holy public transit batman! i'd say on average there was a cable car every 100 feet!

also, super jealous of the people that got to turn left off of market street!

the embedded video is down at the moment from a copyright claim, but the trailer still works at IMDB.com
http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi150641433/

TED throttles the release of the talks so there is a continuous flow of "new" videos available. I'm sure PK will post when his talk is released. (I hope!)

curious how paul.kedrosky.com rates!

So let me get this straight (I'm not in finance). A random mutual fund wanted to unload $4.1B worth of E-mini S&P500 futures contracts. The afternoon of the crash it decided to do so with a selling algorithm that only looked at trading volumes, not at price or times. So High-Frequency-Traders (HFT's) started trading these suckers back and forth within each other like crazy, which as I understand it is normal nowadays, but is apparently something this $4.1B algorithm did not expect (!!). The mutual fund saw the volume and started dumping shares like crazy thinking there was tons of liquidity. After ten minutes of this, the HFT's had accidentally built up positions in these contracts, which they don't actually want. So they went on a binge of selling (the SEC highlighted a 14 second window where the trading volume was over 100x the actual net amount of shares sold) for three minutes where 80,000 contracts were sold, and only 50,000 contracts were bought (in the passive SEC tone) leaving a "net fundamental imbalance of 30,000 contracts" which tripped the circuit breakers in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

During this time, arbitrageurs were monitoring the price of the E-mini futures, the price of S&P500 ETF "SPY", as well as the individual S&P500 stocks. Whenever there was a discrepancy, they were stepping in to make a small spread, but that brought the 500 individual stocks into this high-volume game.

The spike in volumes coupled with the 6% decline in the S&P500 triggered a lot of internal circuit breakers that apparently a lot of major market participants use. The aliasing of all these events created a time period where nobody wanted to buy (or sell) a specific stock. Now this is the best part. Market makers (or the actual exchanges on their behalf) have stub quotes permanently (?) floating out there with ridiculous prices, like $0.01 or $100,000 "in order to fulfill continuous two-sided quoting obligations even when a market maker has withdrawn from active trading."

So where did the missing 30,000 contracts go? And whose idea was it to input default "live" quotes of $0.01 and who was on the sell side of those?

The Scribd imbed of the "Flash Crash Report" crashed my flash too! The link worked fine when I clicked through. Chrome 6.0 FWIW

D; the USA is playing Ghana in a knock-out match on Saturday FYI. I'll admit, their chances don't look good though :)

Isner had four match points (two were in a row); I don't think Mahut had any...

Isner is an ace-machine, and Mahut is rising to the occasion and serving fantastically as well. Isner easily averages over 1.2 aces per game.

edit: Isner has easily averaged over 1.2 aces per game before; no way that's his career average.

I didn't work for me either. It's on blip.tv though; -->http://blip.tv/file/3653298/