http://www.necessaryandsufficient.net Damien Wintour's personal musings on technology, mathematics, finance, startups and leadership. Sun, 05 Feb 2012 01:20:19 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us... http://www.necessaryandsufficient.net/2011/11/what-motivates-over-achievers/ A prudent risk management strategy in financial markets is using stop losses to protect your downside - even if you are short - but is this yet-to-be-fulfilled order able to be gamed by other market participants? Short answer is YES but first lets define what we mean by stop orders, ... http://www.necessaryandsufficient.net/2011/02/gunning-for-stop-orders-in-hft/ Corporations that raise capital in the debt markets need to pay a spread over risk-free instruments to compensate the investor for the increased default risk that they assume when buying bonds issued by the said corporation. Thus the buyer of such "credit-risky" bonds need to be able to estimate the ... http://www.necessaryandsufficient.net/2011/02/market-based-estimation-of-implied-corporate-credit-risk/ How is a zero-coupon bond different from an ordinary bond? As the name implies, a zero-coupon bond pays no coupon throughout it's life. Instead all funds are returned at maturity. Because of this zero-coupon bonds are sold at a discount to their face value and return face value at maturity. Also, ... http://www.necessaryandsufficient.net/2011/01/fixed-income-101-pop-quiz/ I've stated it before, but I'm a big fan of the Google Chrome browser because it's so damn fast! Apart from the awesome V8 JavaScript engine, one of the things that makes it fly is some clever DNS resolution. It's a great example of using concurrent programming to hide latency. ... http://www.necessaryandsufficient.net/2010/12/adaptive-dns-pre-resolution-in-google-chrome/