Trader’s Narrative

In light of everything going on, lets have some chuckles:

Think you can do better?

Come up with a funnier caption for the above picture and win this trading T-Shirt:

Carpenters do it with big wood. Doctors do it while you turn your head and cough. Teachers do it with yard sticks. Lawyers do it in front of a jury of their peers. Traders do it….

Drop your wit in the comments below. No kiddin’.

Make sure to leave your correct email so I can get in touch with you for mailing and size info.

This is a hilarious Alex cartoon about the many uses of quant jocks in investment banks:

A slightly better use of a quant jock’s talents would be to find correlating stocks. But what do I know?

For more, check out alexcartoon.com.

You know that Web 2.0 has come into its own when killer apps like extortr show up (in beta no less):

The business model is simple, and yet fiendish: upload an incriminating or embarrassing picture/video, set a price and contact the person implicated via anonymous email then wait for payment. Extortr takes a reasonable 10% cut ($5 minimum).

Admit it, you’ve always wondered what overachieving Wall Street investment bankers do on their tiny amount of down time. Wonder no more. They write a sporadically published e-newsletter titled The Bullpen Report.

If you don’t know what to expect, let me put it to you this way: the Bullpen is the love child of MAD magazine and the Wall Street Journal. Now go get your dose of relief.

Remember “Ginger”? aka Segway? The invention that would give all other inventions an inferiority complex? The invention that would have whole cities ripping out their roads and redesigning themselves around it? Yeah, that one. Whatever happened to all the hype?

Since it’s unveiling in 2002, I’ve only seen two being used in real life. And in both instances, the owners were not using it for its utilitarian purpose but to show off a $5000 glorified scooter.

Now there are some rumblings of an IPO being on the horizon. I guess the early VC investors want out since it is obvious that the project will not generate any cashflow. Might as well offload the thing to the gullible public, right?

The problem, as I see it, is not really with the management of the company or the marketing of the product. Evenso, you have to wonder just how clueless they are when they have only recently made plans to offer leases as a way to mollify the sticker shock. The real problem is that it is ergonomically wrong for a device to make you stand erect, while moving you horizontally.

The human body wasn’t designed for that. In fact, we need to be in constant motion. It doesn’t help either that the Segway offers no real shock absorbers; causing any bump or vibration to travel right up your spine. In the end, the Segway will be a footnote in history. Look for it right beside the citation for the Apple Newton.

And here is Maddox adding insult to injury: