A Day in Paradise

HedgeCo is the company I’ve worked with for the last 3 and a half years! We passed a milestone this month!

Read the full press release here.

New York, NY (PRWEB) April 30, 2008 — HedgeCo Networks LLC has received its first major outside investment from Inter-Atlantic Group, a private equity firm specializing in the financial services sector. The capital will be used by HedgeCo to expand business operations in both their New York City and West Palm Beach locations, as well as to break out into new verticals of the hedge fund industry.

“We are extremely excited that Inter-Atlantic has taken an interest in us, and are eager to take HedgeCo to the next level,” says Evan Rapoport, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of HedgeCo Networks. “The vote of confidence that they’ve instilled in us further fuels our existing drive to be the leading name in the hedge fund service industry.”

Inter-Atlantic currently invests in a handful of small to mid-size companies. The companies are chosen after a careful evaluation and determination of potential growth and market reach.

“Inter-Atlantic believes the hedge fund industry is a high growth sector with tremendous potential,” says Inter-Atlantic Managing Partner Andrew Lerner. “Rather than investing in a hedge fund itself, Inter-Atlantic chose to invest in one of the premier service providers to hedge funds. We like HedgeCo’s international reach, position as a top tier portal and recurring fee revenue model.”

About HedgeCo Networks
HedgeCo Networks manages HedgeCo.Net, the premier Hedge Fund Database and Information Portal, along with nine other websites devoted to alternative investments. With over 25,000 active members, HedgeCo.Net provides a platform for hedge fund managers, investors and service providers. HedgeCo also offers a vast array of services, including hedge fund website design, consultation, third party marketing and seeding. The company has consulted or helped to launch over 500 new hedge funds, both onshore and offshore. HedgeCo Networks was founded in 2001 by Evan Rapoport and Andrew Schneider. For more information, visit HedgeCoNetworks.com.

About Inter-Atlantic Group
Inter-Atlantic Group seeks to identify and create private equity investment opportunities throughout the broad financial services industry, one of the largest segments of the US economy. Specific sectors include financial technology, banking, insurance, asset management and service providers to the financial services industry. Typical investments range from $3 million – $10 million. Inter-Atlantic is principally focused on US and Bermuda opportunities but considers investment opportunities worldwide. For more information, visit InterAtlanticGroup.com.

How to read a chart.

Trendlines

Support / Resistance

Filed for future consumption. THE SHARPE RATIO – by Bob Fulks – I should probably put this stuff in my del.icio.us… either that or start a link blog…

http://www.intrepid.com/robertl/index.html

unfortunately most of them are broken.

This is a response to Lukas’ post over here… I hate blogging about comments I make on other blogs, but I also like to keep semi-coherent blog entries under my roof, so that I can have them should I ever need to refer back to them.

I am not a stock broker, but spend all my working hours with them.

There is nothing wrong with the stock market, the problem is simply with capitalism and greed.

I can’t agree with you on condemning the stock market for bad company decisions. Once you have opened your company up to private investments it is truly out of your hands. Although I do agree that it’s the very big players who make the power moves and the small players who loose the money.

A typical example of the volatility of the stock market was the crazy last week. A lot of the best stocks got hit the hardest, not because there was anything wrong with the company but because some big players lost a LOT of money on other stocks, and had to sell off their earning stocks to cover their margin calls. This sent perfectly good stocks into free fall and lost a lot of small investors a lot of money.

Yay capitalism!

I forgot who said this, but a great investment is to buy a lot of gold, and bury it in a hole (that’s actually not that good advice… since you’re going to pay a lot of tax… better go with a gold ETF).

for future reference:

http://allfinancialmatters.com/2006/06/06/average-vs-geometric-average/

http://news.morningstar.com/index/indexReturn.html

http://village.albourne.com/places/data/

http://www.hedgeindex.com/hedgeindex/en/default.aspx?cy=USD

http://www.djhedgefundindexes.com/ (download available)

http://www.hedgefundresearch.com/index.php?fuse=indices

http://www.hedgefund.net/HFNRealtime/bench_index.aspx

S&P

http://www2.standardandpoors.com/portal/site/sp/en/us/page.topic/indices_500/2,3,2,2,0,0,0,0,0,5,12,0,0,0,0,0.html

DJIA

http://www.djindexes.com/mdsidx/index.cfm?event=showavgIndexData

Yesterday I read the an article on Network Neutrality on CNN.com. The article was written by Craig Newmark of Craigslist and was VERY wrong.

Here’s part of what bothered me:

Here’s a real world example that shows how this would work. Let’s say you call Joe’s Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying you’ll be connected in a minute or two, but if you want, you can be connected to Pizza Hut right away. That’s not fair, right? You called Joe’s and want some Joe’s pizza. Well, that’s how some telecommunications executives want the Internet to operate, with some Web sites easier to access than others. For them, this would be a money-making regime.

That is a VERY misleading analogy on many levels. Here is my counter-analogy.

Steve runs a Pizza delivery service. When his service started he used to charge per-pizza he delivered. The prices weren’t that high, and since I’m too lazy to go out and get my own pizzas I appreciated the service. I didn’t eat as much pizza as I would like to, because Steve’s surcharge was always in the back of my mind.

Once Steve got enough clients, he expanded his business and realized that he could offer a better service by charging a flat-fee. Using this new business model everyone paid a flat monthly fee, and the cost of people who ate a pizza every night (like me) were subsidized by the people who only ate 1 pizza a month.

Everyone had hot pizzas, everyone was happy.

A couple months ago Gpizza opened, they offer all the regular pizzas, but also offer the GSuper 4-course MegaPizza. This pizza comes in 4 parts which are served by midgets waiters. The midgets waiters need to be transported with the pizzas and then brought back to the Gpizza store.

For the first couple months Steve is happy to provide his loyal clients with Gpizzas, even though it did require substantially more resources for Steve to transport the Gpizzas and midgets. As Gpizzas become more and more famous, people start to complain that their Gpizzas are arriving cold, the midgets were tired from the slow ride and weren’t as enthusiastic with their serving the pizzas.

Ypizza, which has been using Steve for 10 years, sees how much money Gpizza is making and decides to make the Ysuper 4-course MegaPizza and one-ups Gpizza by providing a dancing leprechaun along side the 3 midget servers.

Steve sees that he will not be able to provide any service if more Pizza places start offering MegaPizzas. He has two options:

1.Revert to a Per-pizza business model and charge his clients for the delivery of MegaPizzas
2.Charge pizza places for the delivery of MegaPizzas

Gpizza catches wind of this and prepares the “Pizza Delivery Guy Neutrality” bill which mandates that Pizza delivery guys are unable to charge pizza shops extra for delivering MegaPizzas.

Now with silly analogies out of the way, a bit of mythbusting:

The Network is NOT Neutral
Craig says “So let’s keep the Net as it is now: Neutral, fair and free.” The network is currently NOT neutral, it’s free for ISPs to do what they want. Network Neutrality regulation will not free anything, but will restrict the ISPs in the service they can provide.

Bandwidth / Latency costs Money!
High Bandwidth/Latency applications cost money to transfer. The money has to come from somewhere. Creating laws that stop ISPs from charging the Googles, YouTubes and Skypes of the world mean that YOU and I will be paying for it instead.

YouTube/Google/Skype and Craigslist are making money
They can allocate a bit of money to provide good pipes.

When Google rules most of the Cable in the US
How neutral do you think that will be?

In the footsteps of a couple good friends I’ve decided to make the first blog entry of the new year yet another year in review round-up for the year 2006.

It’s hard to believe that we’re already done with 2006, this one went by fast. A lot happened, and due to the overflow of work, I missed a lot of what I did last year (specifically LinuxWorld Expo and LinuxTag).

One of the big work-related events is a new venture that I’ve been working on this year. <project-pimping>HedgeCo Hedge Fund Website Creation was officially launched on December 1st, however about 18 months worth of work had gone into the product and building a client list before the site launch. The sprang out of my work with HedgeCo Networks which involved a the development of a high-end statistics/graphing package which generated quantitative statistics for Hedge Funds. After deploying the product on their flagship product, they started receiving request to license the package on various other website platforms, so the package was reworked into a slimmed down edition which can be deployed in smaller sites.

As we started deploying the product we realized the potential, and reallocated some of the design talent that we had been working on other project into creating entire websites and Hedge Fund start-up consulting/compliance packages. Since our Dec. 1 launch we have had a fantastically profitable month (to keep up-to-date with what we’re doing check out the Hedge Fund Websites blog)</project-pimping>

All of the above required me to reallocate my own time away from other projects, until the point that for the last year I have done little else. So as of Jan 1, 2007 I am officially working full time for HedgeCo Hedge Fund Websites… Freelancer no longer! This year I’m also moving my family up to West Palm Beach, Florida and will be working in the brand new HedgeCo offices (will post pics of when we move in later this month).

OK, so now that I’ve spent all my time pimping my current project I’ll skim through the news.

January: Slow month, Sid officially joined our family as “brother”. I weighed in on the PHP Security debate du jour wondering when good security verges on paranoia and the side effects.

February: Traveled to UK for PHPLondon conference. This was a fantastic event (looking forward to next year), as far as I remembered there were about 250 geeks attending the 1-day event. Got a cool new LCD. In defense of PHPNuke (and other applications of low repute whose name starts with PHP*) I responded to Marco’s post reminiscing about how great PHPNuke was back in the day.

March: Slow month… google releases finance portal, barra stops reporting S&P numbers and screws up my webservice. Tom Fox is Executed.

April: Gearing up for the world cup 32Cards PHP-based card game is released. I start using backpackit to organize my life (note to reader, I stop using it in a couple months, when it stops scaling with my needs). I spent 10 days in Florida, unfortunately missing PHPTek by 10 days.

May: I question open-source for highly specific niche applications (more specifically my statistic package). I enjoy Scott Sigler’s “Infection” which is in full swing. I start watching theshow with ze frank.

June: DSL CRASH!!! I try to “upgrade” my connection by switching providers which turns into 3 weeks on dial-up. During this time I camp at friends houses during all night product launches, and drive everyone around me insane. I finally return. World cup is in full swing, and Germany is World Cup CRAZY! I take pictures.
I travel to Norway for the eZpublish conference & PHPVikinger. Ammar Ibrahim comes to Frankfurt, we watch some football!

July: A slow month… I try Fedora Core, only to get frustrated when I can’t mount my ntfs external drive with the correct permissions (worked fine in root, was able to find no usable explanation). Infection ends. Put out a notice for css code monkeys get more response than I can handle. Macs Rock? During one of the hottest months on record the kids have chickenpox and we are confined indoors.

August: I subscribe to Gail Orenstein’s Flickr feed during her trip to Israel. cool pictures (quite possibly NSFW) with political commentary. Two talks are accepted for ZendCon. I manage to squeeze into the PHPConference schedule at the last minute. We take the kids on a mini-vacation to Legoland and then visit some friends in Switzerland.

September: Catch Mark Nemcoff on in a 5-minute-review. I deploy a site using eZpublish, blog about lessons learned. RIP Lilo. Do some myspace defending.

October: The Pear book is out!. I speculate about google world domination, and yahoo opens up the login api. Spend a week in WPB Florida, then fly to LA and drive down to San Jose for Zendcon.

November: Conference season. Meet Scott Sigler!!! Give talks at Zendcon, fly back home and give tutorial at IPC2k6. After seeing that the Zend Framework is more than hype I take a look at it and start my Zend Framework Hidden Gems article series. I dump backpackit for google docs (which I am still happily using). When is it a good time to rewrite your platform?

December: HedgeCo Hedge Fund Website launch. Fantastic month on the work front, however not a whole lot of time for anything else. David (CPUNerd) on the other hand has way too much time on his hands, and immortalizes me in kilt.

And that’s about it… probably the longest blog entry ever! I’m looking forward to this year as being the craziest yet. I’ll be flying to WPB next week, and for this first quarter will probably spend more time on that side of the pond.

A big THANK YOU to my readers (let’s make that anyone who made it this far into the blog entry). And most of all thanks to Stella, Annie and Mia for putting up with me during this hectic time.

Project Home Page
XBRL 2.1 Spec

XML.com article
Microsoft Excel Plugin
Microsoft XRBL FAQ

XMLFiles XBRL article (links to other good resources)
Article using MS Excel

XBRL Education

Use Your Computer To Retire Rich

Funny thing… I thought that’s what I was doing. I guess they aren’t talking about coding for food

Financial management used to be the select skill of specialists available for hire, making it out of reach for people who couldn’t afford time with consultants or who didn’t want to employ a money manager, tax guru, or accountant. But financial-management software has done more than put advice within reach. It has made consumers their own financial advisers, giving them the power to tweak their portfolios, manage their funds, and, ultimately, build their wealth.

If you have just started on the path to wealth in retirement, the number of software packages for tracking budgets or analyzing account transactions is dizzying. These tools include everything from software that targets mortgages and personal finance to loan-servicing software designed to follow commercial or consumer loans. There also are packages that focus on bonds, derivatives, hedge funds, and equities.

Indices

So Barra stopped updating their historical S&P numbers last November. This leaves me having to update 30+ product deployments which have been cut off from thier benchmark datasource.

I’ll admit it was rather silly to make my application dependant on a single source of information which I didn’t have control over. In hindsight it’s obvious that I should have built my own webservice, which would not be dependant on any one source of information.

I guess we live and learn. Now to find alternative datasources and roll out a new webservice and update those deployments. Like I didn’t have enough to do already.

Google Finance

At first glance google’s new financial portal looks like another catch-up attempt to offer an alternative to a Yahoo! service. However, once you get past the simple front page, the individual stock pages are quite impressive.

Using a mix of Flash and AJAX, Google finance mixes the stock charts with their news service, allowing users to view access news articles and press releases directly from the stock graphs. The Flash interface also gives makes it very easy to select a time window to examine.

Company and management information are also presented as well as a summary of blog posts related to the company and timeframe. Unfortunatly, it seems that they only have hourly from the 14th of this march. Other than that it certainly ranks up there with Fool.com and Yahoo Finance as a great financial reference source. Interestingly Google hasn’t updated their stock search to include Google Finance.

Stats: R-squared

Dear Professor Mean, On my TI-83, when calculating quadratic regression, there is a number that is found called R-squared (R^2). I understand that this is the coefficient of determination. But….I thought that R^2 had to do with linear models. What is R^2 finding for this quadratic regression? what does this number mean? is there a way to find R^2 through a “pencil and paper” process?? I know the equation for R^2 for a linear regression. But its the quadratic I need to know about. please, anyone, help!!