along. You just mustn't let yourself be scared.
The day had started badly at another table, where my Aces ran into Queens.
$400 USD NL Texas Hold'em - Monday, October 19, 14:02
Seat 4 is the button
Total number of players : 9
Seat 5: Hero ( $424.80 USD )
Seat 4: Fortuna78 ( $456.80 USD )
Seat 6: RoomNr22 ( $400 USD )
Seat 1: SIIRTYJA ( $911.40 USD )
Seat 2: ZAPOROJEZ07 ( $252.99 USD )
Seat 7: armon ( $417.89 USD )
Seat 8: cfcpaul666 ( $551.52 USD )
Seat 9: franky64111 ( $376.85 USD )
Seat 3: yerdem999 ( $541.22 USD )
Hero posts small blind [$2 USD].
RoomNr22 posts big blind [$4 USD].
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Hero [ A◊; A♠ ]
armon folds
cfcpaul666 folds
franky64111 folds
SIIRTYJA raises [$12 USD]
ZAPOROJEZ07 calls [$12 USD]
yerdem999 raises [$20 USD]
Fortuna78 folds
Hero raises [$84 USD]
RoomNr22 folds
SIIRTYJA folds
ZAPOROJEZ07 raises [$240 USD]
yerdem999 folds
Hero raises [$332 USD]
ZAPOROJEZ07 is all-In [$0.99 USD]
** Dealing Flop ** [ Q♣;, T◊;, 6◊; ]
** Dealing Turn ** [ 4♠ ]
** Dealing River ** [ 2♡; ]
Hero shows [ A◊;, A♠ ]a pair of Aces.
ZAPOROJEZ07 shows [ Q♡;, Q◊; ]three of a kind, Queens.
Hero wins $165.01 USD from the side pot 1 with a pair of Aces.
ZAPOROJEZ07 wins $538.98 USD from the main pot with three of a kind, Queens.
This next hand qualifies as one of the great madnesses. I just stared in disbelief, wondering if I had misread the board. But, no, I hadn't.
$400 USD NL Texas Hold'em - Monday, October 19, 14:15:52
Seat 5 is the button
Total number of players : 9
Seat 8: Hero ( $400 USD )
Seat 7: Fortuna78 ( $400 USD )
Seat 1: HughPowell ( $359.60 USD )
Seat 2: SIIRTYJA ( $450.25 USD )
Seat 9: Tigrezzz ( $80 USD )
Seat 4: TomPlewman ( $394 USD )
Seat 5: TOTAL LAG ( $1,760.67 USD )
Seat 3: Wc3MyWorld ( $64 USD )
Seat 6: fadingmaid ( $419.35 USD )
fadingmaid posts small blind [$2 USD].
Fortuna78 posts big blind [$4 USD].
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Hero [ 8♠ 8◊; ]
Hero calls [$4 USD]
I am looking to see flops with pairs relatively cheaply. I can stand one raise from the nutter pre-flop.
HughPowell raises [$12 USD]
SIIRTYJA raises [$40 USD]
Wc3MyWorld folds
TomPlewman folds
TOTAL LAG raises [$68 USD]
fadingmaid folds
Fortuna78 folds
Hero folds
HughPowell folds
SIIRTYJA raises [$160 USD]
TOTAL LAG calls [$132 USD]
** Dealing Flop ** [ 7♣;, 8♡;, K◊; ]
SIIRTYJA bets [$100 USD]
TOTAL LAG calls [$100 USD]
** Dealing Turn ** [ K♡; ]
SIIRTYJA is all-In [$150.25 USD]
TOTAL LAG calls [$150.25 USD]
** Dealing River ** [ Q◊; ]
SIIRTYJA shows [ K♣;, K♠ ]four of a kind, Kings.
TOTAL LAG shows [ 5◊;, 4◊; ]a pair of Kings.
The time at which hand ended:Oct 19 2009 14:17 EDT
SIIRTYJA wins $919 USD from the main pot with four of a kind, Kings.
It became clear that you just had to wait for the right hand against this guy. He could be quite tricky post-flop (the above piece of insanity notwithstanding) so what I really wanted was to get the money in pre-flop when I was favourite. I managed this just twice….
$400 USD NL Texas Hold'em - Monday, October 19, 14:46:53
Seat 3 is the button
Total number of players : 9
Seat 1: AspAstier ( $76 USD )
Seat 8: Hero ( $400 USD )
Seat 7: Fortuna78 ( $412 USD )
Seat 4: TomPlewman ( $435.90 USD )
Seat 5: TOTAL LAG ( $1,640.67 USD )
Seat 3: Wc3MyWorld ( $101.54 USD )
Seat 2: YoMamaSaid ( $0 USD )
Seat 6: fadingmaid ( $411.90 USD )
Seat 9: sannih ( $400 USD )
TomPlewman posts small blind [$2 USD].
TOTAL LAG posts big blind [$4 USD].
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Hero [ K♡; A♠ ]
fadingmaid folds
Fortuna78 folds
Hero calls [$4 USD]
AspAstier folds
Wc3MyWorld calls [$4 USD]
TomPlewman calls [$2 USD]
TOTAL LAG raises [$24 USD]
Hero raises [$112 USD]
Wc3MyWorld folds
TomPlewman folds
TOTAL LAG raises [$176 USD]
Hero is all-In [$284 USD]
TOTAL LAG calls [$196 USD]
** Dealing Flop ** [ 4◊;, 4♣;, 3♡; ]
** Dealing Turn ** [ T◊; ]
** Dealing River ** [ 9◊; ]
TOTAL LAG shows [ T♡;, Q♡; ]two pairs, Tens and Fours.
Hero doesn't show [ K♡;, A♠ ]a pair of Fours.
The time at which hand ended:Oct 19 2009 14:48 EDT
TOTAL LAG wins $804.50 USD from the main pot with two pairs, Tens and Fours.
CHIPS!
$400 USD NL Texas Hold'em - Monday, October 19, 14:56:09
Seat 7 is the button
Total number of players : 9
Seat 1: AspAstier ( $804.50 USD )
Seat 8: Hero ( $400 USD )
Seat 7: Fortuna78 ( $416.90 USD )
Seat 3: RunningHORST ( $400 USD )
Seat 4: TomPlewman ( $442.80 USD )
Seat 5: TOTAL LAG ( $1,528.93 USD )
Seat 2: YoMamaSaid ( $392 USD )
Seat 6: fadingmaid ( $403.80 USD )
Seat 9: sannih ( $400 USD )
Hero posts small blind [$2 USD].
sannih posts big blind [$4 USD].
** Dealing down cards **
Dealt to Hero [ A♣; K◊; ]
AspAstier folds
YoMamaSaid folds
RunningHORST folds
TomPlewman raises [$8 USD]
TOTAL LAG raises [$56 USD]
fadingmaid folds
Fortuna78 folds
Hero raises [$154 USD]
sannih folds
TomPlewman folds
TOTAL LAG raises [$200 USD]
Hero is all-In [$244 USD]
TOTAL LAG calls [$144 USD]
** Dealing Flop ** [ 3◊;, 8♠, 7♣; ]
** Dealing Turn ** [ J♣; ]
** Dealing River ** [ 5♣; ]
TOTAL LAG shows [ 2◊;, 4◊; ]high card Jack.
Hero shows [ A♣;, K◊; ]high card Ace.
The time at which hand ended:Oct 19 2009 14:56 EDT
Hero wins $808.50 USD from the main pot with high card, Ace.
I ended up down about $500 for an 833-hand session, with an EV of plus $127. But, as I said, I had run v good earlier in the month. These things happen. What I was most pleased with was my lack of emotional response once I had stood up from the tables. Indeed, when I woke up the following morning, I had to have a think for a few seconds to remember whether I had won or lost….
In 96 hands TOTAL LAG won or lost more than $100 in 18 of them. He won $442 with an EV of minus $550, and he had an all-in situation in 18 of the 96 hands. I keep hoping and praying that he will reappear. Oh, and he was from Russia!
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| Swongos |
[19 Oct 2009|12:47pm] |
I won five bucks yesterday over 1,400 hands. If one hand (where I was a 25% dog, but won) had gone against me, I would have lost $400 on the day. If another hand (where I was a 90% favourite, but lost) had gone in my favour, I would have won $300. My point here is that you can have wide swings in actual results without doing much different. Randomness has much more of an impact on your day-to-day results than your ability to make the right decision more often than do your opponents. Indeed, much of the day was "running bad" in a way that doesn't show up in the stats. When you hit a set, no-one has anything. When you miss, your continuation bet always seems to find a weak-tight opponent suddenly waking up with a raise. Etc.
However, this gave me an idea. I've theorized before that moving up in stakes increases your volatility in greater proportion, because you have to run thinner edges. This year I reckon I spent the first half of the year mainly playing $100 BI (say, 75:25) and the second half mainly $200 BI (same proportion but the other way). So, if I take my wins and losses each day, compared with my EV I think that this would give me a close approximation on whether $200 BI is more than twice as swingy as $100BI.
+++++++++++
There was an interesting play the other day. I picked up Ks Kd in MP3 and raised to $6. Big Blind (something like 17%/7% on Party $200BI. Marginal winner) repopped to $18, and I 4-bet it to $54, which he called. $108 in the pot, and he has $126 behind.
Flop came 9h 5h 2s. Big blind shoves all-in.
I had a little think about this, and I reckon that if I had QQ here I would pass, because KK is within Big Blind's parameters. But, with me holding KK, things are different.
I can't see Big Blind making this bet with a set. He just didn't have that kind of imagination. Similarly, I can't see it being AA, because he would have shoved pre-flop with AA. The other KK is a possibility of course (in which case he would be marginally free-rolling me for the back-door flush) but the only hand that really makes sense here is Ah Kh.
If I have QQ against this then I'm about 45%. With KK I'm about 55% and with AA I reckon I'm about 65%. He also has fold equity (or a marginal freeroll) if I am AK, and quite good fold equity if I am QQ or JJ.
The downside of the bet is that it really makes it double-dummy if I have AA or KK. If regular marginal-winning players at $200BI occasionally shoved with a set in this situation, then my decision is that much harder. But they don't.
So, question. Suppose you are at $600 BI, holding a pair of nines in the big blind, and the flop comes 9h 4h 2s after the same betting sequence pre-flop as above. Would a shove elicit a call enough of the time (because thinking opponent immediately places you with Ah Kh) often enough to make this the best line?
++++++++++
18min 21sec for 4km on the rowing machine today. That's one hell of a good time for me, some 30 seconds better than anything I've done since 2006 and 38 seconds better than my recent PB on this particular machine. Weight might not be coming down as much as I would like, but strength and stamina are clearly going up.
++++++++++
I watched There Will Be Blood on DVD at the weekend. Paul Thomas Anderson is without doubt a great director, and this is a great journey, but, once again, the journey was better than the arriving. Daniel Day-Lewis gave a magnificent performance. This film was slightly overshadowed by No Country For Old Men when it came out, but the comparison is undeserved. They are completely different films. And I look forward to watching it again.
____________
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| Party revenues |
[15 Oct 2009|09:00am] |
As I noted here a few months ago, times are good in the rakeback world for poker players. Party's regulatory release this morning confirmed that bonus costs had gone up from 20% of gross revenue to 25% -- for which, read, 25% rakeback.
It's both better and worse than that. Most players don't play that much and, the more you play, the more you earn both in absolute and relative terms. Even moreth goes to those that hatheth. Once you clock up an average of 20k hands a month at $1-$2 NL (my own estimate) on Party, you hit a rakeback level not far short of 40%. However, affiliates rake off a slice of the headline number, so if you are a player getting an "average" rakeback, I'd guess it would be about 20%.
That's still one hell of a lot better than it was 18 months ago.
Only 888 Holdings, a site that survives solely because it has more fish than elsewhere, decided to actually go in the opposite direction, and to reduce rakeback by cutting out all affiliates and instituting its own pile of shit that comes in at about 18%. The software continues to be massively irritating, although not as bad as the old Boss Media. Reviews on PokerScout are typically withering.
Incidentally, while looking through some of the small sites on PokerScout, I was sure that one of them was using the old Paradise Poker software (who can forget the cocktail tables and the menu??!!). To be frank, this software remains above average, even though no work has been done on it in about six years. If I find the site again, I might just put some money in and play on it for old-times-sake.
I played my guaranteed 'D' game last night and got deservedly spanked. I shall attribute my $600 loss (which should have been about a grand and could easily have been $1,500) to research and development. I eight-tabled on Stars and played rather more loose-passively than usual (looking to use position and take the pot away from guys who were looking to nick lots of small pots, but bottled it after you called the flop and/or turn). It didn't work, but I did learn a few things for future reference. Then again, perhaps I was just unlucky, and the moments I chose to make a move just turned out to be those when opponent had a crusher.
And nights like these are good in making you refocus and stop assuming that "winning is easy". I might still lose tonight. I might run bad. But at least I won't be overconfident.
More insomnia last night but (good sign) I managed to get back to sleep relatively speedily. My head's still full of shit and it won't stop whirring, but I made a better fist of tring last night than I had managed the night before.
____________________
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| Rough and the smooth |
[13 Oct 2009|02:16pm] |
I've been going through a bit of a rough patch emotionally the past 10 days or so, despite running well online. The problem is; you start feeling a bit down, so you take some carbs to boost you, which leads to being a bit more down when they wear off, so you eat some more carbs, which makes the mood swings worse, and all of a sudden you are in a vicious circle that's one hell of a bastard to break out of.
I even got a recurrence of insomnia last night and and twinges of agoraphobia when on the platform on London Bridge. Both of these are bad signs.
It's very tempting to try to put on a show when talking to people because, well, let's face it, no-one wants to hear in response to "How are you" the line "not too good, can I tell you about it?". Just as misery loves company, ordinary, happy (or at least, not sad) people, don't really know how to cope with people who are sad. So, you have a choice, you hide it (not because you are ashamed of it, but because you know it makes other people uncomfortable), or, if you can't hide it, you withdraw, because you know that you will be shit company.
The bout of insomnia was revelatory in a way. As I sat there, the old possibilities (lie there in the dark trying to get back to sleep, or turn on the radio, or get up) were joined by a fourth. Turn on the Netbook and check your emails/facebook. That at least passed a few minutes. I could even have played a bit of 1c-2c with the $7 I still have in my Ultimate account out of the free $25 that they gave me (can't beat those micro limit games!).
Eventually got up. Showered. Dressed. Made sandwiches. Went to work. Life goes on.
__________
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peterbirks's journal