Up until this point, I never understand how executing a trade in 10ms and 100ms would make any difference. Well, apparently if your business is arbitrage, it makes a lot of sense. Arbitrage takes advantage of price inefficiency in the global market and exploit them to make a small amount of money each time. (i.e. buy a once of gold in US with USD and selling it in its chinese unit HK for HKD) A 10 ms execution means you can stick your order in front of everyboy else’s.
But let’s talk physics for a second. It takes 100 ms to simply send a packet across the transatlantic undersea cable, 40 ms to send across the US, and 10 ms to send across the Hudson river. When you are in a 10 msec business, every milliseconds counts. Then you have the biggest time sink, the database. Even when you are able to reduce the transaction to one load and one save on the return leg, you are still talking about 15 + 40 ms. It’s a fun problem to work on, and long as the arbitrage business makes enough money to cover the servers and the piping.
May 14th, 2008
I got measured up for a suit last Saturday. When the sales dude asked me my waist size, I was like “29.5, but I’ve gain some weight, so maybe a 30.” Got measured up, came out to be a 32. Good job.
May 12th, 2008
Over the break I was talking to Ajit and Pradip about how ineffective 360 reviews are. With any large organization who centralize employee performance rating, it is hard to do a truely fair job. How much did Kavin contributed to the 11 billion dollar profit last year. How much of it should be credited to past employee who built the infrastructure. How much work did I put it to enable future success? When my rating travels up the chain, how much of my work is actually visible to other managers?
So I thought, why not have a peer driven system as a part of your rating? Much like open source developers get his reputation, we all know some developers in another group that’s really good, and some that sucks. Why don’t we randomly show each developers a list of logins, and ask them to rate from 1 to 10 (with an option for N/A). At the end you can draw all sort of statistic from it, like if one group ranks above others. Using this system you will actually encourage developer to work with another group for the greater good of the firm.
April 1st, 2008
I pass by the old Cambridge Member store on 33th st and Broadway in NYC yesterday and saw they converted their stored to “made to measure suit”. I was lookign for a grey suit with blue strips so I pop in to check on their price range. Their super 130s starts from $495 and go up to $695 for Italian mill fabric with working buttons and everything, which is 1/2 of what I was expecting. They do one fitting and send your measurement out to Korea for the suit to be made. You get it back in a few weeks.
Increasingly clothing companies have figured out how to use their globalization know how to setup manufacturing channels for individual items at exactly the same cost as the mas manufactured version: initialed polos at polo.com, custom shirt at Alexander West… All involve taking individual measurement and sending it oversea to assemble the end product from pre-manufactured parts; just like Dell have been doing for a long time
March 31st, 2008
Mike Bloomberg’s Op-ed piece on NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/opinion/28mike.html?hp
February 28th, 2008
I’ve been wanting to read this book since my days in the social entrepreneurship. Like Deutsche Bank’s recent microloan syndication, I firmly believe you cna create a sustainable business model doign good thing. The first chapter goes into why meauring percentage of fund used for cause vs management was flawed; instead the fitness function should focus of output rather than input. The next few chapters focus assembling great people for who they are rather than what they can do, the skillset required to lead an organization with a diffused power structure, how to focus on delivering core value and why turning down much needed but restricted resource will steer you closer to the mission. And last building pocket of greatness in an environment with systematic issues.
A very short book. Well worth my 15 minutes. You can find it here
February 7th, 2008
Tata purchased British car icon Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford. I am sure Ajit have been waiting for this day for a long time.
January 28th, 2008
Microsoft did this prototype product where you can navigate a set of 2D photos photos in 3D. http://labs.live.com/photosynth/video.html Pretty interesting application I have to say, esp for street maps and battle field recreation. Imagine taking a series of photos, upload it and have a halo map of your house back. I thought about what would it take for you to do that. Basically you’ll need:
- longitude
- latitude
- altitude
- point
- tilt
- zoom length (angle of view)
- time (optional)
You just need to stick the first 5 into the data link of your camera. I search online. Currently there is no hand held GPS device that has a both a compass and a tilt sensor, although Garmin has a patent out for one. I thought about hacking the Wii Remote to hijack it’s motion sensor and strap it to the camera, reset to base when camera boots up. But most camera out there doesn’t have bluetooth input capability either…
January 3rd, 2008
Like everything else, tickets has a supply and demand. A ticket is an option to redeem something valuable (i.e. a pleasant experience) in the future. For a particular concert, supply is govern by the number of seats in the venue.
Let’s ignore the artist and the social implication for the moment. From the event organizer’s economic perspective, it’s goal is to maximize profit by selling the highest number of ticket at the highest possible price before the ticket expires. Much like a good IPO, a perfect ticket price is one that won’t have much secondary demand at a higher price immediately after the sale. It means everyone who is willing to pay up to and more than the ticket price for the experience is satisfied. There is no one else willing to pay more than what the ticket is being sold for. Of course this never happens. That where ticket scalper comes in. The put in capital ad buy up these futures, provide a liquid secondary market that picks up the pricing inefficiency by the event organizer so everyone can be satisfied.
One of the problem is the complication that comes with non regulated scalpers. There is no way to determine if the ticket is legit, leaving the secondary ticket buying in a vulnerable situation. Another one is the common view that it is the social responsibility of the event organizer to offer the experience to the public who can’t afford the high ticket price by subsidizing it with it’s own potential profit. But nonetheless, economically speaking ticket scalping improve the efficiency of ticket pricing.
Now comes this site. http://nyc.tablexchange.com/ It’s a market place for people to buy and sell reservations. There is just something wrong about it. When you make a reservation at a restaurant, most of the time you don’t need to put any capital in. There is no mechanism to prevent someone from taking up the entire restaurant at no cost, then reselling it for a profit. Unless the restaurant start charging for reservations, which it won’t, since that will likely turn customer away. What they could do is to ask for a credit card at the time of the reservation, do a $1 auth, and charge the card a fix amount at no show. That does not prevent scalpers, but does present a form of identification and opportunity to reject the reservation if the card has been blacklisted. But unlike ticket scalpers, honestly I don’t see any value that this site has for the restaurants if the reservation is indeed demand.
January 3rd, 2008
That was the headline from one of the reporters in the evening news. Yes, it was a toy recall. This time for safety reason, because the beads were too small that a young child can swallow. What the hell does it have to do with China?
When 95% (or some ridiculously large percentage) of our toys are made in China, of course when problem happens, there is a ridiculously high chance that the
product is manufactured in China. Some problems such as this one are not even manufacturing error at all.
The recent public finger pointing at China is a result of various political engine at work. Various lobbying group is taking the opportunity to get what they need to get done. China problem sells paper, design flaw doesn’t. The media is happy to cooperate. if a statistical study of percentage of problem cause by the lack of governance and inspection as a result from manufacturing in China, minus those that are designed to be quality controlled in the US, I bet the numbers are not interesting at all.
As a matter of fact, the recent recalls are examples of consumer consciousness and the check and balances at work.
January 3rd, 2008
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