text:
15 results back to index
Expected Returns: An Investor's Guide to Harvesting Market Rewards by Antti Ilmanen
Amazon: amazon.com — amazon.co.uk — amazon.de — amazon.fr
Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, asset-backed security, availability heuristic, backtesting, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, debt deflation, deglobalization, delta neutral, demand response, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Flash crash, framing effect, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, global reserve currency, Google Earth, high net worth, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, incomplete markets, index fund, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, market friction, market fundamentalism, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, mittelstand, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, New Journalism, oil shock, p-value, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, private sector deleveraging, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Robert Shiller, savings glut, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic volatility, survivorship bias, systematic trading, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, value at risk, volatility arbitrage, volatility smile, working-age population, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game
The full integration of all countries into global markets is a hoped-for outcome, not a reality. Market frictions and illiquidity premia The impact of supply–demand factors—and of investor irrationalities—on asset prices is made possible by market frictions. Frictions related to illiquidity, funding constraints, and trading costs, as well as counterparty risk, agency concerns, and other information problems can be first-order important, as the 2008 experience shows. Bearish expectations, elevated risk, and risk aversion do not alone explain the distressed price levels of securitized bonds and other assets. Many financial intermediaries and investors became forced sellers as market frictions prevented them and other investors from taking advantage of good deals or nearly riskless arbitrage opportunities.
Opportunities that appeared compelling over the long horizon could not be taken due to the possibility that further de-levering and related mark-to-market volatility would make the investment positions unsustainable over the short run. A diverse literature on market frictions explains why asset prices might deviate from fair values or respond sluggishly to new information. However, few asset-pricing models relate asset risk premia to market frictions such as funding and liquidity constraints. Garleanu–Pedersen (2009a) propose a model in which the CAPM risk premium is boosted when binding funding constraints make capital scarce, while Acharya–Pedersen (2005) have adjusted the CAPM to include liquidity-related premia. Illiquidity is the most important market friction. Early studies of liquidity premia focused on the cost (rather than the risk) of illiquidity—they observed that greater trading costs when buying and selling assets would reduce expected net returns.
Peso problems and learning stories help in interpreting past return predictability but contain no lessons about future profit opportunities. Market frictions Most academic predictability evidence is presented without taking into account trading costs and other market frictions. It is not surprising, then, that paper profits tend to be most consistent in illiquid assets (e.g., small-cap stocks) or in trading styles that involve high turnover (e.g., short-term reversal). Faced with evidence of profitable trading strategies, it is always reasonable to question whether trading cost estimates (including both direct costs and market impact) have been understated. Fortunately, newer studies increasingly adjust profits for trading costs, financing costs, short-selling constraints, and other market frictions. While the limits-to-arbitrage literature explains why speculative capital is generally scarce, these adjustments explain why certain paper regularities are harder to exploit in practice than others.
The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan
Amazon: amazon.com — amazon.co.uk — amazon.de — amazon.fr
Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Brownian motion, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable, clean water, conceptual framework, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, winner-take-all economy
Airbnb is an epic leap forward when compared to the epic leap of faith involved in renting a room via its predecessors, the classified ads or Craigslist. But let's not confuse a set of groundbreaking market innovations with the end of market frictions. Yes, there are entire websites devoted to Airbnb horror stories—the trashed homes, the tenant-turned-squatter. There's an equal number of angry rants directed at Uber. Neither of us rents our idle real estate assets when we're out of town and not because we're old-fashioned. We've also experienced market frictions of a more mundane variety. In writing this book we went to Washington to interview George Akerlof of market-for-lemons fame. As a bit of add-on market research, one of us, Ray, decided to rent an apartment for the night via Airbnb. The renter's credentials were impeccable.
But to get your $60 billion valuation, you need to create as many frictions as possible for everyone else. Although proponents of the sharing economy tout its ability to reduce market frictions, the only way they're going to make the kinds of profits they (and their investors) want is to create new ones. That's something they're not interested in talking about to the public at large, or to their representatives in government. This leaves a bit of a paradox in the techno-utopian free-market narrative. A great entrepreneur will use technology to create a fantastic new market, then will use technology to set up market frictions to protect it. As entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "Competition Is for Losers."12 Don't get us wrong. We're not faulting the market makers of Silicon Valley nor begrudging them for the profits they've generated and captured.
We need to figure out how to adapt our models to reality, not the other way around. Sharing Economists aren't the only ones trying to recast the world in our model's image. If friction—informational, transactional, contractual—is all that stands between textbook economic models and the functioning of our real economy, then there is a vocal contingent out there ("there" being mostly Silicon Valley) that sees technology as the solution. When viewed through the lens of market frictions, the much-hyped notion of the sharing economy can be seen as an effort to bring free-market salvation to bricks, mortars, and automobiles. If you've ever tried to hail a taxi in San Francisco or rent a room in Washington, DC, you know the frictions of which we speak. The Bay Area's sprawl, combined with strict regulations on the cab and livery businesses, used to leave you at the mercy of the two thousand or so taxi medallion holders that covered San Francisco's 230 square miles.
Efficiently Inefficient: How Smart Money Invests and Market Prices Are Determined by Lasse Heje Pedersen
Amazon: amazon.com — amazon.co.uk — amazon.de — amazon.fr
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, algorithmic trading, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Black-Scholes formula, Brownian motion, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, frictionless, frictionless market, Gordon Gekko, implied volatility, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, late capitalism, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market clearing, market design, market friction, merger arbitrage, money market fund, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, paper trading, passive investing, price discovery process, price stability, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, survivorship bias, systematic trading, technology bubble, time value of money, total factor productivity, transaction costs, value at risk, Vanguard fund, yield curve, zero-coupon bond
If a country fails to invest enough, its capital stock decreases as it depreciates and becomes obsolete. One driver of investment is how low the real interest rate is, which depends in part on the inflation risk premium (i.e., stable inflation is best) and the rule of law. Also, supply shocks can arise from changes in labor-market frictions (sticky wages, search frictions, and rigid labor laws), product-market frictions (sticky prices and anticompetitive corporate measures), and capital-market frictions (market and funding illiquidity) leading to unemployment and lower capital utilization. For instance, a systemic banking crisis slows growth because the ability to finance projects is a driver of investment. In the long run, output depends on supply factors such as technological progress and population growth. 11.4.
., salaries to traders, computers, rent, legal fees, and auditors). Investors are willing to bear these costs and fees when they are outweighed by the profits that the manager is expected to extract from the efficiently inefficient market. How close are prices and returns to their fully efficient values in an efficiently inefficient market? Well, because of competition, securities' returns net of all the relevant market frictions—transaction costs, liquidity risk, and funding costs—are very close to their fully efficient levels in the sense that consistently beating the market is extremely difficult. However, despite returns being nearly efficient, prices can deviate substantially from the present value of future cash flows. To understand this apparent paradox, note that the return to buying a cheap stock, say, depends both on the price today and the price tomorrow.
The Law of One Price breaks down when arbitrage opportunities arise in currency markets (defying the covered interest rate parity), credit markets (the CDS-bond basis), convertible bond markets, equity markets (Siamese twin stock spreads), and option markets. Investors exercise call options and convert convertible bonds before maturity and dividend payments when they need to free up cash or face large short sale costs (defying Merton's Rule). The financial market frictions influence the real economy, and unconventional monetary policy, such as central banks' lending facility, can be important in addressing liquidity draughts.4 TABLE I.1. PRINCIPLES OF NEOCLASSICAL FINANCE AND ECONOMICS VS. THOSE IN AN EFFICIENTLY INEFFICIENT MARKET Neoclassical Finance and Economics Efficiently Inefficient Markets Modigliani–Miller Irrelevance of capital structure Capital structure matters because of funding frictions Two-Fund Separation Everyone buys portfolios of market and cash Investors choose different portfolios depending on their individual funding constraints Capital Asset Pricing Model Expected return proportional to market risk Liquidity risk and funding constraints influence expected returns Law of One Price and Black–Scholes No arbitrage, implied derivative prices Arbitrage opportunities arise as demand pressure affects derivative prices Merton's Rule Never exercise a call option and never convert a convertible, except at maturity/dividends Optimal early exercise and conversion free up cash, save on short sale costs, and limit transaction costs Real Business Cycles and Ricardian Equivalence Macroeconomic irrelevance of policy and finance Credit cycles and liquidity spirals driven by the interaction of macro, asset prices, and funding constraints Taylor Rule Monetary focus on interest rate policy Two monetary tools are interest rate (the cost of loans) and collateral policy (the size of loans) II.
Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms by David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee
Amazon: amazon.com — amazon.co.uk — amazon.de — amazon.fr
Airbnb, Alvin Roth, big-box store, business process, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Lyft, M-Pesa, market friction, market microstructure, mobile money, multi-sided market, Network effects, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, Victor Gruen, winner-take-all economy
That's the sort of problem that an important, but until recently overlooked, type of business sets out to solve by helping parties who have something valuable to exchange find each other, get together, and do a deal. Multisided Platforms In 1998, this important type of business didn't have a name. That's surprising, in retrospect. Many businesses had been built to reduce these sorts of market frictions, which economists tend to call transaction costs. Their basic business model had been around for thousands of years. But business schools didn't teach classes on how to start or run businesses that help different parties get together to exchange value. Economists didn't have a clue how these businesses worked. In fact, the companies that reduced these market frictions charged prices and adopted other strategies that economic textbooks insisted no sensible business would do. Now we call these businesses multisided platforms.2 Don't let the economists' unsexy name fool you.3 Multisided platforms are anything but boring.
The bigger the friction, the greater the value the platform can potentially provide, the greater the opportunity for getting participants on board, and the greater the chance for the platform to make money. Knowing which type of participants benefits the most from eliminating that friction can guide decisions on ignition strategies as well as on pricing. Sometimes, as with OpenTable, the platform drastically reduces a clear market friction, and the issue is whether the friction is big enough to enable the platform to earn adequate revenue to cover all the costs of launching and running the platform. In other cases, the platform pioneer has identified a new way for participants to interact—one that no one recognized because there was no way to do it. People and restaurants were already making and taking reservations before OpenTable came along.
Less than ten years later, in 2014, more than 84 percent of Kenyan mobile phone users, including many of the very poor, were able to use their mobile phones to transfer money to each other, to pay their bills, and to pay at stores.7 People can now also use new financial services available through their mobile money accounts to save money and take out loans, and many do.8 Increasingly, stores are accepting mobile money for payment. The way this happened in Kenya is a remarkable story of how a company figured out how to ignite a multisided platform in trying circumstances, to massively reduce important market frictions, and to provide financial services to millions of impoverished people. And it is a story of how multisided platforms—M-PESA and other mobile money schemes that have started in Kenya and elsewhere—are leapfrogging traditional industries. Kenyans don't need to rely on banks for many financial services. And while it is too soon to tell, Kenyan merchants and consumers may end up using mobile money instead of traditional payment cards and point-of-sale equipment.
How I Became a Quant: Insights From 25 of Wall Street's Elite by Richard R. Lindsey, Barry Schachter
Amazon: amazon.com — amazon.co.uk — amazon.de — amazon.fr
Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andrew Wiles, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, Brownian motion, business process, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, centre right, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized markets, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial innovation, fixed income, full employment, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, John von Neumann, linear programming, Loma Prieta earthquake, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, merger arbitrage, Myron Scholes, Nick Leeson, P = NP, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, performance metric, prediction markets, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, six sigma, sorting algorithm, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Levy, stochastic process, systematic trading, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, young professional
It was a lot of fun. No data, no computer even—just pen and paper. I remember making ample use of hyperbolic tangent functions to represent the value of information without having to worry about my estimates of expected returns getting too far above the bid or below the offer. Modeling stocks in a microstructure framework, for the purpose of earning a profit, is all about modeling market frictions. Bid/offer spreads are a market friction; so is the fact that markets have to open and close and that you cannot trade in unlimited size. This was hardly sexy stuff in the early 1990s, when all the rage was customized curvature in the form of structured derivative products or over-the-counter options. At that time, quantitative finance was all about improving upon Black-Scholes. I loved being apart from the crowd.
Everything I had seen in the finance literature up to this point searched for market anomalies using closing prices or assumed continuous, single-price processes. And yet, this was not the way the world worked, I thought. Stocks trade in a double-auction framework. A trade results from someone hitting a bid, taking an offer, or two sides agreeing in the middle. So looking at how stocks moved short-term meant studying market frictions and the discreteness of how stocks moved from bid/offer to bid/offer. As far as I could tell, no one had studied this before. There was no box; so thinking out of it was all one could do. It was then I figured out how I wanted to make my mark. JWPR007-Lindsey April 30, 2007 16:14 Andrew J. Sterge 325 The story of APS seems to me a neat lesson in how quantitative finance can evolve from humble roots.
See Grinold research, difference, 35–36 scientists, 34–42 Ziff-Davis sale, 307 BASIC (computer language), 113–114 Basket options, 298 Basle CAD II, requirements, 236 Batterymarch Fellowship, establishment. See Schulman "Beating the Foreign Exchange Markets" (Sweeney), 190 Beder, Tanya Styblo, 285–294 Bedriftsøkonomusik Institutt (BI), 153–154 "Behavior of Stock Prices, The" (Fama), 266 Berman, Gregg E., 49–66 Bermudan Monte Carlo techniques, 174 Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Award, 192 Best practices, analysis (absence), 128 Bid/offer spreads, market friction, 325 381 Binary options (pricing), call spreads (usage), 122 Binomial trees, trinomial tree extension, 124 Blacher, Guillamume, 167 Black, Fischer, 11, 88, 172, 224 analytic software, development, 23 input, 217 Kahn visit, 44–45 Leinweber, meeting, 23 predecessor, 228 Black boxes, usage, 209 Black-Scholes and Beyond (Chriss), 124–125, 132 Black-Scholes-Merton option pricing formula, 278 Bloom, Norman, 25 Bloomberg, Mike (employ).
Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets by John McMillan
Amazon: amazon.com — amazon.co.uk — amazon.de — amazon.fr
accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, Deng Xiaoping, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, first-price auction, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, George Gilder, global village, Hernando de Soto, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, income per capita, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job-hopping, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, lone genius, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, means of production, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, ought to be enough for anybody, pez dispenser, pre–internet, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, proxy bid, purchasing power parity, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Stewart Brand, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, War on Poverty, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, yield management
Ronald Coase complained that the market has a "shadowy role" in economic theory, and "discussion of the market itself has entirely disappeared." The Nobel laureates' critique has now been addressed. Modern economics has a lot to say about the workings of markets. Theorists have opened up the black box of supply and demand and peered inside. Game theory has been brought to bear on the processes of exchange. Examining markets up close, the new economics emphasizes market frictions and how they are kept in check. In 2001, this work received recognition with the award of the Nobel Prize in economics to George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Joseph Stiglitz for laying the foundation, as the Nobel citation said, "for a general theory of markets with asymmetric information." Expressed in mathematics and impenetrable jargon, these new ideas reside obscurely in the technical journals.
Because of the buyers' cost of searching, the merchants make a large profit. Big effects can come from small transaction costs. Today's economics has the problem of information at its core. The "biggest new concept in economics in the last thirty years," Kenneth Arrow said in 2000, "is the development of the importance of information, along with the dispersion of information."4 Two kinds of market frictions arise from the uneven supply of information. There are search costs: the time, effort, and money spent learning what is available where for how much. And there are evaluation costs, arising from the difficulties buyers have in assessing quality. A successful market has mechanisms that hold down the costs of transacting that come from the dispersion of information. Search costs can cause markets to malfunction in large and small ways.
Firms that contract out some of their production—buying rather than making—place their trust in the market mechanism. If markets achieve such impressive efficiencies, why are so many transactions deliberately taken out of the market and put into the planned sub-economies that are firms? Why isn't everyone an independent contractor instead of a hired employee? The answer is that firms exist as a response to market frictions. Sometimes it is less expensive to run a hierarchy than to use the market. Whether a firm produces its inputs in-house or procures them from other firms depends on the relative costs of each form of transaction. One of the factors affecting this comparison, as Ronald Coase wrote in 1937, is the efficiency with which markets work. Where the transaction costs of using the market are high, firms tend to make inputs themselves.
High-Frequency Trading: A Practical Guide to Algorithmic Strategies and Trading Systems by Irene Aldridge
Amazon: amazon.com — amazon.co.uk — amazon.de — amazon.fr
algorithmic trading, asset allocation, asset-backed security, automated trading system, backtesting, Black Swan, Brownian motion, business process, capital asset pricing model, centralized clearinghouse, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, computerized trading, diversification, equity premium, fault tolerance, financial intermediation, fixed income, high net worth, implied volatility, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, law of one price, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, p-value, paper trading, performance metric, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Small Order Execution System, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, systematic trading, trade route, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-sum game
Tough market conditions, an unexpected change in regulation, or terrorist events can destroy credible public companies overnight. r Transaction costs may wipe out all the profitability of stat-arb trading, particularly for investors deploying high leverage or limited capital. r The bid-ask spread may be wide enough to cancel any gains obtained from the strategy. r Finally, the pair's performance may be determined by the sizes of the chosen stocks along with other market frictions—for example, price jumps in response to earnings announcements. Careful measurement and management of risks, however, can deliver high stat-arb profitability. Gatev, Goetzmann, and Rouwenhorst (2006) document that the out-of-sample back tests conducted on the daily equity data from 1967 to 1997 using their stat-arb strategy delivered Sharpe ratios well in excess of 4. High-frequency stat-arb delivers even higher performance numbers.
"Long-Lived Private Information and Imperfect Competition." Journal of Finance 47, 247–270. Hollifield, B., R. Miller and P. Sandas, 2004. "Empirical Analysis of Limit Order Markets." Review of Economic Studies 71, 1027–1063. Horner, Melchior R., 1988. "The Value of the Corporate Voting Right: Evidence from Switzerland," Journal of Banking and Finance 12 (1), 69–84. Hou, K. and T.J. Moskowitz, 2005. "Market Frictions, Price Delay, and the CrossSection of Expected Returns." Review of Financial Studies 18, 981–1020. References 315 Howell, M.J., 2001. "Fund Age and Performance," Journal of Alternative Investments 4. No. 2, 57–60. Huang, R. and H. Stoll, 1997. "The Components of the Bid-ask Spread: A General Approach." Review of Financial Studies 10, 995–1034. Huberman, G. and D. Halka, 2001. "Systematic Liquidity."
Topics in Market Microstructure by Ilija I. Zovko
Amazon: amazon.com — amazon.co.uk — amazon.de — amazon.fr
Brownian motion, computerized trading, continuous double auction, correlation coefficient, financial intermediation, Gini coefficient, information asymmetry, market design, market friction, market microstructure, Murray Gell-Mann, p-value, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs
Order flow and the quality of the market. In Y. Amihud, T. Ho, and R. A. Schwartz, editors, Market Making and the Changing Structure of the Securities Industry. Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, 1985. T. E. Copeland and D. Galai. Information effects on the bid-ask spread. Journal of Finance, 38(5):1457–69, 1983. M. G. Daniels, J. D. Farmer, G. Iori, and E. Smith. Quantitative model of price diffusion and market friction based on trading as a mechanistic random process. Physical Review Letters, 90(10): Article no. 108102, 2003. H. Demsetz. The cost of transacting. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 82:33–53, 1968. P. M. Dixon, J. Weiner, T. Mitchell-Olds, and R. Woodley. Bootstrapping the gini coefficient of inequality. Ecology, 68(5):1548– 1551, 1987. I. Domowitz and J. Wang. Auctions as algorithms: Computerized trade execution and price discovery.
Handbook of Modeling High-Frequency Data in Finance by Frederi G. Viens, Maria C. Mariani, Ionut Florescu
Amazon: amazon.com — amazon.co.uk — amazon.de — amazon.fr
algorithmic trading, asset allocation, automated trading system, backtesting, Black-Scholes formula, Brownian motion, business process, continuous integration, corporate governance, discrete time, distributed generation, fixed income, Flash crash, housing crisis, implied volatility, incomplete markets, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, Menlo Park, p-value, pattern recognition, performance metric, principal–agent problem, random walk, risk tolerance, risk/return, short selling, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process
Moreover, γ (n, N ), MSEFm = MSEF + n2 α̂(n, N ) + nβ̂(n, N ) + where α̂(n, N ) and β̂(n, N ) are defined in Equations (10.26) and (10.27), while γ (n, N ) := γ + 4(E[η2 ]2 + E[η4 ])(2DN ( 2π 2 2π ) − DN ( )). n n We note that if N 2 /n → 0, then lim n2 α̂(n, N ) + nβ̂(n, N ) = 0 n,N →∞ and lim n,N →∞ γ (n, N ) = 8E[η2 ]IV + 2E[η4 ] + 6E[η2 ]2 . (10.29) It follows that the MSE of the Fourier estimator does not diverge, and it is not significantly affected by microstructure noise; in fact, by conveniently choosing N , we obtain that MSEF and MSEFm differ by the positive constant term (Eq. 10.29). We conclude that the Fourier estimator needs no correction in order to be asymptotically unbiased and robust to market frictions of MA(1)-type, that is, the microstructure noise is represented by independent identically distributed random variables. The result is generalized to noise correlated with the efficient returns in Mancino and Sanfelici (2008). 10.3.2 MONTE CARLO ANALYSIS The theoretical results above can be reproduced by simulating discrete data from a continuous time stochastic volatility model with microstructure noise as in Mancino and Sanfelici (2008).
Using high-frequency data in dynamic portfolio choice. Economet Rev 2008;27/1-3:163–198. Barndorff-Nielsen OE, Graversen SE, Jacod J, Shephard N. Limit theorems for bipower variation in financial econometrics. Economet Theor 2006;22(4):677–719. Barndorff-Nielsen OE, Hansen PR, Lunde A, Shephard N. Realized kernels can consistently estimate integrated variance: correcting realized variance for the effect of market frictions. Working paper, 2005. Barndorff-Nielsen OE, Hansen PR, Lunde A, Shephard N. Designing realized kernels to measure the ex-post variation of equity prices in the presence of noise. Econometrica 2008;76/6:1481–1536. Barndorff-Nielsen OE, Hansen PR, Lunde A, Shephard N. Multivariate realized kernels: consistent positive semi-definite estimators of the covariation of equity prices with noise and non-synchronous trading.
Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
Amazon: amazon.com — amazon.co.uk — amazon.de — amazon.fr
affirmative action, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, Corn Laws, Deng Xiaoping, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, liquidity trap, market friction, minimum wage unemployment, price discrimination, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing
The potential gains, particularly to early entrants, are so great that it would be worth incurring extremely heavy administrative costs.10 Whatever the reason, an imperfection of the market has led to underinvestment in human capital. Government intervention might therefore be rationalized on grounds both of "technical monopoly," insofar as the obstacle to the development of such investment has been administrative costs, and of improving the operation of the market, insofar as it has been simply market frictions and rigidities. If government does intervene, how should it do so? One obvious form of intervention, and the only form that has so far been taken, is outright government subsidy of vocational or professional schooling financed out of general revenues. This form seems clearly inappropriate. Investment should be carried to the point at which the extra return repays the investment and yields the market rate of interest on it.
Empirical Market Microstructure: The Institutions, Economics and Econometrics of Securities Trading by Joel Hasbrouck
Amazon: amazon.com — amazon.co.uk — amazon.de — amazon.fr
Alvin Roth, barriers to entry, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, discrete time, disintermediation, distributed generation, experimental economics, financial intermediation, index arbitrage, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, inventory management, market clearing, market design, market friction, market microstructure, martingale, price discovery process, price discrimination, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Richard Thaler, second-price auction, selection bias, short selling, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, transaction costs, two-sided market, ultimatum game, zero-sum game
At this point, the dealer revises her quotes to $109 bid, offered at $111 (thus bracketing the new value). Each of the other 99 customers will perceive an opportunity cost of $10 (=$110 − $100) and may well attribute this to sloth on the part of their brokers or their systems. Thus, the aggregate opportunity cost is $990, for an aggregate implementation shortfall of $991. It is nonsensical, of course, to suggest that aggregate welfare could be enhanced by this amount if market frictions or broker ineptitude were eliminated. The problem is that the benchmark price of π0 = $100 does not come close, given the new information, to clearing the market. The profits realized by the lucky first trader are akin to lottery winnings. Individual traders might attempt to gain advantage by increasing the speed of their order submission linkages, but because only one trader can arrive first, the situation is fundamentally a tournament (in the economic sense). 14.2.1 The Implementation Cost for Liquidity Suppliers Is implementation cost a useful criterion for liquidity suppliers?
Beyond the Random Walk: A Guide to Stock Market Anomalies and Low Risk Investing by Vijay Singal
Amazon: amazon.com — amazon.co.uk — amazon.de — amazon.fr
3Com Palm IPO, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, capital asset pricing model, correlation coefficient, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, fixed income, index arbitrage, index fund, information asymmetry, liberal capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, margin call, market friction, market microstructure, mental accounting, merger arbitrage, Myron Scholes, new economy, prediction markets, price stability, profit motive, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, selection bias, Sharpe ratio, short selling, survivorship bias, transaction costs, Vanguard fund
First, it is not clear that those mispricings actually occur, given the noise in estimates. Second, trading strategies are not easily amenable to long holding periods. Short-term price patterns considered here are of two kinds: the pattern could be a form of price drift, where the price continues to move in the same direction, or it could be a price reversal where the 56 Short-Term Price Drift price moves in the opposite direction. These price patterns may be due to market frictions, a result of market inefficiency, or related to information arrival. The earliest documentation of short-term price drift is related to earnings announcements, in which it was found that firms with surprisingly good earnings earn abnormal returns of about 2 percent in the following three months, whereas firms with surprisingly bad earnings lose abnormally. Evidence of price drift suggests that information in the earnings announcement is not immediately and fully reflected in prices.
Market Risk Analysis, Quantitative Methods in Finance by Carol Alexander
Amazon: amazon.com — amazon.co.uk — amazon.de — amazon.fr
asset allocation, backtesting, barriers to entry, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, constrained optimization, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, discounted cash flows, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, implied volatility, interest rate swap, market friction, market microstructure, p-value, performance metric, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, value at risk, volatility smile, Wiener process, yield curve, zero-sum game
Now in place of (I.3.141) we write dXt = − Xtdt + dBt (I.3.142) The parameter is called the rate of mean reversion and the parameter is called the long term value of X. In Section II.5.3.7 we prove that the discrete time version of (I.3.142) is a stationary AR(1) model. I.3.7.3 Stochastic Models for Asset Prices and Returns Time series of asset prices behave quite differently from time series of returns. In efficient markets a time series of prices or log prices will follow a random walk. More generally, even in the presence of market frictions and inefficiencies, prices and log prices of tradable assets are integrated stochastic processes. These are fundamentally different from the associated returns, which are generated by stationary stochastic processes. Figures I.3.28 and I.3.29 illustrate the fact that prices and returns are generated by very different types of stochastic process. Figure I.3.28 shows time series of daily prices (lefthand scale) and log prices (right-hand scale) of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) DJIA 12000 9.4 Log DJIA 9.3 11000 9.2 10000 9.1 9000 9 8000 8.9 Sep-01 May-01 Jan-01 Sep-00 May-00 Jan-00 Sep-99 May-99 Jan-99 Sep-98 May-98 8.8 Jan-98 7000 Figure I.3.28 Daily prices and log prices of DJIA index 56 This is not the only possible discretization of a continuous increment.
The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Alex Hyde-White
Amazon: amazon.com — amazon.co.uk — amazon.de — amazon.fr
bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, cashless society, central bank independence, centre right, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency peg, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, income inequality, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, light touch regulation, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market friction, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, open economy, paradox of thrift, pension reform, pensions crisis, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, working-age population
Since the start of the euro, it continues as what is sometimes called ERM II, a band linking the Danish krone to the euro. 37 Though the basic idea of full employment is clear—that everyone who would like a job can get one at the prevailing wages for those with the individual's skills and talents—there is some controversy over the precise definition of full employment. The general notion is that the labor market is just sufficiently loose—with job seekers matching employers looking for employees—that there is no inflationary pressure. Because of labor market frictions—it takes time to find a good match between employers and employees—this "natural rate" is greater than zero, normally around 2 to 3 percent. Unemployment might also exist because of rigidities in the adjustment of relative wages—the labor market for skilled labor might be so tight that wages are rising, but there may still be unemployment of unskilled workers. This level of unemployment is sometimes referred to as structural unemployment.
Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies by Tim Koller, McKinsey, Company Inc., Marc Goedhart, David Wessels, Barbara Schwimmer, Franziska Manoury
Amazon: amazon.com — amazon.co.uk — amazon.de — amazon.fr
activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, barriers to entry, Basel III, BRICs, business climate, business process, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable, cloud computing, commoditize, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, discounted cash flows, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, energy security, equity premium, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, iterative process, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, market friction, meta analysis, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, p-value, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, six sigma, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, survivorship bias, technology bubble, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond
But some managers and academics claim that the lower price should make the stock more attractive for capital-constrained investors, thereby increasing demand, improving liquidity, and leading to higher returns for shareholders.41 In many cases, a stock split is indeed accompanied by positive abnormal returns to shareholders (see Exhibit 5.16).42 The abnormal returns have nothing to do with the split as such but are simply a function of self-selection and signaling. Self-selection is the tendency of companies to split their stocks into lower denominations because of a prolonged rise in their share price, as shown in Exhibit 5.16. As a result, one should expect any sample of companies that 40 R. D. Boehme and B. R. Danielsen report over 6,000 stock splits between 1950 and 2000: "Stock-Split Post-Announcement Returns: Underreaction or Market Friction?" Financial Review 42 (2007): 485–506. D. Ikenberry and S. Ramnath report over 3,000 stock splits between 1988 and 1998: "Underreaction to Self-Selected News Events: The Case of Stock Splits," Review of Financial Studies 15 (2002): 489–526. 41 There is ample evidence to show that this is not the case: after a split, trading volumes typically decline, and brokerage fees and bid-ask spreads increase, indicating lower liquidity, if anything.


text:
Over the Labor Day weekend we headed to the mountains. We found that the squirrels and chipmunks had been quite busy with the pine cones. They left pine cobs scattered everywhere about the yard. Some people say that they can tell if the Winter is going to be cold and long if the squirrels are especially busy in the Fall. Our patio was a mess of pine cobs. I'm hoping for a long, snow filled, Winter.
One of the things we like about the mountains is that the pace seems so much slower than the rest of our world. There is a place where musical artists come to share their songs with the locals on the weekend evenings. Friday night was one of those special events. Karl Larson was singing. He especially likes to sing Cat Stevens and Jim Croce. He looks so happy when he is singing. There is even a brighter spot to his performing though. His daughter, Karlene, comes and sings with him too sometimes.
What makes this so special is that you then have everything from Operator to Girl Crush. She keeps him up to date. It is so much fun to listen and watch them interact.
Fall is certainly settling in and you can see it everywhere.
We hiked to Eureka Lake and found the water levels to be low but still amazingly beautiful. As we sat out having lunch by the lake, we talked about how good our life is.
There is nothing better in life then getting older and realizing how good we have it in the USA. It's not perfect but it's pretty grand. We are the fortunate ones.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Workforce and Future Skills Report
Local Government NSW and its state and territory associations undertook research in 2017-18 on the local government workforce and its future skills needs.
The research focused on:
- The demographic profile of employees in local government
- Skills shortages, skills gaps and emerging skill needs of councils
- Uptake of apprenticeships and traineeships in councils
- Issues around accessing training to address skills gaps
The research drew on data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a survey conducted of all councils in Australia and data from the National Centre for Vocational Education and Research (NCVER).
The NSW report
Local Government Workforce and Future Skills Reports - NSW (PDF, 2MB)


text:
It's been raining here since Saturday night, and isn't supposed to quit til Thursday. Oh yeah, it may turn to snow for a while at some point. It's a good thing knitting is an all weather sport!!!
I went to Yarnover on Saturday. It's a big knitting deal, held in Hopkins, Minnesota, every year. I didn't sign up for any classes. I had to bring Superblonde to the airport, so I decided to hang out and see a few friends, and check out the market. Yep! I bought yarn. Duh!!!
The most exciting thing was that I got to see Sheryl's Coat of Many Colors.
This isn't hers, but it's close. I purchased the kit in Washington last fall. I'd done my test swatch, but just hadn't gotten around to starting it. I was picturing it as being kind of stripey. It wasn't at all. It was just gorgeous. So Sunday morning before church, (because I'm old and can't sleep in any more) I wound yarn and started it. It starts out with 560 something stitches, so I don't have much to show for it, but I'll blog it eventually.
I do have two finishes to show you. I made another necklace from Betsy Harshberg. She was teaching at Yarnover so I was able to show it to her.
I started it Friday afternoon and finished it Saturday morning before I left for Minneapolis. It goes perfectly with my Vitamin D, which wasn't planned.
Not a great photo, but you get the idea.
I also finished my Romi Mystery Shawl.
I used Blue Moon Fiber Arts Sock That Rock lightweight. The color is Vancouver Violet. The variegated yarn is Seacoast Handpaints in Spring Storm. I had about 2 yards of the Violet left when I finished.
And now I'm going to go cut out Dreamboy's graduation quilt. His Nana is making it for him and we're running out of time. It's an easy quilt, but will be really cool. I'll be sure to blog it when its finished.


text:
WASHINGTON (AP) - The next president will inherit a record budget deficit approaching $490 billion, a Bush administration official said today.
The official said the deficit was being driven to an all-time high by the sagging economy and the stimulus payments being made to 130 million households in an effort to keep the country from falling into a deep recession. A deficit approaching $490 billion would easily surpass the record deficit of $413 billion set in 2004.
The administration official spoke on condition of anonymity because the new estimate had not been formally released. Administration officials were scheduled to do that at a news conference later today.
The new figure actually underestimates the deficit, since it leaves out about $80 billion in war costs. In a break from tradition - and in violation of new mandates from Congress - the White House did not include its full estimate of war costs.
White House Press Secretary Dana Perino had no comment on the $490 billion figure.
She told reporters that the White House and lawmakers acknowledged months ago that they were going to increase the deficit by approving a short-term boost for the slumping economy.
The White House had earlier predicted next year's deficit at $407 billion. Figures for the 2008 budget year ending Sept. 30 might also set a record.
The numbers represent about 3 percent of the size of the economy, which is the deficit measure seen as most relevant by economists. That's considerably smaller than the deficits of the 1980s and early 1990s, when Congress and earlier administrations cobbled together politically painful deficit-reduction packages.
Still, the new figures are so eye-popping in dollar terms that it might restrain the appetite of the next president to add to it with expensive spending programs or new tax cuts. In fact, pressure may build to allow some tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 to expire as scheduled at the end of 2010, with Congress also feeling pressure to curb spending growth.
The deficit for 2007 totaled $161.5 billion, which represented the lowest amount of red ink since an imbalance of $159 billion in 2002. The 2002 performance marked the first budget deficit after four consecutive years of budget surpluses.
That stretch of budget surpluses represented a period when the country's finances had been bolstered by a 10-year period of uninterrupted economic growth, the longest period of expansion in U.S. history.
In his first year in office, helped considerably by projections of continuing surpluses, President George W. Bush drove through a 10-year, $1.3 trillion package of tax cuts.
However, the country fell into a recession in March 2001, and government spending to fight the war on terrorism contributed to pushing the deficit to a record in dollar terms in 2004.
The figures, to be released later, will paint a picture of the financial health of the government that President Bush's successor will inherit, as well as updated predictions of the health of the economy.
Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.


text:
THE SWIISH KITCHEN: Coco Macaroons
March 23rd, 2014
Sorry guys I know it has been a while since the last SWIISH Kitchen post, but to make up for it I have been cooking up a storm and have lots of delicious recipes to share with you all which I'll be posting soon.
I came across a similar version of these Cacao Coconut Macaroons in a magazine but didn't have all the ingredients so I changed it slightly and made my version instead. These macaroons are literally so good for you! They are sugar free (I Quit Sugar readers delight!), full of superfoods and are a filling, healthy and seriously yum treat. Plus, as a bonus they are way too easy to make.
Cacao and Coconut Macaroons
What you'll need:
What to do:
*swiish tip: Try drizzling a little melted dark chocolate over the top of the macaroons to make them even more decadent!


text:
THE FIRE DANCER Cover Reveal
This one's been a long time coming, and I'm so excited to finally be able to share the awesomeness with you! My vampires are spinning in a different direction. It's my pleasure to introduce you to Cirque Macabre and THE FIRE DANCER.
This ain't a love song…
Meet Holly Octane, a burlesque performer that bursts into flames with any extreme emotion. And there's a fine line between love and hate. THE FIRE DANCER is my first step away from romance into straight dark fantasy with a touch of horror. It's twisty and dark. Don't get me wrong, it's a sexy book, but instead of focusing on the romance, it focuses on Holly's journey and what makes her ignite. It also features many of the villains from The Night Songs series, and shows you a different side of them. After all, there is three sides to every story.
First of all, check out this gorgeous cover. I know, I'm talking about my child and everyone's children are beautiful, but my artists deserve a massive shout out. They knocked it out of the park. I found the amazing Daoyi Liu to do the illustration, and Hang Le knew exactly how to make this cover sing.
THE FIRE DANCER is available for preorder (at the special introductory price of 1.99) and on Goodreads.
At Le Cirque Macabre, Holly Octane bursts into flames five nights a week. The stage is where Holly feels most alive. When she's there no one can touch her, and everyone adores her.
Brought to Las Vegas as vampire bait, Holly's connection to the immortals is a mystery. She's one of a kind– traveling through time and igniting when her emotions get too hot to handle. The only people who understand her are an aunt with a hidden agenda and her fortune teller girlfriend, Rainey, who doesn't see a future with Holly in it.
Cash Logan needs Holly, but she's not the reason he came to Vegas. The enigmatic magician seeks Blade Bennett, a vampire that has a power that he shouldn't have–fire. A power that could determine the future of all of vampire kind. Holly's the only one who can help Blade control his fire, but their feelings for each other are too fiery to ignore.
Immortals rule the Vegas night, and not one of them trusts Cash or Blade. If Holly lets them draw her in to this world designed to destroy her, she'll lose everything—the only family she's ever known, and everyone who adores her.
Las Vegas is her stage, and Holly is determined to set the city on fire.
"How long have you been like this?" His gaze ran the length of my robe, and he didn't have to clarify what he meant.
As far as everyone knew, I was twenty-four. "Decades. I think." The concept of time simply made me dizzy.
Cash nodded; my answer didn't surprise him. "You were born north of London in 1781, in a village called Moorfields." My knees buckled, and if I didn't clutch the table, I would have fallen. Even though I knew the answer wasn't going to be something nice and neat like twenty-five years ago in Memphis, actually having the answer blew my mind.
"I remember things that happened before that." I couldn't face him. "And I think I remember you."
"Do you?" Cash ran his fingers lightly along my hair, never touching my body. At first, I was terrified we'd burst into flames. We'd fireproofed my dressing room, but Cash wouldn't survive. This information was just the tip of the iceberg. I needed him to stay alive. "What do you remember?"
Images jumbled in my brain as if someone spun a wheel. I saw Cash, bound, bloody, and burned, surrounded by laughing onlookers. His hair was shorter, and it was a different time, but I knew him. His eyes. No matter what humiliation was bestowed upon him, they remained proud. "Chaos."
His silky laugh almost convinced me I'd been wrong. No one could actually survive the state I pictured Cash in, his skin purple from abuse, weak from starvation, and still have a sense of humor. But those eyes. "That's about right." He moved closer to me, my robe pressed against my skin.
I couldn't let him distract me. "But why do I remember things that happened before that? Like I was there. Is that even possible?"
"If you experienced it, then you made it possible, Holly." His words were soft, and like time, they made me dizzy. "You're a Bleed."
My eyes snapped open. "A what?"
"You're a Bleed. You age much more slowly than mortals,your immortality extends in all directions. Forward, backward, and sideways if it's possible."
I had to turn and face him. Rainey would knock on the door any time now, and I needed to wrap this up before she came. She'd warned me stay away from Cash. We'd been fighting too much lately already. I hated it. "How many of us are there?"
"You mean how many of you are there." Someone knocked on the door softly. I forced my eyes away from Cash, and he stepped back. The knock repeated, more forceful this time. Rainey would be able to sense I wasn't alone, even if she couldn't see Cash. "You might be the only one."
"Then how do you know so much about it?" I kept waiting for the heat to rise in my body, but it didn't. All the triggers, fear and frustration, were there, but no flames. The knocking became frantic.
"Because I do." Cash placed my hat back on my head before he headed to the door. His hand was on the doorknob when he turned back to me. "You've been patient this long, Holly. I want you to need me."


text:
Coming off the heels of his debut mixtape Mr Get Down, Goodie Mob member, Gipp, has his eyes set already on his next album, Zagga. Tonight, he decides to come through and premiere the first single off that album with "Beautiful Lover," featuring Eric Benet.
Produced by DR Freak, the track is another funky, feel-good record that features the soulful vocals of R&B crooner Eric Benét. Speaking on the upcoming album, here's what Gipp had to say about it,
"Zagga represents his signature sound and style. "I am the beginning and the end. There is no you without me," he explains. "The name starts with the end of the alphabet and ends with the beginning. That's the significance of it all. I did it full circle as far as being an artist. That's what I mean by the name of the album, Zagga."
Thoughts on the first single?
Quotable Lyrics:
I'm a beautiful lover, complicated
I'm bad as a mother, come save me
If there's rules to be broke, I'ma break em
I was born to be wild, Im a wild child


text:
By Oliver Lyttelton | www.oliverlyttelton.com
We're already halfway through the fall festival season (with NYFF kicking off this week, and London, Tokyo and the AFI among those still to come), but three of the biggest in terms of notable premieres are all out of the way already, with Venice TIFF and Telluride, having come and gone. From those, we've seen big movies like "Birdman," "The Imitation Game," "Wild," "The Theory Of Everything," "Nightcrawler" and more, with "Gone Girl," "Rosewater," "Inherent Vice" and "Fury" among those premiering shortly. But what of those films that didn't make any of the festivals?
Back in the summer, we posted our wish-list of 50 movies that we hoped would be unveiled sometime this fall, and while most have screened, or will soon enough, there are quite a few candidates that seemed likely at the time that haven't yet surfaced, and almost certainly won't until 2015, possibly even until TIFF or Venice next year. So what are they, and what happened to them? Is it a sign of trouble, or are the filmmakers and producers taking their time to give their work the best bow possible? Take a look below, and let us know if there's anything else you expected to see on the festival circuit that failed to show up.
What Is It? After seven long years away, Todd Haynes returns to the big screen (having made HBO miniseries "Mildred Pierce" a few years back) for this adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's "The Price Of Salt," about the sapphic relationship between a lonely department store employee (Rooney Mara) and the title character, an older divorcee (Cate Blanchett). Kyle Chandler, Sarah Paulson, Jake Lacy and Sleater-Kinney/"Portlandia" mastermind Carrie Brownstein are in the supporting cast, and from what we hear, this is closer to "Far From Heaven" than some of Haynes' other work. The Weinstein Company picked up the film before cameras rolled.
What Happened? With the film wrapping late this spring, it was always touch-and-go whether this would be ready in time for the fall. Some filmmakers are able to turn things around speedily ("Selma," for instance, didn't start shooting until May or June, but arrives this holiday season), and while we hear this is near the finish line, it seems the folks involved are waiting for the right place to present it.
When Will We See It? Cannes seems like the likeliest bet. That said, Haynes has favored Venice in recent years, with "I'm Not There" and "Mildred Pierce" both screening there, so it's possible it won't surface until then(depending on what the Weinsteins think of its awards chances).
For the full article, click here:
Sep 23, 2014
15 Films That Failed To Hit The 2014 Fall Festival Circuit
Posted by Dolphin at 5:27 PM No comments: Links to this post
Sep 17, 2014
Happy Birthday, Kyle Chandler!!!
Today, all of us at Kyle Chandler Central wish Kyle a very Happy Birthday!
Posted by Dolphin at 1:05 AM 2 comments: Links to this post
Sep 15, 2014
Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, and 15 Facts About 'Friday Night Lights' You Never Knew
In honor of Kyle Chandler's Birthday this week, this article with pics and videos is a must for FNLs and Kyle Chandler Fans. Even long term, hard core fans might learn a thing or two they didn't know before. I know I did. (Tom Arnold . . . NBC/Direct TV? Who knew?): http://uproxx.com/tv/2014/09/clear-eyes-full-hearts-and-15-facts-about-friday-night-lights-you-never-knew/2/ Thank you, Amazing Grace!!
Posted by Dolphin at 1:16 PM 1 comment: Links to this post
Sep 3, 2014
Events boost St. David's Foundation Community Fund
Holly Jackson
Emmy Award-winning actor and movie star Kyle Chandler enjoys one of the recent of the Toast of the Town fundraising events with party host and sponsor Patty Chandler.
Memorable moments were celebrated at the 30th anniversary season of the Toast of the Town fundraising series. Benefiting the St. David's Foundation Community Fund and chaired by Westbanker Dinah Street, 18 signature soirees were recently held over five weeks in exceptional homes and distinctive venues.
These themed events were conceptualized to be intimate and special experiences. Two parties in particular were attended highly by Westbankers.
"Lights… Camera… and Plenty of Action" was co-hosted by Westbankers Renata Marsilli and Jeff Ashpitz. Held at their cliff-top, Florentine estate in Seven Oaks, more than 75 glamorous glitterati gathered at the silver screen-themed party. In the circular driveway, a red Mercedes sports car and a sleek, black helicopter set the Hollywood scene.
Word of Mouth catered divine delectables on the poolside veranda. University of Texas student and scholarship recipient Juliette Coronado told the audience she "wanted to change lives through healthcare."
The evening's highlight featured Emmy Award-winning actor and movie star Kyle Chandler of Friday Night Lights, Wolf of Wall Street and Argo. He posed for pictures with admirers on the red carpet and mingled throughout the night.
Chandler said he was not a good speaker, but shared his mantra is "I am no better than anyone else, and no one is better than me." He believes "everyone needs help from time to time."
"An Austin Vibe" showcased iconic originals of live music, trailer cuisine and renowned art at the Umlauf Sculpture Garden. More than 50 partygoers enjoyed a bountiful buffet by Valentina's Tex Mex BBQ and a personalized concert by singer-songwriter Casey McPherson with two Alpha Rev band members. Guests were transfixed on the alternative rock.
UT student and scholarship awardee Amberlee Adams shed tears when telling the crowd she "didn't think college would be attainable."
A record-breaking $1.4 million was raised, including two-to-one matching from the St. David's Foundation.
Proceeds go toward the St. David's Neal Kocurek Scholarship Fund established in memory of the longtime CEO/president whose passion was education. Needs-based scholarships are provided annually to top-ranking, Austin-area high school graduates pursuing health-related careers at Texas colleges and universities. Students are matched with medical mentors who guide this next generation of healthcare professionals.
Since inception in 2005, 285 scholarships have been awarded. This year's increase of 54 scholarships was given to 28 high school recipients who will receive $7,500 per year for up to eight years of undergrad and graduate studies.
Posted by Dolphin at 3:41 PM 1 comment: Links to this post
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)


text:
George Christie, the widely known, liked and respected former President of the Ventura Charter of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club made bail for Labor Day weekend. Christie was arrested August 12.
The Department of Justice issued a release later that day which stated:
"The former president of the Ventura County Chapter of the Hells Angels outlaw motorcycle gang was arrested this morning on federal charges stemming from an extortion plot and the firebombing of two Ventura tattoo shops in 2007."
DOJ Release
"George Christie Jr., 64, of Ventura, was one of four defendants arrested this morning on federal conspiracy, extortion and arson charges contained in a six-count indictment.
"The indictment alleges that Christie, while the president of the Ventura County Chapter of the Hells Angels, conspired to threaten the owners of rival tattoo parlors in an effort to force them to close down their businesses. When the owners remained in business, Christie allegedly conspired to firebomb the businesses."
The widely publicized accusations allege, "that Christie, who was the owner of The Ink House in Ventura, conspired to confront the owners of two other tattoo parlors – Scratch the Surface, of Ventura, and Twisted Ink, of Ventura. The indictment specifically alleges that Christie intended for the confrontations to induce the owners of the rival tattoo parlors to shut down their businesses.
"When the owners of Scratch the Surface and Twisted Ink kept their shops open for business despite the prior threats to shut down, Christie conspired to damage or completely destroy the businesses so they could no longer compete with Christie's tattoo shop, The Ink House, according to the indictment.
"Both Scratch the Surface and Twisted Ink were damaged on July 6, 2007 when Molotov cocktails were thrown into the businesses by individuals acting in furtherance of this conspiracy. At the time of the fire bombings, Twisted Ink was located directly across the street from Ventura High School, while Scratch the Surface – housed in the same building as an occupied residence – was operating next to a pre-school."
According to the release, after the arsons, Christie was "investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation with assistance from the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; the Ventura County Sheriff's Department; and the Ventura Police Department."
Veteran Incarceration Expert
Besides his tattoo parlor, Christie is the founder of a company called Felony Prison Consultants (FPC). The company states its mission as helping "those facing possible incarceration learn how to navigate the perilous path of law enforcement and the criminal justice system. A veteran incarceration expert, Christie gained critical knowledge and experience 'on the inside' when he, himself, faced incarceration."
Christie was imprisoned for a year in 1986 while awaiting trial for conspiracy to commit murder. He was acquitted of those charges. He spent another year in jail in 2011 for allegedly selling prescription drugs. He was released after agreeing to plead guilty to one charge of conspiracy to possess a prescription drug for sale.
Christie's official biography for FPC states that he has, "spent the past four decades as a leader and spokesman of the Hells Angels. He has spearheaded several philanthropic endeavors with Easter Seals, Gulls Wings Children's Museum and the Special Olympics. He was recently petitioned by the Salvation Army to collect Toys for Tots and has worked to organize various blood drives for the Red Cross.
"Christie has appeared as a guest expert on numerous television shows including 60 Minutes, CNN, History Channel, and CBS 2 News."
Christie was freed from federal custody in Los Angeles Friday, September 2 after U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Nguyen ordered him released on $200,000 bail. Christie must wear an electronic monitoring device and is confined to his home except to visit a doctor or his attorney.
If convicted of all the charges against him, Christie could face life imprisonment.


text:
Let me paint you a picture.
I get up and straighten my ombré hair with GHDs. I drink Nescafé. I wear a patterned skirt that I got from H&M. I check my Mac lipstick in the rear view mirror of my Vauxhall Corsa. I have lunch at Subway (Nando's if it's the weekend, Wagamama if it's a Bank Holiday.) I watch old re-runs of Friends every evening while sitting on my Ikea sofa.*
I could be any girl in the world.
Now, before you start thinking that I'm writing about how global brands are ruining culture – or that I'm trying to transcribe my own Trainspotting-esque 'Choose Life' monologue – I'm not. What I'm actually trying to say, in a very long winded and round about kind of way, is that originality is hard. And that – whether they care to admit it or not – a lot of people fundamentally have the same outline of life. (I'm guessing even those #refusetoconform people still watch too much Friends and own a tube of Velvet Teddy.)
It means that when somebody does something different it's hard not to take notice of it. When that something is not only different, it's also brilliant – it's hard to not become completely and utterly compelled by it.
Last week I found myself becoming that exact kind of compelled when I heard about a little someone called, The Door to Door Poet (although his real name is Rowan McCabe.)
In case you couldn't guess from his title (or you thought he was so poetic his title would be ironic) Rowan is a guy who goes from door to door, meeting people, learning their story and then writing amazing poetry for them. It's simple, it's insanely original, and it's actually pretty bold. Because knocking on the door's of strangers and volunteering to write them a poem – at least in some parts of the U.K. – makes him pretty freaking crazy. Seriously…just imagine your real, honest reaction if someone knocked on your door with the promise to write and perform a free poem for you. If you're anything like me you'd slam the door in his face and accuse him of trying to case the joint for a robbery.
Luckily not everyone is quite that skeptical.
Some people in his home town of Newcastle gave him a chance. They spoke to him, they told him things, they gave him permission to run with his creativity and let him write unique poetry just for them, only to marvel at the results and proceed to spread the word about his talent. (It's the kind of thing you do when someone has taken the time to write and perform a poem for you.)
It means that he's now gaining a little more exposure in some parts of the U.K., but he still deserves a lot more. If you ask me he deserves more and more exposure until the publishers listen up and give this guy a book deal already.
Not just because he's actually found a unique way to write and perform his own poetry, or because his work is something which continually makes extraordinary out of the ordinary, but because he's doing something special. Something really special. He's making people smile, and he's doing it by making them feel valued. In a world that chooses reality TV, slut shaming, revenge porn (okay, maybe there's a little bit of Trainspotting in that part) that is pretty spectacular. At the same time he's also pretty funny. Just check out some of the things he's written and you'll see for yourself just how all round gifted he is…
Once you've done that go and tell everyone you know about him. (Not just because he's super talented and deserves to be shouted about, but in case he happens to pop round their house. They'll need to know he's purely there to make rhymes; not to scope out how to get the 42″ flat screen TV through the patio doors.)
*For the people who really know me, I only said that whole Wagamama thing for effect. Same applies to the Ikea sofa.


text:
People do a variety of things to get rid of stress, some of which are healthier than others. A new study from Brigham Young University (BYU) finds that running is particularly effective at dealing with chronic stress and protects your memory.
Running alleviates the negative impacts of stress on the hippocampus, a section of the brain that's in charge of learning and memory, reports EurekAlert.
"Exercise is a simple and cost-effective way to eliminate the negative impacts on the memory of chronic stress," according to study lead author Jeff Edwards, associate professor of physiology and developmental biology at BYU.
The hippocampus has synapses that intensify over time and enable memory formation. This is known as long-term potentiation (LTP). When a person is chronically stressed, these synapses weaken, LTP drops, and memory is adversely impacted. However, if a person exercises while they're feeling stressed, LTP levels don't drop. Instead, they remain normal.
Edwards conducted his research using mice. One group ran on running wheels over a four-week period. The other group did not exercise. Half of each group were then subjected to stressful events such as walking on an elevated platform or swimming in cold water. Edwards' team then analyzed the LTP by performing electrophysiology experiments on the mice's brains.
Stressed mice who ran had much greater LTP than their counterparts who did not exercise. In fact, stressed mice who exercised did just as well in a maze-running experiment that tested their memory as non-stressed mice. The researchers also found that the mice who exercised had fewer memory mistakes than sedentary mice.
The findings show that running is a good way to combat the adverse effects of chronic stress and its impact on the brain.
"The ideal situation for improving learning and memory would be to experience no stress and to exercise," Edwards said. "Of course, we can't always control stress in our lives, but we can control how much we exercise. It's empowering to know that we can combat the negative impacts of stress on our brains just by getting out and running."
The study was published in the journal of Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.
And in case you didn't know, protecting memory under stress isn't the only thing running can do for you. It helps you burn calories and get fit, strengthens your bones and joints, keeps you mentally alert, helps prevent cancer, and helps you live longer.


text:
Join our Mailing List
About Us
Mission and Policies
Our Team
Annual Reports
Our Partners
Religious Freedom
Economic Rights
Parliamentary Outreach
Urgent Action
Activist Tool-Kits
Volunteer For Tibet
Tibet & Canada
Government Relations
Tibetans in Canada
1000 New Tibetans
Community Contacts
Media Releases
World Tibet News
About Tibet
Photo Archive
Talk Tibet Blog
"For a happier, more stable and civilized future, each of us must develop a sincere, warm-hearted feeling of brotherhood and sisterhood."
Dalai Lama
Tibetan Resistance
Stand Up for Tibet
Photo Gallery
A Letter from Tibet: Blood on the Land of Snow
May 1, 2009
Philippa Carrick
Total Politics vol. 11
April 2009
Time is running out for Tibet, says Philippa
Carrick, chief executive of the Tibet Society. If
nothing is done, the rich and unique Tibetan
language, culture and traditions will become part of history
Tibet today belies its mystical image as Shangri
La, land of snow, and is a country under
occupation; its people increasingly marginalised
by the policies of the Chinese government.
The People's Liberation Army first crossed the
border into Tibet in late 1949 under the guise of
'liberating' the Tibetan people. Nearly 10 years
later, on 10 March 1959, thousands of Tibetans
rose up against the occupying Chinese regime,
only to be brutally quashed. Following this
merciless suppression, the Dalai Lama, the
spiritual and temporal leader of the Tibetan
people, was forced to fl ee his country.
Despite worldwide admiration and acclaim for the
Dalai Lama and his nonviolent approach to seeking
justice for his people, world governments have
stood by and done nothing in practical terms to
call China to account. UN resolutions that
express grave concerns for the Tibetan people and
call for the "cessation of practises which
deprive the Tibetan people of their fundamental
human rights and freedoms, including their right
to self-determination" gather dust, and the
ongoing plight of Tibet remains unresolved.
Widespread demonstrations and protests swept
through Tibet last year; the largest since 1959.
These were suppressed by an immediate crackdown,
resulting in the deaths of over 200 Tibetans,
with thousands injured, detained or missing and
an estimated 1,300 still unaccounted for. Tibet
is now effectively under de facto martial law,
with vast numbers of troops and armed police
evident both in Tibet's capital, Lhasa, and many other areas.
In January, the Chinese government re-launched a
'strike hard' campaign to try and prevent further
political protests. Within three days, widespread
raids were conducted in Lhasa. Following these,
the Public Security Bureau rounded up nearly
6,000 for questioning and at least 81 Tibetans were arrested.
Lhasa remains tense; the few undercover
journalists who have managed to visit report a
climate of fear, with a highly visible Chinese
military presence on the streets. Snipers are frequently seen on rooftops.
Despite the Chinese government's relaxation for
foreign media visiting other parts of China,
permissions for Tibet are severely restricted.
There is also minimal access for tourists, with
authorities recently instructing tourist agencies
to cancel trips for the foreseeable future. The
Chinese government also continues to refuse
permission for any independent delegation to visit Tibet.
This drive to isolate and suppress the Tibetan
people reinforces the long-held frustrations and
fears of Tibetans that their basic freedoms,
language, culture and traditions will be lost to future generations.
The few reports that have reached the outside
world show that the spirit of Tibetan people is
unbroken, with news of continuing demonstrations
and defi ance. These range from individuals
carrying the Tibetan flag or shouting "long live
the Dalai Lama" to hundreds of people taking to
the streets calling for human rights, the
release of political prisoners and the right to
hold prayers at festivals. All such displays are
met with immediate, brutal repression. In early
March, a young monk in his twenties set fire to
himself while holding an image of the Dalai Lama
and a Tibetan flag. He was summarily shot three
times by Chinese police and taken away.
Over the last 50 years, the Chinese policy has
effectively been one of colonisation. Measures
such as the aggressive resettlement of Tibetan
nomads, leaving them without any means of
livelihood; an education system that is
non-existent in many areas, or too expensive,
further marginalises indigenous Tibetans; the
persecution of nuns and monks through "patriotic
re-education", which is now accepted by the UN
Committee against Torture as a form of torture;
and the use of Chinese as the official language
within the government have all contributed to the
intense frustration and anguish of the Tibetan people.
Time is running out for Tibet. If nothing is
done, there is a real danger that the rich and
unique Tibetan language, culture and traditions
will become part of history. If this is the case,
world governments will have failed the Tibetan
people and, by omission, will have condoned a
regime that continues to flagrantly flout the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The world will be a poorer place.
The British government has recently reaffirmed
its commitments to seek a solution for the
Tibetan people, and its support for the Dalai
Lama's nonviolent campaign for justice. Let us
hope this commitment is not too late.
World Tibet News
May 17, 2019
Chinese authorities in Tibetan Prefecture in Qinghai to drastically cut Tibetan language education
- Radio Free Asia
The CCP rewrites history in order to justify its repression of Tibetan language and culture.
- Bitter Winter
Tibetan man and his aunt sentenced for calling the release of Panchen Lama
- Radio Free Asia
China has been running global influence campaigns for years
- The Atlantic
2018 Annual Report on Human Rights in Tibet
May 2, 2019
Setting up astroturf "Tibetan Associations" in the West is China's latest ploy to mislead the world on Tibet
Three Tibetans Are Detained For Calling For Panchen Lama's Release
- Radio Free Asia
Report: Religious freedom conditions worsening in China
- Freebeacon
China is attempting a large-scale rewriting of history
- Telegraph India
Letter From Trudeau Supporting Pro-China Tibet Group Is Fake, PM's Office Says
- The EpochTimes
View Archive
More News
Media Releases
World Tibet News
WTN Archive
About Tibet
Photo Archive
CTC National Office
1425 René-Lévesque Blvd West, 3rd Floor, Montréal, Québec, Canada, H3G 1T7
Privacy Policy
© 2020 Canada Tibet Committee
Developed by


text:
Floral branches in shades of pink on a midnight blue hem feature on this dress in georgette. The flowing silhouette is characterised by elastic inserts that outline the waist and create playful gatherings. Matching belt, lined body, unlined sleeves.
See more
Fabric: 100% rayon viscose; lining: 100% polyester. Do not wash in water. Do not bleach. Iron at max. 110 °C using a damp cloth between the iron and the fabric. Delicate dry clean with perchloroethylene. Do not tumble dry.
Distributed by Manifatture del Nord S.r.l. Unipersonale, with registered office in Reggio Emilia (Italia), Via Mazzacurati n. 6, 42122
You may also like
If you require more information or assistance in choosing the right size for you, feel free to contact our Customer Care.


text:
2nd BATTALION 70th ARMOR
Plaque Dedication 2004
Reunion 2006 & 07
Desert Storm
Gulf War Illness
25th ANNIVERSARY 1990 - 2015
This August 2, 2015, will be the 25th anniversary of Desert Shield. Next January 17, 2016 will be the 25th anniversary of Desert Storm and the air campaign and on February 24 - 28, 2016 will be the 25th anniversary of the ground campaign.
The photo on the left is of the HHC Headquarters Operation Center (HOC) taken prior to the ground campaign and the photo on the right was taken at our 2007 reunion at Ft. Knox, KY.
The National Desert Storm War Memorial Committee (NDSWM) was created in 2010 with the sole purpose of creating a National Desert Storm War Memorial in Washington, D.C. The Iron Tigers are personally involved and working with the NDSWM Committee to help create this memorial. For more information, you can go to
, or to their Facebook page or contact the webmaster on this site
The Iron Tigers also have a Facebook page and please visit it.
Welcome to the 2nd Battalion, 70th Armor Web Site. This site is the home of the 2-70th Armor "Iron Tigers" that were stationed in Erlangen, West Germany with 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division. The Iron Tigers also participated in the 1990-1991 Gulf War with 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division, VII Corps, 3rd Army.
Here you'll find information about the history of the 70th Tank Battalion, 2-70th Armor Regiment, photos of our past reunions, information about Gulf War Illness, and links to other related sites and additional information.
The Armored Force was created on July 10, 1940. The 1st and 2nd Armored Divisions were established on July 15, 1940 along with the 70th Independent Tank Battalion. The 70th was the first independent tank battalion created by the U.S. Army and controlled by General Headquarters. It was established at Ft. Meade, Maryland. 2-70th Armor traces its history to Company B, 70th Tank Battalion.
Being an independent tank battalion meant that the battalion was not part of an armored division and that a headquarters element, such 1st or 3rd Army, could attach the battalion to whatever division it needed to be with to help support that specific military operation. The 70th was attached to the 9th Infantry Division in North Africa, the 1st Infantry Division in Sicily, and primarily the 4th Infantry Division throughout Western Europe with a short stint with the 63rd Infantry Division.
After the U.S. entered WWII, the 70th went to North Africa where it landed as part of Operation Torch. The battalion had M5 Light Stuart tanks. Company B landed at Safi, French Morocco on November 8, 1942. The 70th attacked across North Africa and helped defeat the German Army in North Africa.
On June 10, 1943, the 70th participated in the Operation Husky, the invasion of Sicily (still using M5s). While fighting in Sicily, the 70th supported the 1st Infantry Division and assisted in defeating the German Army in Sicily. After Operation Husky was completed, the battalion sailed to England to refit and reorganize.
In England, they prepared for D-Day. This time the battalion used M4 Sherman tanks and the improved M5A1 Stuart tanks. On June 6, 1944, the 70th supported the 4th Infantry Division and landed at Utah Beach, Normandy, France as part of the first wave of the invasion of France. After the invasion, they continued to support the 4th Infantry Division and helped to defeat the German Army in France. The battalion continued to attack across Western Europe and participated in the Battle of the Huertgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge. The battalion ended the war in southern Bavaria, Germany.
In 30 months of war, 12 officers and 149 enlisted soldiers were killed, while 75 officers and 405 enlisted soldiers were wounded. Ninety medium and 35 light tanks were lost. The 70th conducted 3 amphibious landings; North Africa, Sicily and France. It received 9 Distinguished Service Crosses, 3 Legion of Merits, 123 Silver Stars, 2 Soldier's Medals, 287 Bronze Stars, 709 Purple Hearts and 25 Croix de Guerres.
After the war ended, the battalion performed occupation duty from May 8, 1945 to May 22, 1946. The battalion was deactivated and reactivated as a training battalion at Ft. Knox, KY. It was re-designated a heavy tank battalion and dropped Company D.
On June 26, 1950, the North Koreans invaded South Korea and the 70th Heavy Independent Tank Battalion was alerted and gathered up its tanks at Ft. Knox, (to include display tanks that were around the post). The 70th used M4A3E8 Sherman and M26 Pershing tanks. On July 23, 1950 it sailed for Pusan, South Korea.
It landed there on August 7, 1950.
The 70th was attached to and supported the 1st Cavalry Division with Company A supporting the 5th Cavalry Regiment, Company B the 8th Cavalry Regiment and Company C the 7th Cavalry Regiment and they immediately went into combat as part of the defense of the Pusan Perimeter and held strategic positions along the Naktong River.
On September 15, 1950, the U.S. conducted the Inchon landings, which began the breakout of the Pusan Perimeter. The 70th along with the 1st Cavalry Division attacked north, went through Seoul, South Korea, crossed the 38th Parallel and went into North Korea and captured Pyongyang, the capital city of North Korea. Company B along with the 8th Cavalry Regiment continued north to the Yalu River. The 70th withdrew back to the 38th Parallel and continued to fight the North Koreans in around the 38th Parallel until Dec 1951 when they pulled out of Korea and deployed to Japan.
The 70th spent 16 months in combat, crossed the 38th Parallel five times, had 40 men killed in combat, over 500 wounded and missing and 400 individual decorations for valor and bravery.
On January 21, 1963, Company B was reorganized and reactivated as 2nd Battalion, 70th Armor, 24th Infantry Division in Germany. The battalion would be reassigned a couple more times until December 16, 1987 where it was assigned to the 1st Armored Division, Erlangen, West Germany.
In 1990, it was once again called to war as it deployed from Erlangen to Saudi Arabia to participate in Operation Desert Shield/Storm using M1A1 Abrams tanks.
(see Desert Shield/Storm section)
After Desert Storm, the battalion redeployed back to Erlangen.
On August 16, 1991, it was reassigned, this time to the 3rd Infantry Division and stayed in Erlangen.
On December 15, 1993 the battalion was inactivated.
On February 15, 1996, it was reactivated at Ft. Riley, KS as part of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division.
On March 20, 2003, the battalion went to war again against Iraq still using M1A1s, for Operation Iraqi Freedom and supported the 3rd Infantry Division and the 101st Air Assault Division.
During the course of the war, it cleared numerous routes and sectors and on March 21, 2003, it was the first American unit to seize a bridgehead across the Euphrates River.
On March 31, 2003, the battalion supporting, Co C 1-502nd Infantry, 101st AA, attacked into Al Hillah, Iraq.
During the course of the battle, 2-70th Armor destroyed an infantry battalion and associated equipment from the Nebuchadnezzar Republican Guards Division.
For the remainder of the war, 2-70th Armor continued to clear routes, secure areas and destroy enemy forces in and around Baghdad and other parts of Iraq.
Whenever called upon, 2nd Battalion, 70th Armor has and will always complete its mission to the highest standards, maintain its traditions and serve the Army and country proudly. 2-70th Armor will always "Strike Swiftly" when called to war.
This is a company that makes Desert Storm Posters with your personal photo on it. The posters are fantastic and I
encourage everone to check them out at:
Please direct any questions you have about this web site to:
Web Hosting
by IPOWER


text:
Metallica – Eye of the Beholder 7″ Single
Fully Autographed circa 1997
This item comes from one of my first Met Club Meet & Greets way back in 1997. Eye of the Beholder, for whatever reason, is my favorite 7″ single. Maybe it's because the Pushead artwork isn't seen as often as, say, the armless/legless wonder that adorns the One cover.
I've always wanted to get this signed by Pushead but have never had a chance. In the meantime, I'll have to be happy with the Hetfield/Ulrich/Hammett/Newsted ink scrawls on the sleeve.


text:
Languages, Design Methods, and Tools for Electronic System Design
Selected Contributions from FDL 2013
- Editors
- (view affiliations)
Part of the Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering book series (LNEE, volume 311)
Part of the Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering book series (LNEE, volume 311)
This book brings together a selection of the best papers from the sixteenth edition of the Forum on specification and Design Languages Conference (FDL), which was held in September 2013 in Paris, France. FDL is a well-established international forum devoted to dissemination of research results, practical experiences and new ideas in the application of specification, design and verification languages to the design, modeling and verification of integrated circuits, complex hardware/software embedded systems, and mixed-technology systems.
• Covers applications of formal methods for specification, verification and debug;
• Includes embedded analog and mixed-signal system design;
• Enables model-driven engineering for embedded systems design and development.


text:
THE EDEN Project's chief executive Tim Smit will visit the National Botanic Garden of Wales today to discuss how the troubled project might move forward.
Alan Heyward, chairman of trustees at the botanic garden, said he would be "more than happy" to work with Mr Smit on a plan to secure the garden's long-term future.
But although the Middleton garden has shown interest in working with Eden for the long-term future, Mr Smit said the trip was to offer moral support, and not a deal for the debt-ridden garden.
He said, "I am really happy to offer advice and moral support at a time like this is really important."
Mr Heyward also said he did not expect a pre-prepared deal to be placed on the table today, but is eager to speak to Mr Smit.
"We are keen to talk about the current situation and something may come of it, or it may not," said Mr Heyward. "There is no firm deal but yes, we would love to work with Mr Smit in any way possible - he is a very experienced guy and creative in marketing areas too."
Mr Smit has vast experience in creating gardens and is famously opposed to marketing his attractions as "up-market theme parks".
He said that measuring success by visitor numbers was not appropriate for these sort of attractions. "One should not measure an institution in the same way as one might measure a theme park," he said.
Yet the Eden Project secures visitors of all ages, even attracting children who normally prefer white-knuckle rides. The Middleton garden, in contrast, has been accused of failing to attract visitors and is desperately looking for a funding partner.
It has been linked in talks with the Oakwood theme park in Pembrokeshire but Mr Heyward denied that a deal had been struck with the Welsh leisure giants.
"There is definitely no deal with Oakwood," he said.
"We at Middleton do need to work out our long-term strategy and look at all possible partners but I cannot predict further than that."
The fortunes of the Middleton garden at Llanarthne, Carmarthenshire, took a downturn in September when it was revealed that government funding had dried up. Since then the garden has been running on emergency funds and these too could run dry in a matter of weeks.
The Eden Project, in contrast, has gone from strength to strength. But Mr Smit, who has visited Middleton several times, said, "The national gardens of Wales is something which the nation should be proud of."