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ABOUT JRE · JOSH GIERSCH Your editor is a former FX options trader, now working in a San Francisco software firm. JRE is finance, politics, economics, and a little bit of travel photography on the side. Email Josh: josh@josh.sg RECIPEBLOGGING · JOSH GIERSCH Found this one in Penn and Teller’s How To Play With Your Food. Ingredients 1 egg 1⁄2 cup buttermilk (apparently 1⁄4 cup milk and 1⁄4 cup vinegar also works. MISCELLANEOUS · JOSH GIERSCH Update: here’s a text version without smartquotes. Download it, change the extension to .sh, and enjoy. Update 2: this is now on Github, go there instead As a followup to this previous post - a script that automates EBS snapshots on an Amazon EC2 server - here’s a bash script to prune the EC2 snapshots created by the other script. RETURN TO ZIMBABWE: THE OLD MUTUAL IMPLIED RATE · JOSH GIERSCH Return to Zimbabwe: the Old Mutual Implied Rate. Aug 11, 2019. Let’s hop in the hot tub time machine and head back to the other financial crisis of 2008. While Bear was having two-dollar bills taped to its headquarters, Lehman was turning into Less-Than, and Citibank was living up to its Shi nickname, Zimbabwe was having its AN INTEREST RATES PRIMER FOR CRYPTOCURRENCY FOLKS · JOSH I’ve banged on a little bit on Twitter about how digital asset markets are continually recapitulating discoveries from fiat markets (securitization, credit-default swaps, corporate actions oh wait no disregard that). But aside from an effort by Genesis Trading, there’s been a surprising lack of interest or development in crypto interest rate markets. From what I’ve heard (and @ me if I THE OLD NEW THING: TURNING JOSH.SG STATIC · JOSH GIERSCH Fifteen years ago, when I spun up what became josh.sg, Movable Type was the de rigeur blogging platform, the CMS before any of us even really knew what a “CMS” was. It was Perl (with all the quirks that that implies); it was static (PHP-powered dynamic page generation was still TK); but it still meant that any idiot could post content on the web without having to learn to wrangle HTML. 40-TIMES-LEVERAGED SHORT VOLATILITY TRADE GOES or, Managing and Mitigating the 2014 CNH FX TARF blowup (Author’s note: I wrote this a year or so back for a few friends on Finance Twitter who wanted to know what FX TARFs were and what effect the huge vol overhang from USDCNH TARFs would have on the spot market. I figured that the shenanigans in USDCNY yesterday made it an appropriate time to dig this up and republish it for a POUNDED BY THE POUND: SPORTS DIRECT'S HEDGES AND THE CABLE Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to the mid-1.20s. Explanations for the move ranged from “algorithms!” to “fat fingers!” to “stop-losses being executed in SADLY, SAYING "SHOVE IT UP YOUR ARSE" IN A REGULATORY Slightly old news (it’s from January) but this is, to put it politely, quite astonishing: when the SGX ordered listed company China Sky Chemical Fibre to appoint a special auditor to investigate its (probably fraudulent) accounts and (probably dodgy) related-party real estate transactions, China Sky turned around and told the SGX to shove its special auditor up its tailpipe. It says volumes HOME · JOSH GIERSCH Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to themid-1.20s.
ABOUT JRE · JOSH GIERSCH Your editor is a former FX options trader, now working in a San Francisco software firm. JRE is finance, politics, economics, and a little bit of travel photography on the side. Email Josh: josh@josh.sg RECIPEBLOGGING · JOSH GIERSCH Found this one in Penn and Teller’s How To Play With Your Food. Ingredients 1 egg 1⁄2 cup buttermilk (apparently 1⁄4 cup milk and 1⁄4 cup vinegar also works. MISCELLANEOUS · JOSH GIERSCH Update: here’s a text version without smartquotes. Download it, change the extension to .sh, and enjoy. Update 2: this is now on Github, go there instead As a followup to this previous post - a script that automates EBS snapshots on an Amazon EC2 server - here’s a bash script to prune the EC2 snapshots created by the other script. RETURN TO ZIMBABWE: THE OLD MUTUAL IMPLIED RATE · JOSH GIERSCH Return to Zimbabwe: the Old Mutual Implied Rate. Aug 11, 2019. Let’s hop in the hot tub time machine and head back to the other financial crisis of 2008. While Bear was having two-dollar bills taped to its headquarters, Lehman was turning into Less-Than, and Citibank was living up to its Shi nickname, Zimbabwe was having its AN INTEREST RATES PRIMER FOR CRYPTOCURRENCY FOLKS · JOSH I’ve banged on a little bit on Twitter about how digital asset markets are continually recapitulating discoveries from fiat markets (securitization, credit-default swaps, corporate actions oh wait no disregard that). But aside from an effort by Genesis Trading, there’s been a surprising lack of interest or development in crypto interest rate markets. From what I’ve heard (and @ me if I THE OLD NEW THING: TURNING JOSH.SG STATIC · JOSH GIERSCH Fifteen years ago, when I spun up what became josh.sg, Movable Type was the de rigeur blogging platform, the CMS before any of us even really knew what a “CMS” was. It was Perl (with all the quirks that that implies); it was static (PHP-powered dynamic page generation was still TK); but it still meant that any idiot could post content on the web without having to learn to wrangle HTML. 40-TIMES-LEVERAGED SHORT VOLATILITY TRADE GOES or, Managing and Mitigating the 2014 CNH FX TARF blowup (Author’s note: I wrote this a year or so back for a few friends on Finance Twitter who wanted to know what FX TARFs were and what effect the huge vol overhang from USDCNH TARFs would have on the spot market. I figured that the shenanigans in USDCNY yesterday made it an appropriate time to dig this up and republish it for a POUNDED BY THE POUND: SPORTS DIRECT'S HEDGES AND THE CABLE Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to the mid-1.20s. Explanations for the move ranged from “algorithms!” to “fat fingers!” to “stop-losses being executed in SADLY, SAYING "SHOVE IT UP YOUR ARSE" IN A REGULATORY Slightly old news (it’s from January) but this is, to put it politely, quite astonishing: when the SGX ordered listed company China Sky Chemical Fibre to appoint a special auditor to investigate its (probably fraudulent) accounts and (probably dodgy) related-party real estate transactions, China Sky turned around and told the SGX to shove its special auditor up its tailpipe. It says volumes ABOUT JRE · JOSH GIERSCH Your editor is a former FX options trader, now working in a San Francisco software firm. JRE is finance, politics, economics, and a little bit of travel photography on the side. Email Josh: josh@josh.sg RECIPEBLOGGING · JOSH GIERSCH Found this one in Penn and Teller’s How To Play With Your Food. Ingredients 1 egg 1⁄2 cup buttermilk (apparently 1⁄4 cup milk and 1⁄4 cup vinegar also works. RANT · JOSH GIERSCH One of the larger investment scandals in Singapore - a city which is not short of investment scandals - was the saga surrounding Profitable Group, a land-banking investment firm that collapsed in 2009, taking tens of millions of dollars of investor funds with it. MISCELLANEOUS · JOSH GIERSCH Update: here’s a text version without smartquotes. Download it, change the extension to .sh, and enjoy. Update 2: this is now on Github, go there instead As a followup to this previous post - a script that automates EBS snapshots on an Amazon EC2 server - here’s a bash script to prune the EC2 snapshots created by the other script. MONEY · JOSH GIERSCH Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to themid-1.20s.
REVIEW · JOSH GIERSCH I took the plunge today and bought the Mac I’ve been wanting ever since Tiger was released. It’s a 12” Combo-drive Powerbook; when closed, it’s small enough to hide under an A4 sheet. WHAT'S MINE IS YOURS; WHAT'S YOURS IS MINED · JOSH GIERSCH (I was going to turn this into a tweetstorm, but it’s a bit over the line for what would be a reasonable-length tweetstorm and also I am an old fart who thinks tweetstorming is unwieldy. Am I the only one who thinks tweetstorms are kind of annoying? Apparently I am.) The big news in bitcoin-land today is the nine-figure-USD evaporation of the Mycoin exchange in Hong Kong (the SCMP article is THE MILLION-DOLLAR PIZZA · JOSH GIERSCH In 2010, a Florida man parted with 10,000 units of a new-fangled anarcho-currency thing called “bitcoins” in return for two hot, fresh, tasty pizzas. At the time, that was about $40 worth of these “buttcoins” (NSFW), so that was already quite an expensive pizza. (Must’ve been a pretty serious case of the munchies.) Three years later, and Bitcoin has boomed, busted, and boomed again. SINGAPORE ELECTION 2011: NOMINATION DAY · JOSH GIERSCH Update: Hi! If you enjoyed this post, I’ve got a series on Singapore’s election going up over the next week: Election 2011: the Redistricting Election 2011: Nomination Day (this post) Election 2011: He’s Their Helen Thomas and there’s more to come. Today was Nomination Day. There’s only one day in the entire election cycle where candidates can register to get on the ballot for a HERSTATT RISK IS NOT DEAD Back in the seventies, a German bank named Herstatt Bank earned an ignominious place in history. It opened for business one sunny summer’s day, and halfway through the day, it settled some of its outstanding FX transactions by taking in a whole bunch of Deutschmarks - the idea being that later in the day, when its US clearing bank opened for business, it would pay out the US dollars that HOME · JOSH GIERSCH Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to themid-1.20s.
ABOUT JRE · JOSH GIERSCH Your editor is a former FX options trader, now working in a San Francisco software firm. JRE is finance, politics, economics, and a little bit of travel photography on the side. Email Josh: josh@josh.sg RANT · JOSH GIERSCH One of the larger investment scandals in Singapore - a city which is not short of investment scandals - was the saga surrounding Profitable Group, a land-banking investment firm that collapsed in 2009, taking tens of millions of dollars of investor funds with it. MISCELLANEOUS · JOSH GIERSCH Update: here’s a text version without smartquotes. Download it, change the extension to .sh, and enjoy. Update 2: this is now on Github, go there instead As a followup to this previous post - a script that automates EBS snapshots on an Amazon EC2 server - here’s a bash script to prune the EC2 snapshots created by the other script. RETURN TO ZIMBABWE: THE OLD MUTUAL IMPLIED RATE · JOSH GIERSCH Return to Zimbabwe: the Old Mutual Implied Rate. Aug 11, 2019. Let’s hop in the hot tub time machine and head back to the other financial crisis of 2008. While Bear was having two-dollar bills taped to its headquarters, Lehman was turning into Less-Than, and Citibank was living up to its Shi nickname, Zimbabwe was having its WHAT'S MINE IS YOURS; WHAT'S YOURS IS MINED · JOSH GIERSCH (I was going to turn this into a tweetstorm, but it’s a bit over the line for what would be a reasonable-length tweetstorm and also I am an old fart who thinks tweetstorming is unwieldy. Am I the only one who thinks tweetstorms are kind of annoying? Apparently I am.) The big news in bitcoin-land today is the nine-figure-USD evaporation of the Mycoin exchange in Hong Kong (the SCMP article is THE MILLION-DOLLAR PIZZA · JOSH GIERSCH In 2010, a Florida man parted with 10,000 units of a new-fangled anarcho-currency thing called “bitcoins” in return for two hot, fresh, tasty pizzas. At the time, that was about $40 worth of these “buttcoins” (NSFW), so that was already quite an expensive pizza. (Must’ve been a pretty serious case of the munchies.) Three years later, and Bitcoin has boomed, busted, and boomed again. PRIOR ART · JOSH GIERSCH An eagle-eyed colleague recently pointed me to the case of CLS Bank v Alice, where Alice Corporation is trying to enforce a set of patents against CLS Bank, the little-known (but systematically vital) central settlement point for interbank FX trades. The judgment itself is interesting because it tries to rule on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions (that is, business methods 40-TIMES-LEVERAGED SHORT VOLATILITY TRADE GOES or, Managing and Mitigating the 2014 CNH FX TARF blowup (Author’s note: I wrote this a year or so back for a few friends on Finance Twitter who wanted to know what FX TARFs were and what effect the huge vol overhang from USDCNH TARFs would have on the spot market. I figured that the shenanigans in USDCNY yesterday made it an appropriate time to dig this up and republish it for a WHEN 20,000 REAL ESTATE AGENTS DISAPPEAR · JOSH GIERSCH Singapore has, according to estimates, about thirty thousand real estate agents in a city of five million people. Or had, until last Friday night. I was on my thirty-somethingth Hendricks and tonic when the clock rolled over from Friday to Saturday, and I completely missed the moment when more than twenty thousand real estate agents disappeared. From Channel News Asia (Singapore’s own 24 HOME · JOSH GIERSCH Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to themid-1.20s.
ABOUT JRE · JOSH GIERSCH Your editor is a former FX options trader, now working in a San Francisco software firm. JRE is finance, politics, economics, and a little bit of travel photography on the side. Email Josh: josh@josh.sg RANT · JOSH GIERSCH One of the larger investment scandals in Singapore - a city which is not short of investment scandals - was the saga surrounding Profitable Group, a land-banking investment firm that collapsed in 2009, taking tens of millions of dollars of investor funds with it. MISCELLANEOUS · JOSH GIERSCH Update: here’s a text version without smartquotes. Download it, change the extension to .sh, and enjoy. Update 2: this is now on Github, go there instead As a followup to this previous post - a script that automates EBS snapshots on an Amazon EC2 server - here’s a bash script to prune the EC2 snapshots created by the other script. RETURN TO ZIMBABWE: THE OLD MUTUAL IMPLIED RATE · JOSH GIERSCH Return to Zimbabwe: the Old Mutual Implied Rate. Aug 11, 2019. Let’s hop in the hot tub time machine and head back to the other financial crisis of 2008. While Bear was having two-dollar bills taped to its headquarters, Lehman was turning into Less-Than, and Citibank was living up to its Shi nickname, Zimbabwe was having its WHAT'S MINE IS YOURS; WHAT'S YOURS IS MINED · JOSH GIERSCH (I was going to turn this into a tweetstorm, but it’s a bit over the line for what would be a reasonable-length tweetstorm and also I am an old fart who thinks tweetstorming is unwieldy. Am I the only one who thinks tweetstorms are kind of annoying? Apparently I am.) The big news in bitcoin-land today is the nine-figure-USD evaporation of the Mycoin exchange in Hong Kong (the SCMP article is THE MILLION-DOLLAR PIZZA · JOSH GIERSCH In 2010, a Florida man parted with 10,000 units of a new-fangled anarcho-currency thing called “bitcoins” in return for two hot, fresh, tasty pizzas. At the time, that was about $40 worth of these “buttcoins” (NSFW), so that was already quite an expensive pizza. (Must’ve been a pretty serious case of the munchies.) Three years later, and Bitcoin has boomed, busted, and boomed again. PRIOR ART · JOSH GIERSCH An eagle-eyed colleague recently pointed me to the case of CLS Bank v Alice, where Alice Corporation is trying to enforce a set of patents against CLS Bank, the little-known (but systematically vital) central settlement point for interbank FX trades. The judgment itself is interesting because it tries to rule on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions (that is, business methods 40-TIMES-LEVERAGED SHORT VOLATILITY TRADE GOES or, Managing and Mitigating the 2014 CNH FX TARF blowup (Author’s note: I wrote this a year or so back for a few friends on Finance Twitter who wanted to know what FX TARFs were and what effect the huge vol overhang from USDCNH TARFs would have on the spot market. I figured that the shenanigans in USDCNY yesterday made it an appropriate time to dig this up and republish it for a WHEN 20,000 REAL ESTATE AGENTS DISAPPEAR · JOSH GIERSCH Singapore has, according to estimates, about thirty thousand real estate agents in a city of five million people. Or had, until last Friday night. I was on my thirty-somethingth Hendricks and tonic when the clock rolled over from Friday to Saturday, and I completely missed the moment when more than twenty thousand real estate agents disappeared. From Channel News Asia (Singapore’s own 24 ABOUT JRE · JOSH GIERSCH Your editor is a former FX options trader, now working in a San Francisco software firm. JRE is finance, politics, economics, and a little bit of travel photography on the side. Email Josh: josh@josh.sg RANT · JOSH GIERSCH One of the larger investment scandals in Singapore - a city which is not short of investment scandals - was the saga surrounding Profitable Group, a land-banking investment firm that collapsed in 2009, taking tens of millions of dollars of investor funds with it. HANDY · JOSH GIERSCH You’ve probably noticed how weak the US dollar is lately. Try this on for size. At an Apple store in the USA, the top-spec Macbook Aircosts USD 3,098.
THE OLD NEW THING: TURNING JOSH.SG STATIC · JOSH GIERSCH Fifteen years ago, when I spun up what became josh.sg, Movable Type was the de rigeur blogging platform, the CMS before any of us even really knew what a “CMS” was. It was Perl (with all the quirks that that implies); it was static (PHP-powered dynamic page generation was still TK); but it still meant that any idiot could post content on the web without having to learn to wrangle HTML. THE MILLION-DOLLAR PIZZA · JOSH GIERSCH In 2010, a Florida man parted with 10,000 units of a new-fangled anarcho-currency thing called “bitcoins” in return for two hot, fresh, tasty pizzas. At the time, that was about $40 worth of these “buttcoins” (NSFW), so that was already quite an expensive pizza. (Must’ve been a pretty serious case of the munchies.) Three years later, and Bitcoin has boomed, busted, and boomed again. WHEN 20,000 REAL ESTATE AGENTS DISAPPEAR · JOSH GIERSCH Singapore has, according to estimates, about thirty thousand real estate agents in a city of five million people. Or had, until last Friday night. I was on my thirty-somethingth Hendricks and tonic when the clock rolled over from Friday to Saturday, and I completely missed the moment when more than twenty thousand real estate agents disappeared. From Channel News Asia (Singapore’s own 24 ADDING TLS TO YOUR S3 STATIC SITE WITH CLOUDFRONT · JOSH Step n+1 in the process of moving josh.sg to a static site (steps 0 through n are right here) was to enable TLS encryption. Gone are the days when you had to fork out squillions of dollars for an SSL certificate if you wanted that fancy padlock in the address bar; these days, Amazon Certificate Manager hands them out for free. If you’re not wedded to the AWS ecosystem, the good folks at Let GUILT-EDGED INVESTMENTS: SINGAPORE'S LATEST PONZI SCHEME I like to think that all of JRE’s readers would be smart enough to run a mile if they saw an investment advertising returns of “20-25% per year guaranteed!”. Unfortunately, a phenomenally large number of Singaporeans and Malaysians weren’t: KUALA LUMPUR - A gold-trading business shut down by Malaysian authorities for suspected illegalities may have raised as much as US$3 TRADING WHILE INSOLVENT IS APPARENTLY FINE IF YOU'RE A Amid the fiasco of MtGox’s apparent collapse last night (acquisition? rebranding? god knows), some kind person leaked MtGox’s “Crisis Strategy Draft”. It’s an internal Powerpoint that appears to describe a plan for shutting down MtGox and relaunching it as “Gox” - a new, trustworthy Bitcoin exchange from the people who brought you this. And this. And there is _so much_ ickystuff
HERSTATT RISK IS NOT DEAD Back in the seventies, a German bank named Herstatt Bank earned an ignominious place in history. It opened for business one sunny summer’s day, and halfway through the day, it settled some of its outstanding FX transactions by taking in a whole bunch of Deutschmarks - the idea being that later in the day, when its US clearing bank opened for business, it would pay out the US dollars that HOME · JOSH GIERSCH Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to themid-1.20s.
ABOUT JRE · JOSH GIERSCH Your editor is a former FX options trader, now working in a San Francisco software firm. JRE is finance, politics, economics, and a little bit of travel photography on the side. Email Josh: josh@josh.sg RECIPEBLOGGING · JOSH GIERSCH Found this one in Penn and Teller’s How To Play With Your Food. Ingredients 1 egg 1⁄2 cup buttermilk (apparently 1⁄4 cup milk and 1⁄4 cup vinegar also works. RANT · JOSH GIERSCH One of the larger investment scandals in Singapore - a city which is not short of investment scandals - was the saga surrounding Profitable Group, a land-banking investment firm that collapsed in 2009, taking tens of millions of dollars of investor funds with it. MISCELLANEOUS · JOSH GIERSCH Update: here’s a text version without smartquotes. Download it, change the extension to .sh, and enjoy. Update 2: this is now on Github, go there instead As a followup to this previous post - a script that automates EBS snapshots on an Amazon EC2 server - here’s a bash script to prune the EC2 snapshots created by the other script. RETURN TO ZIMBABWE: THE OLD MUTUAL IMPLIED RATE · JOSH GIERSCH Return to Zimbabwe: the Old Mutual Implied Rate. Aug 11, 2019. Let’s hop in the hot tub time machine and head back to the other financial crisis of 2008. While Bear was having two-dollar bills taped to its headquarters, Lehman was turning into Less-Than, and Citibank was living up to its Shi nickname, Zimbabwe was having its AN INTEREST RATES PRIMER FOR CRYPTOCURRENCY FOLKS · JOSH I’ve banged on a little bit on Twitter about how digital asset markets are continually recapitulating discoveries from fiat markets (securitization, credit-default swaps, corporate actions oh wait no disregard that). But aside from an effort by Genesis Trading, there’s been a surprising lack of interest or development in crypto interest rate markets. From what I’ve heard (and @ me if I THE OLD NEW THING: TURNING JOSH.SG STATIC · JOSH GIERSCH Fifteen years ago, when I spun up what became josh.sg, Movable Type was the de rigeur blogging platform, the CMS before any of us even really knew what a “CMS” was. It was Perl (with all the quirks that that implies); it was static (PHP-powered dynamic page generation was still TK); but it still meant that any idiot could post content on the web without having to learn to wrangle HTML. 40-TIMES-LEVERAGED SHORT VOLATILITY TRADE GOES or, Managing and Mitigating the 2014 CNH FX TARF blowup (Author’s note: I wrote this a year or so back for a few friends on Finance Twitter who wanted to know what FX TARFs were and what effect the huge vol overhang from USDCNH TARFs would have on the spot market. I figured that the shenanigans in USDCNY yesterday made it an appropriate time to dig this up and republish it for a HERSTATT RISK IS NOT DEAD Back in the seventies, a German bank named Herstatt Bank earned an ignominious place in history. It opened for business one sunny summer’s day, and halfway through the day, it settled some of its outstanding FX transactions by taking in a whole bunch of Deutschmarks - the idea being that later in the day, when its US clearing bank opened for business, it would pay out the US dollars that HOME · JOSH GIERSCH Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to themid-1.20s.
ABOUT JRE · JOSH GIERSCH Your editor is a former FX options trader, now working in a San Francisco software firm. JRE is finance, politics, economics, and a little bit of travel photography on the side. Email Josh: josh@josh.sg RECIPEBLOGGING · JOSH GIERSCH Found this one in Penn and Teller’s How To Play With Your Food. Ingredients 1 egg 1⁄2 cup buttermilk (apparently 1⁄4 cup milk and 1⁄4 cup vinegar also works. RANT · JOSH GIERSCH One of the larger investment scandals in Singapore - a city which is not short of investment scandals - was the saga surrounding Profitable Group, a land-banking investment firm that collapsed in 2009, taking tens of millions of dollars of investor funds with it. MISCELLANEOUS · JOSH GIERSCH Update: here’s a text version without smartquotes. Download it, change the extension to .sh, and enjoy. Update 2: this is now on Github, go there instead As a followup to this previous post - a script that automates EBS snapshots on an Amazon EC2 server - here’s a bash script to prune the EC2 snapshots created by the other script. RETURN TO ZIMBABWE: THE OLD MUTUAL IMPLIED RATE · JOSH GIERSCH Return to Zimbabwe: the Old Mutual Implied Rate. Aug 11, 2019. Let’s hop in the hot tub time machine and head back to the other financial crisis of 2008. While Bear was having two-dollar bills taped to its headquarters, Lehman was turning into Less-Than, and Citibank was living up to its Shi nickname, Zimbabwe was having its AN INTEREST RATES PRIMER FOR CRYPTOCURRENCY FOLKS · JOSH I’ve banged on a little bit on Twitter about how digital asset markets are continually recapitulating discoveries from fiat markets (securitization, credit-default swaps, corporate actions oh wait no disregard that). But aside from an effort by Genesis Trading, there’s been a surprising lack of interest or development in crypto interest rate markets. From what I’ve heard (and @ me if I THE OLD NEW THING: TURNING JOSH.SG STATIC · JOSH GIERSCH Fifteen years ago, when I spun up what became josh.sg, Movable Type was the de rigeur blogging platform, the CMS before any of us even really knew what a “CMS” was. It was Perl (with all the quirks that that implies); it was static (PHP-powered dynamic page generation was still TK); but it still meant that any idiot could post content on the web without having to learn to wrangle HTML. 40-TIMES-LEVERAGED SHORT VOLATILITY TRADE GOES or, Managing and Mitigating the 2014 CNH FX TARF blowup (Author’s note: I wrote this a year or so back for a few friends on Finance Twitter who wanted to know what FX TARFs were and what effect the huge vol overhang from USDCNH TARFs would have on the spot market. I figured that the shenanigans in USDCNY yesterday made it an appropriate time to dig this up and republish it for a HERSTATT RISK IS NOT DEAD Back in the seventies, a German bank named Herstatt Bank earned an ignominious place in history. It opened for business one sunny summer’s day, and halfway through the day, it settled some of its outstanding FX transactions by taking in a whole bunch of Deutschmarks - the idea being that later in the day, when its US clearing bank opened for business, it would pay out the US dollars that RECIPEBLOGGING · JOSH GIERSCH Found this one in Penn and Teller’s How To Play With Your Food. Ingredients 1 egg 1⁄2 cup buttermilk (apparently 1⁄4 cup milk and 1⁄4 cup vinegar also works. RANT · JOSH GIERSCH One of the larger investment scandals in Singapore - a city which is not short of investment scandals - was the saga surrounding Profitable Group, a land-banking investment firm that collapsed in 2009, taking tens of millions of dollars of investor funds with it. REVIEW · JOSH GIERSCH I took the plunge today and bought the Mac I’ve been wanting ever since Tiger was released. It’s a 12” Combo-drive Powerbook; when closed, it’s small enough to hide under an A4 sheet. MONEY · JOSH GIERSCH Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to themid-1.20s.
WHAT'S MINE IS YOURS; WHAT'S YOURS IS MINED · JOSH GIERSCH (I was going to turn this into a tweetstorm, but it’s a bit over the line for what would be a reasonable-length tweetstorm and also I am an old fart who thinks tweetstorming is unwieldy. Am I the only one who thinks tweetstorms are kind of annoying? Apparently I am.) The big news in bitcoin-land today is the nine-figure-USD evaporation of the Mycoin exchange in Hong Kong (the SCMP article is PRIOR ART · JOSH GIERSCH An eagle-eyed colleague recently pointed me to the case of CLS Bank v Alice, where Alice Corporation is trying to enforce a set of patents against CLS Bank, the little-known (but systematically vital) central settlement point for interbank FX trades. The judgment itself is interesting because it tries to rule on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions (that is, business methods THE MILLION-DOLLAR PIZZA · JOSH GIERSCH In 2010, a Florida man parted with 10,000 units of a new-fangled anarcho-currency thing called “bitcoins” in return for two hot, fresh, tasty pizzas. At the time, that was about $40 worth of these “buttcoins” (NSFW), so that was already quite an expensive pizza. (Must’ve been a pretty serious case of the munchies.) Three years later, and Bitcoin has boomed, busted, and boomed again. WHEN 20,000 REAL ESTATE AGENTS DISAPPEAR · JOSH GIERSCH Singapore has, according to estimates, about thirty thousand real estate agents in a city of five million people. Or had, until last Friday night. I was on my thirty-somethingth Hendricks and tonic when the clock rolled over from Friday to Saturday, and I completely missed the moment when more than twenty thousand real estate agents disappeared. From Channel News Asia (Singapore’s own 24 GUILT-EDGED INVESTMENTS: SINGAPORE'S LATEST PONZI SCHEME I like to think that all of JRE’s readers would be smart enough to run a mile if they saw an investment advertising returns of “20-25% per year guaranteed!”. Unfortunately, a phenomenally large number of Singaporeans and Malaysians weren’t: KUALA LUMPUR - A gold-trading business shut down by Malaysian authorities for suspected illegalities may have raised as much as US$3 HERSTATT RISK IS NOT DEAD Back in the seventies, a German bank named Herstatt Bank earned an ignominious place in history. It opened for business one sunny summer’s day, and halfway through the day, it settled some of its outstanding FX transactions by taking in a whole bunch of Deutschmarks - the idea being that later in the day, when its US clearing bank opened for business, it would pay out the US dollars that HOME · JOSH GIERSCH Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to themid-1.20s.
ABOUT JRE · JOSH GIERSCH Your editor is a former FX options trader, now working in a San Francisco software firm. JRE is finance, politics, economics, and a little bit of travel photography on the side. Email Josh: josh@josh.sg RECIPEBLOGGING · JOSH GIERSCH Found this one in Penn and Teller’s How To Play With Your Food. Ingredients 1 egg 1⁄2 cup buttermilk (apparently 1⁄4 cup milk and 1⁄4 cup vinegar also works. RANT · JOSH GIERSCH One of the larger investment scandals in Singapore - a city which is not short of investment scandals - was the saga surrounding Profitable Group, a land-banking investment firm that collapsed in 2009, taking tens of millions of dollars of investor funds with it. MISCELLANEOUS · JOSH GIERSCH Update: here’s a text version without smartquotes. Download it, change the extension to .sh, and enjoy. Update 2: this is now on Github, go there instead As a followup to this previous post - a script that automates EBS snapshots on an Amazon EC2 server - here’s a bash script to prune the EC2 snapshots created by the other script. RETURN TO ZIMBABWE: THE OLD MUTUAL IMPLIED RATE · JOSH GIERSCH Return to Zimbabwe: the Old Mutual Implied Rate. Aug 11, 2019. Let’s hop in the hot tub time machine and head back to the other financial crisis of 2008. While Bear was having two-dollar bills taped to its headquarters, Lehman was turning into Less-Than, and Citibank was living up to its Shi nickname, Zimbabwe was having its AN INTEREST RATES PRIMER FOR CRYPTOCURRENCY FOLKS · JOSH I’ve banged on a little bit on Twitter about how digital asset markets are continually recapitulating discoveries from fiat markets (securitization, credit-default swaps, corporate actions oh wait no disregard that). But aside from an effort by Genesis Trading, there’s been a surprising lack of interest or development in crypto interest rate markets. From what I’ve heard (and @ me if I THE OLD NEW THING: TURNING JOSH.SG STATIC · JOSH GIERSCH Fifteen years ago, when I spun up what became josh.sg, Movable Type was the de rigeur blogging platform, the CMS before any of us even really knew what a “CMS” was. It was Perl (with all the quirks that that implies); it was static (PHP-powered dynamic page generation was still TK); but it still meant that any idiot could post content on the web without having to learn to wrangle HTML. 40-TIMES-LEVERAGED SHORT VOLATILITY TRADE GOES or, Managing and Mitigating the 2014 CNH FX TARF blowup (Author’s note: I wrote this a year or so back for a few friends on Finance Twitter who wanted to know what FX TARFs were and what effect the huge vol overhang from USDCNH TARFs would have on the spot market. I figured that the shenanigans in USDCNY yesterday made it an appropriate time to dig this up and republish it for a HERSTATT RISK IS NOT DEAD Back in the seventies, a German bank named Herstatt Bank earned an ignominious place in history. It opened for business one sunny summer’s day, and halfway through the day, it settled some of its outstanding FX transactions by taking in a whole bunch of Deutschmarks - the idea being that later in the day, when its US clearing bank opened for business, it would pay out the US dollars that HOME · JOSH GIERSCH Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to themid-1.20s.
ABOUT JRE · JOSH GIERSCH Your editor is a former FX options trader, now working in a San Francisco software firm. JRE is finance, politics, economics, and a little bit of travel photography on the side. Email Josh: josh@josh.sg RECIPEBLOGGING · JOSH GIERSCH Found this one in Penn and Teller’s How To Play With Your Food. Ingredients 1 egg 1⁄2 cup buttermilk (apparently 1⁄4 cup milk and 1⁄4 cup vinegar also works. RANT · JOSH GIERSCH One of the larger investment scandals in Singapore - a city which is not short of investment scandals - was the saga surrounding Profitable Group, a land-banking investment firm that collapsed in 2009, taking tens of millions of dollars of investor funds with it. MISCELLANEOUS · JOSH GIERSCH Update: here’s a text version without smartquotes. Download it, change the extension to .sh, and enjoy. Update 2: this is now on Github, go there instead As a followup to this previous post - a script that automates EBS snapshots on an Amazon EC2 server - here’s a bash script to prune the EC2 snapshots created by the other script. RETURN TO ZIMBABWE: THE OLD MUTUAL IMPLIED RATE · JOSH GIERSCH Return to Zimbabwe: the Old Mutual Implied Rate. Aug 11, 2019. Let’s hop in the hot tub time machine and head back to the other financial crisis of 2008. While Bear was having two-dollar bills taped to its headquarters, Lehman was turning into Less-Than, and Citibank was living up to its Shi nickname, Zimbabwe was having its AN INTEREST RATES PRIMER FOR CRYPTOCURRENCY FOLKS · JOSH I’ve banged on a little bit on Twitter about how digital asset markets are continually recapitulating discoveries from fiat markets (securitization, credit-default swaps, corporate actions oh wait no disregard that). But aside from an effort by Genesis Trading, there’s been a surprising lack of interest or development in crypto interest rate markets. From what I’ve heard (and @ me if I THE OLD NEW THING: TURNING JOSH.SG STATIC · JOSH GIERSCH Fifteen years ago, when I spun up what became josh.sg, Movable Type was the de rigeur blogging platform, the CMS before any of us even really knew what a “CMS” was. It was Perl (with all the quirks that that implies); it was static (PHP-powered dynamic page generation was still TK); but it still meant that any idiot could post content on the web without having to learn to wrangle HTML. 40-TIMES-LEVERAGED SHORT VOLATILITY TRADE GOES or, Managing and Mitigating the 2014 CNH FX TARF blowup (Author’s note: I wrote this a year or so back for a few friends on Finance Twitter who wanted to know what FX TARFs were and what effect the huge vol overhang from USDCNH TARFs would have on the spot market. I figured that the shenanigans in USDCNY yesterday made it an appropriate time to dig this up and republish it for a HERSTATT RISK IS NOT DEAD Back in the seventies, a German bank named Herstatt Bank earned an ignominious place in history. It opened for business one sunny summer’s day, and halfway through the day, it settled some of its outstanding FX transactions by taking in a whole bunch of Deutschmarks - the idea being that later in the day, when its US clearing bank opened for business, it would pay out the US dollars that RECIPEBLOGGING · JOSH GIERSCH Found this one in Penn and Teller’s How To Play With Your Food. Ingredients 1 egg 1⁄2 cup buttermilk (apparently 1⁄4 cup milk and 1⁄4 cup vinegar also works. RANT · JOSH GIERSCH One of the larger investment scandals in Singapore - a city which is not short of investment scandals - was the saga surrounding Profitable Group, a land-banking investment firm that collapsed in 2009, taking tens of millions of dollars of investor funds with it. REVIEW · JOSH GIERSCH I took the plunge today and bought the Mac I’ve been wanting ever since Tiger was released. It’s a 12” Combo-drive Powerbook; when closed, it’s small enough to hide under an A4 sheet. MONEY · JOSH GIERSCH Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to themid-1.20s.
WHAT'S MINE IS YOURS; WHAT'S YOURS IS MINED · JOSH GIERSCH (I was going to turn this into a tweetstorm, but it’s a bit over the line for what would be a reasonable-length tweetstorm and also I am an old fart who thinks tweetstorming is unwieldy. Am I the only one who thinks tweetstorms are kind of annoying? Apparently I am.) The big news in bitcoin-land today is the nine-figure-USD evaporation of the Mycoin exchange in Hong Kong (the SCMP article is PRIOR ART · JOSH GIERSCH An eagle-eyed colleague recently pointed me to the case of CLS Bank v Alice, where Alice Corporation is trying to enforce a set of patents against CLS Bank, the little-known (but systematically vital) central settlement point for interbank FX trades. The judgment itself is interesting because it tries to rule on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions (that is, business methods THE MILLION-DOLLAR PIZZA · JOSH GIERSCH In 2010, a Florida man parted with 10,000 units of a new-fangled anarcho-currency thing called “bitcoins” in return for two hot, fresh, tasty pizzas. At the time, that was about $40 worth of these “buttcoins” (NSFW), so that was already quite an expensive pizza. (Must’ve been a pretty serious case of the munchies.) Three years later, and Bitcoin has boomed, busted, and boomed again. WHEN 20,000 REAL ESTATE AGENTS DISAPPEAR · JOSH GIERSCH Singapore has, according to estimates, about thirty thousand real estate agents in a city of five million people. Or had, until last Friday night. I was on my thirty-somethingth Hendricks and tonic when the clock rolled over from Friday to Saturday, and I completely missed the moment when more than twenty thousand real estate agents disappeared. From Channel News Asia (Singapore’s own 24 GUILT-EDGED INVESTMENTS: SINGAPORE'S LATEST PONZI SCHEME I like to think that all of JRE’s readers would be smart enough to run a mile if they saw an investment advertising returns of “20-25% per year guaranteed!”. Unfortunately, a phenomenally large number of Singaporeans and Malaysians weren’t: KUALA LUMPUR - A gold-trading business shut down by Malaysian authorities for suspected illegalities may have raised as much as US$3 HERSTATT RISK IS NOT DEAD Back in the seventies, a German bank named Herstatt Bank earned an ignominious place in history. It opened for business one sunny summer’s day, and halfway through the day, it settled some of its outstanding FX transactions by taking in a whole bunch of Deutschmarks - the idea being that later in the day, when its US clearing bank opened for business, it would pay out the US dollars that HOME · JOSH GIERSCH Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to themid-1.20s.
ABOUT JRE · JOSH GIERSCH Your editor is a former FX options trader, now working in a San Francisco software firm. JRE is finance, politics, economics, and a little bit of travel photography on the side. Email Josh: josh@josh.sg MISCELLANEOUS · JOSH GIERSCH Update: here’s a text version without smartquotes. Download it, change the extension to .sh, and enjoy. Update 2: this is now on Github, go there instead As a followup to this previous post - a script that automates EBS snapshots on an Amazon EC2 server - here’s a bash script to prune the EC2 snapshots created by the other script. REVIEW · JOSH GIERSCH I took the plunge today and bought the Mac I’ve been wanting ever since Tiger was released. It’s a 12” Combo-drive Powerbook; when closed, it’s small enough to hide under an A4 sheet. RETURN TO ZIMBABWE: THE OLD MUTUAL IMPLIED RATE · JOSH GIERSCH Return to Zimbabwe: the Old Mutual Implied Rate. Aug 11, 2019. Let’s hop in the hot tub time machine and head back to the other financial crisis of 2008. While Bear was having two-dollar bills taped to its headquarters, Lehman was turning into Less-Than, and Citibank was living up to its Shi nickname, Zimbabwe was having its WHAT'S MINE IS YOURS; WHAT'S YOURS IS MINED · JOSH GIERSCH (I was going to turn this into a tweetstorm, but it’s a bit over the line for what would be a reasonable-length tweetstorm and also I am an old fart who thinks tweetstorming is unwieldy. Am I the only one who thinks tweetstorms are kind of annoying? Apparently I am.) The big news in bitcoin-land today is the nine-figure-USD evaporation of the Mycoin exchange in Hong Kong (the SCMP article is AN INTEREST RATES PRIMER FOR CRYPTOCURRENCY FOLKS · JOSH I’ve banged on a little bit on Twitter about how digital asset markets are continually recapitulating discoveries from fiat markets (securitization, credit-default swaps, corporate actions oh wait no disregard that). But aside from an effort by Genesis Trading, there’s been a surprising lack of interest or development in crypto interest rate markets. From what I’ve heard (and @ me if I 40-TIMES-LEVERAGED SHORT VOLATILITY TRADE GOES or, Managing and Mitigating the 2014 CNH FX TARF blowup (Author’s note: I wrote this a year or so back for a few friends on Finance Twitter who wanted to know what FX TARFs were and what effect the huge vol overhang from USDCNH TARFs would have on the spot market. I figured that the shenanigans in USDCNY yesterday made it an appropriate time to dig this up and republish it for a IT'S NOT JUST IRS: THE EMBEDDED LAWSUIT OPTION IN FX Walter Kurtz at Sober Look had a great piece a few weeks ago, where he wryly suggested a way to make money if you don’t like that IRS the bank’s sold you: default on the payments and sue the bank. (Note: this is not an actual way to make money, and also not a good idea if you don’t like angry traders hunting you down.) The “sue the bank” option has a long and storied history in HERSTATT RISK IS NOT DEAD Back in the seventies, a German bank named Herstatt Bank earned an ignominious place in history. It opened for business one sunny summer’s day, and halfway through the day, it settled some of its outstanding FX transactions by taking in a whole bunch of Deutschmarks - the idea being that later in the day, when its US clearing bank opened for business, it would pay out the US dollars that HOME · JOSH GIERSCH Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to themid-1.20s.
ABOUT JRE · JOSH GIERSCH Your editor is a former FX options trader, now working in a San Francisco software firm. JRE is finance, politics, economics, and a little bit of travel photography on the side. Email Josh: josh@josh.sg MISCELLANEOUS · JOSH GIERSCH Update: here’s a text version without smartquotes. Download it, change the extension to .sh, and enjoy. Update 2: this is now on Github, go there instead As a followup to this previous post - a script that automates EBS snapshots on an Amazon EC2 server - here’s a bash script to prune the EC2 snapshots created by the other script. REVIEW · JOSH GIERSCH I took the plunge today and bought the Mac I’ve been wanting ever since Tiger was released. It’s a 12” Combo-drive Powerbook; when closed, it’s small enough to hide under an A4 sheet. RETURN TO ZIMBABWE: THE OLD MUTUAL IMPLIED RATE · JOSH GIERSCH Return to Zimbabwe: the Old Mutual Implied Rate. Aug 11, 2019. Let’s hop in the hot tub time machine and head back to the other financial crisis of 2008. While Bear was having two-dollar bills taped to its headquarters, Lehman was turning into Less-Than, and Citibank was living up to its Shi nickname, Zimbabwe was having its WHAT'S MINE IS YOURS; WHAT'S YOURS IS MINED · JOSH GIERSCH (I was going to turn this into a tweetstorm, but it’s a bit over the line for what would be a reasonable-length tweetstorm and also I am an old fart who thinks tweetstorming is unwieldy. Am I the only one who thinks tweetstorms are kind of annoying? Apparently I am.) The big news in bitcoin-land today is the nine-figure-USD evaporation of the Mycoin exchange in Hong Kong (the SCMP article is AN INTEREST RATES PRIMER FOR CRYPTOCURRENCY FOLKS · JOSH I’ve banged on a little bit on Twitter about how digital asset markets are continually recapitulating discoveries from fiat markets (securitization, credit-default swaps, corporate actions oh wait no disregard that). But aside from an effort by Genesis Trading, there’s been a surprising lack of interest or development in crypto interest rate markets. From what I’ve heard (and @ me if I 40-TIMES-LEVERAGED SHORT VOLATILITY TRADE GOES or, Managing and Mitigating the 2014 CNH FX TARF blowup (Author’s note: I wrote this a year or so back for a few friends on Finance Twitter who wanted to know what FX TARFs were and what effect the huge vol overhang from USDCNH TARFs would have on the spot market. I figured that the shenanigans in USDCNY yesterday made it an appropriate time to dig this up and republish it for a IT'S NOT JUST IRS: THE EMBEDDED LAWSUIT OPTION IN FX Walter Kurtz at Sober Look had a great piece a few weeks ago, where he wryly suggested a way to make money if you don’t like that IRS the bank’s sold you: default on the payments and sue the bank. (Note: this is not an actual way to make money, and also not a good idea if you don’t like angry traders hunting you down.) The “sue the bank” option has a long and storied history in HERSTATT RISK IS NOT DEAD Back in the seventies, a German bank named Herstatt Bank earned an ignominious place in history. It opened for business one sunny summer’s day, and halfway through the day, it settled some of its outstanding FX transactions by taking in a whole bunch of Deutschmarks - the idea being that later in the day, when its US clearing bank opened for business, it would pay out the US dollars that RECIPEBLOGGING · JOSH GIERSCH Found this one in Penn and Teller’s How To Play With Your Food. Ingredients 1 egg 1⁄2 cup buttermilk (apparently 1⁄4 cup milk and 1⁄4 cup vinegar also works. RANT · JOSH GIERSCH One of the larger investment scandals in Singapore - a city which is not short of investment scandals - was the saga surrounding Profitable Group, a land-banking investment firm that collapsed in 2009, taking tens of millions of dollars of investor funds with it. MONEY · JOSH GIERSCH Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to themid-1.20s.
REVIEW · JOSH GIERSCH I took the plunge today and bought the Mac I’ve been wanting ever since Tiger was released. It’s a 12” Combo-drive Powerbook; when closed, it’s small enough to hide under an A4 sheet. WHAT'S MINE IS YOURS; WHAT'S YOURS IS MINED · JOSH GIERSCH (I was going to turn this into a tweetstorm, but it’s a bit over the line for what would be a reasonable-length tweetstorm and also I am an old fart who thinks tweetstorming is unwieldy. Am I the only one who thinks tweetstorms are kind of annoying? Apparently I am.) The big news in bitcoin-land today is the nine-figure-USD evaporation of the Mycoin exchange in Hong Kong (the SCMP article is THE OLD NEW THING: TURNING JOSH.SG STATIC · JOSH GIERSCH Fifteen years ago, when I spun up what became josh.sg, Movable Type was the de rigeur blogging platform, the CMS before any of us even really knew what a “CMS” was. It was Perl (with all the quirks that that implies); it was static (PHP-powered dynamic page generation was still TK); but it still meant that any idiot could post content on the web without having to learn to wrangle HTML. THE MILLION-DOLLAR PIZZA · JOSH GIERSCH In 2010, a Florida man parted with 10,000 units of a new-fangled anarcho-currency thing called “bitcoins” in return for two hot, fresh, tasty pizzas. At the time, that was about $40 worth of these “buttcoins” (NSFW), so that was already quite an expensive pizza. (Must’ve been a pretty serious case of the munchies.) Three years later, and Bitcoin has boomed, busted, and boomed again. WHEN 20,000 REAL ESTATE AGENTS DISAPPEAR · JOSH GIERSCH Singapore has, according to estimates, about thirty thousand real estate agents in a city of five million people. Or had, until last Friday night. I was on my thirty-somethingth Hendricks and tonic when the clock rolled over from Friday to Saturday, and I completely missed the moment when more than twenty thousand real estate agents disappeared. From Channel News Asia (Singapore’s own 24 HOW MANY ZEROES DOES ONE COUNTRY NEED? · JOSH GIERSCH Because the last post was so popular: ZimbabweanEquities.com has printed yesterday’s OMIR at somewhere north of 164 trillion to the USD. Now, even for Zimbabwe, that seemed kinda high. But Old Mutual’s closing price yesterday in Harare was ZW$300,000,000,000; Ditto in London was 92.8p. The ratio is 1:1, so 1 GBP is worth 300 billion / 0.928, or about 323 billion ZWD; GBP/USD late TRADING WHILE INSOLVENT IS APPARENTLY FINE IF YOU'RE A Amid the fiasco of MtGox’s apparent collapse last night (acquisition? rebranding? god knows), some kind person leaked MtGox’s “Crisis Strategy Draft”. It’s an internal Powerpoint that appears to describe a plan for shutting down MtGox and relaunching it as “Gox” - a new, trustworthy Bitcoin exchange from the people who brought you this. And this. And there is _so much_ ickystuff
HOME · JOSH GIERSCH Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to themid-1.20s.
ABOUT JRE · JOSH GIERSCH Your editor is a former FX options trader, now working in a San Francisco software firm. JRE is finance, politics, economics, and a little bit of travel photography on the side. Email Josh: josh@josh.sg MISCELLANEOUS · JOSH GIERSCH Update: here’s a text version without smartquotes. Download it, change the extension to .sh, and enjoy. Update 2: this is now on Github, go there instead As a followup to this previous post - a script that automates EBS snapshots on an Amazon EC2 server - here’s a bash script to prune the EC2 snapshots created by the other script. REVIEW · JOSH GIERSCH I took the plunge today and bought the Mac I’ve been wanting ever since Tiger was released. It’s a 12” Combo-drive Powerbook; when closed, it’s small enough to hide under an A4 sheet. RETURN TO ZIMBABWE: THE OLD MUTUAL IMPLIED RATE · JOSH GIERSCH Let’s hop in the hot tub time machine and head back to the other financial crisis of 2008. While Bear was having two-dollar bills taped to its headquarters, Lehman was turning into Less-Than, and Citibank was living up to its Shi nickname, Zimbabwe was having its own economic meltdown despite being pretty much cut off from the rest of the world’s economies. Zimbabwe’s WHAT'S MINE IS YOURS; WHAT'S YOURS IS MINED · JOSH GIERSCH (I was going to turn this into a tweetstorm, but it’s a bit over the line for what would be a reasonable-length tweetstorm and also I am an old fart who thinks tweetstorming is unwieldy. Am I the only one who thinks tweetstorms are kind of annoying? Apparently I am.) The big news in bitcoin-land today is the nine-figure-USD evaporation of the Mycoin exchange in Hong Kong (the SCMP article is AN INTEREST RATES PRIMER FOR CRYPTOCURRENCY FOLKS · JOSH I’ve banged on a little bit on Twitter about how digital asset markets are continually recapitulating discoveries from fiat markets (securitization, credit-default swaps, corporate actions oh wait no disregard that). But aside from an effort by Genesis Trading, there’s been a surprising lack of interest or development in crypto interest rate markets. From what I’ve heard (and @ me if I 40-TIMES-LEVERAGED SHORT VOLATILITY TRADE GOES or, Managing and Mitigating the 2014 CNH FX TARF blowup (Author’s note: I wrote this a year or so back for a few friends on Finance Twitter who wanted to know what FX TARFs were and what effect the huge vol overhang from USDCNH TARFs would have on the spot market. I figured that the shenanigans in USDCNY yesterday made it an appropriate time to dig this up and republish it for a IT'S NOT JUST IRS: THE EMBEDDED LAWSUIT OPTION IN FX Walter Kurtz at Sober Look had a great piece a few weeks ago, where he wryly suggested a way to make money if you don’t like that IRS the bank’s sold you: default on the payments and sue the bank. (Note: this is not an actual way to make money, and also not a good idea if you don’t like angry traders hunting you down.) The “sue the bank” option has a long and storied history in HERSTATT RISK IS NOT DEAD Back in the seventies, a German bank named Herstatt Bank earned an ignominious place in history. It opened for business one sunny summer’s day, and halfway through the day, it settled some of its outstanding FX transactions by taking in a whole bunch of Deutschmarks - the idea being that later in the day, when its US clearing bank opened for business, it would pay out the US dollars that HOME · JOSH GIERSCH Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to themid-1.20s.
ABOUT JRE · JOSH GIERSCH Your editor is a former FX options trader, now working in a San Francisco software firm. JRE is finance, politics, economics, and a little bit of travel photography on the side. Email Josh: josh@josh.sg MISCELLANEOUS · JOSH GIERSCH Update: here’s a text version without smartquotes. Download it, change the extension to .sh, and enjoy. Update 2: this is now on Github, go there instead As a followup to this previous post - a script that automates EBS snapshots on an Amazon EC2 server - here’s a bash script to prune the EC2 snapshots created by the other script. REVIEW · JOSH GIERSCH I took the plunge today and bought the Mac I’ve been wanting ever since Tiger was released. It’s a 12” Combo-drive Powerbook; when closed, it’s small enough to hide under an A4 sheet. RETURN TO ZIMBABWE: THE OLD MUTUAL IMPLIED RATE · JOSH GIERSCH Let’s hop in the hot tub time machine and head back to the other financial crisis of 2008. While Bear was having two-dollar bills taped to its headquarters, Lehman was turning into Less-Than, and Citibank was living up to its Shi nickname, Zimbabwe was having its own economic meltdown despite being pretty much cut off from the rest of the world’s economies. Zimbabwe’s WHAT'S MINE IS YOURS; WHAT'S YOURS IS MINED · JOSH GIERSCH (I was going to turn this into a tweetstorm, but it’s a bit over the line for what would be a reasonable-length tweetstorm and also I am an old fart who thinks tweetstorming is unwieldy. Am I the only one who thinks tweetstorms are kind of annoying? Apparently I am.) The big news in bitcoin-land today is the nine-figure-USD evaporation of the Mycoin exchange in Hong Kong (the SCMP article is AN INTEREST RATES PRIMER FOR CRYPTOCURRENCY FOLKS · JOSH I’ve banged on a little bit on Twitter about how digital asset markets are continually recapitulating discoveries from fiat markets (securitization, credit-default swaps, corporate actions oh wait no disregard that). But aside from an effort by Genesis Trading, there’s been a surprising lack of interest or development in crypto interest rate markets. From what I’ve heard (and @ me if I 40-TIMES-LEVERAGED SHORT VOLATILITY TRADE GOES or, Managing and Mitigating the 2014 CNH FX TARF blowup (Author’s note: I wrote this a year or so back for a few friends on Finance Twitter who wanted to know what FX TARFs were and what effect the huge vol overhang from USDCNH TARFs would have on the spot market. I figured that the shenanigans in USDCNY yesterday made it an appropriate time to dig this up and republish it for a IT'S NOT JUST IRS: THE EMBEDDED LAWSUIT OPTION IN FX Walter Kurtz at Sober Look had a great piece a few weeks ago, where he wryly suggested a way to make money if you don’t like that IRS the bank’s sold you: default on the payments and sue the bank. (Note: this is not an actual way to make money, and also not a good idea if you don’t like angry traders hunting you down.) The “sue the bank” option has a long and storied history in HERSTATT RISK IS NOT DEAD Back in the seventies, a German bank named Herstatt Bank earned an ignominious place in history. It opened for business one sunny summer’s day, and halfway through the day, it settled some of its outstanding FX transactions by taking in a whole bunch of Deutschmarks - the idea being that later in the day, when its US clearing bank opened for business, it would pay out the US dollars that RECIPEBLOGGING · JOSH GIERSCH Found this one in Penn and Teller’s How To Play With Your Food. Ingredients 1 egg 1⁄2 cup buttermilk (apparently 1⁄4 cup milk and 1⁄4 cup vinegar also works. RANT · JOSH GIERSCH One of the larger investment scandals in Singapore - a city which is not short of investment scandals - was the saga surrounding Profitable Group, a land-banking investment firm that collapsed in 2009, taking tens of millions of dollars of investor funds with it. MONEY · JOSH GIERSCH Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to themid-1.20s.
REVIEW · JOSH GIERSCH I took the plunge today and bought the Mac I’ve been wanting ever since Tiger was released. It’s a 12” Combo-drive Powerbook; when closed, it’s small enough to hide under an A4 sheet. WHAT'S MINE IS YOURS; WHAT'S YOURS IS MINED · JOSH GIERSCH (I was going to turn this into a tweetstorm, but it’s a bit over the line for what would be a reasonable-length tweetstorm and also I am an old fart who thinks tweetstorming is unwieldy. Am I the only one who thinks tweetstorms are kind of annoying? Apparently I am.) The big news in bitcoin-land today is the nine-figure-USD evaporation of the Mycoin exchange in Hong Kong (the SCMP article is THE OLD NEW THING: TURNING JOSH.SG STATIC · JOSH GIERSCH Fifteen years ago, when I spun up what became josh.sg, Movable Type was the de rigeur blogging platform, the CMS before any of us even really knew what a “CMS” was. It was Perl (with all the quirks that that implies); it was static (PHP-powered dynamic page generation was still TK); but it still meant that any idiot could post content on the web without having to learn to wrangle HTML. THE MILLION-DOLLAR PIZZA · JOSH GIERSCH In 2010, a Florida man parted with 10,000 units of a new-fangled anarcho-currency thing called “bitcoins” in return for two hot, fresh, tasty pizzas. At the time, that was about $40 worth of these “buttcoins” (NSFW), so that was already quite an expensive pizza. (Must’ve been a pretty serious case of the munchies.) Three years later, and Bitcoin has boomed, busted, and boomed again. WHEN 20,000 REAL ESTATE AGENTS DISAPPEAR · JOSH GIERSCH Singapore has, according to estimates, about thirty thousand real estate agents in a city of five million people. Or had, until last Friday night. I was on my thirty-somethingth Hendricks and tonic when the clock rolled over from Friday to Saturday, and I completely missed the moment when more than twenty thousand real estate agents disappeared. From Channel News Asia (Singapore’s own 24 HOW MANY ZEROES DOES ONE COUNTRY NEED? · JOSH GIERSCH Because the last post was so popular: ZimbabweanEquities.com has printed yesterday’s OMIR at somewhere north of 164 trillion to the USD. Now, even for Zimbabwe, that seemed kinda high. But Old Mutual’s closing price yesterday in Harare was ZW$300,000,000,000; Ditto in London was 92.8p. The ratio is 1:1, so 1 GBP is worth 300 billion / 0.928, or about 323 billion ZWD; GBP/USD late TRADING WHILE INSOLVENT IS APPARENTLY FINE IF YOU'RE A Amid the fiasco of MtGox’s apparent collapse last night (acquisition? rebranding? god knows), some kind person leaked MtGox’s “Crisis Strategy Draft”. It’s an internal Powerpoint that appears to describe a plan for shutting down MtGox and relaunching it as “Gox” - a new, trustworthy Bitcoin exchange from the people who brought you this. And this. And there is _so much_ ickystuff
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RETURN TO ZIMBABWE: THE OLD MUTUAL IMPLIED RATEAug 11, 2019
Let’s hop in the hot tub time machine and head back to the other financial crisis of 2008. While Bear was having two-dollar bills taped to its headquarters, Lehman was turning into Less-Than, and Citibank was living up to its Shi nickname, Zimbabwe was having its own economic meltdown despite being pretty much cut off from the rest of the world’s economies. Zimbabwe’s problem was hyperinflation—the second-fastest episode of hyperinflation in history, as it turned out. AN INTEREST RATES PRIMER FOR CRYPTOCURRENCY FOLKSJan 3, 2019
I’ve banged on a little bit on Twitter about how digital asset markets are continually recapitulating discoveries from fiat markets (securitization, credit-default swaps, corporate actions oh wait no disregard that). But aside from an effort by Genesis Trading, there’s been a surprising lack of interest or development in crypto interest rate markets. From what I’ve heard (and @ me if I’m wrong), crypto lending markets are not big. You can borrow bitcoin and other major cryptocurrencies for shorting or market-making purposes, but the rates are stiff (8-10% on cash-collateralised loans) andvolumes are small.
ADDING TLS TO YOUR S3 STATIC SITE WITH CLOUDFRONTMay 22, 2018
Step n+1 in the process of moving josh.sg to a static site (steps 0 through n are right here) was to enable TLS encryption. Gone are the days when you had to fork out squillions of dollars for an SSL certificate if you wanted that fancy padlock in the address bar; these days, Amazon Certificate Manager hands them out for free. If you’re not wedded to the AWS ecosystem, the good folks at Let’s Encrypt hand out free certs as well, with their Clarkes-Third-Law-level magic configuration software. THE OLD NEW THING: TURNING JOSH.SG STATICMay 20, 2018
Fifteen years ago, when I spun up what became josh.sg, Movable Type was the de rigeur blogging platform, the CMS before any of us even really knew what a “CMS” was. It was Perl (with all the quirks that that implies); it was static (PHP-powered dynamic page generation was still TK); but it still meant that any idiot could post content on the web without having to learn to wrangle HTML. POUNDED BY THE POUND: SPORTS DIRECT’S HEDGES AND THE CABLE FLASHCRASH
Dec 6, 2016
Introduction Just after midnight London time on October 7th, 2016, GBPUSD (henceforth “cable”, henceforth “betty”1) abruptly plunged from 1.2620 to 1.1841 1.1938 1.1378 1.1500 1.14912 in the space of about three minutes, then just as quickly bounced back to the mid-1.20s. Explanations for the move ranged from “algorithms!” to “fat fingers!” to “stop-losses being executed in the typically thin, illiquid markets that prevail between NY and Tokyo timezones” to “hard Brexit” to, probably, “aliens landing on the grounds ofBuckingham Palace!
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