Category: Administration

I have added the Themis Trading Blog to the blogRoll.

Themis Trading bills itself as:

a leading independent, no conflict agency brokerage firm specializing in trading Listed and OTC equities for Institutions. We specialize in helping our clients navigate the fragmented electronic universe, find liquidity and minimize market impact. By design the Themis business model has no conflicts of interest with our clientele, and we do not make markets or provide investment banking services.

They have a lot of material on High Frequency Trading in the blog and elsewhere on their website. Naturally, it’s in their interest to portray HFT as a Bad Thing that has caused the trading process to be so complicated that poor innocent portfolio managers need a little help to keep ahead of the game … but that’s no bad thing. It certainly appears that they know their stuff … although I would need to do more digging before venturing an opinion on their actual skills and the value of their services, of course.

My off-site server host experienced a power outage on the afternoon of August 4; their automatic fail-over to generator power failed; and my websites were down for about eight and a half hours as a result.

My apologies for the inconvenience.

I rarely read the blog any more and consider it’s editorial stance not just intellectually dishonest (possibly too harsh. It might simply be grotesquely sloppy) but, what’s worse, boring.

I regret to advise that PrefInfo.com has recently been hacked. I believe that this hack has been operating for – probably, at least – two days.

The code for the hack has been removed from the index page, and I now seek to engage an expert to review security on the server – the site is hosted on RedHat Linux.

Please feel free to suggest experts.

I have completed the work on my corporate website, himivest.com, and everything should be back to normal.

There is the possibility that eMails sent during the maintenance period went astray – so if you sent me anything important between, say, 5pm April 14 and 9am April 15 and I haven’t responded, please try again.

My corporate website, www.himivest.com, will shortly be undergoing maintenance and will be unavailable for a short period.

During the maintenance period, a short advisory will appear instead of the index page. Links to the site – from here and from other sites – may not work, or may be out of date.

I will post again once service has been restored.

I have removed Thomas Palley’s Blog from the blogroll.

It is moribund.

I haven’t read much of Bronte Capital, but I like what I see! The blog has been favourably reviewed by Felix Salmon.

The identification is not robust, but I believe that the author, John Hempton, was a Senior Analyst with Australia’s Platinum Asset Management. There is a Canadian connection with unsupported allegations that Mr. Hempton was involved – somehow – with the shorts’ attack on Fairfax. There is a John Hempton named in a class action lawsuit against SAC regarding Fairfax, but whether the lawsuit’s John Hempton is the same as the other John Hemptons named here is not clear. There is a similar reference in Fairfax’s lawsuit.

I have added a link to the OANDA Econostats website, under the heading “Broker Research”.

It shows a lot of the major indicators from the major economies in convenient form – there’s nothing particularly unique about it, but it’s a good collection of quickly available data.

Following the discovery that PrefBlog was hacked, software has been updated.

I am now using WordPress 2.6.1

Please let me know if any pop-ups or whatnot appear on your machine following a visit to PrefBlog. And, again, my apologies to those who were inconvenienced or merely puzzled.