Still Alive (But Just Barely)

Winter colds have laid the Unknown Family low. We seem to take shifts - Unknown Son and I are in charge of the 11:30 p.m. -2:00 a.m hacking and coughing shift, while Unknown Daughter and Mother handle the mornings. And Unknown Son stayed home from school today with a fever (gee, I wish I could).

I managed to make it through 3 hours of teaching CFA last night, but today should be tougher - I have my regular classes today in the morning (and then another round of CFA teaching tonight). I'll make it through, but it won't be pretty.

After that, I think I'll just pass out for about 12 hours.

Ninja Bunny

This reminds me of the Killer Rabbit from Monty Python's Holy Grail.

HT: Mike Munger

I actually had some serious links to post, but I got the "Blue Screen of Death" and my computer crashed before I could post them. The computer's back up, but Blogger's "recover post" option didn't work. So like Seinfeld, this is all I got.

Fama and French Like You've Never Seen Them

The grad students at Dartmouth's Tuck Business School aren't just a bunch of grinds. They also regularly publish a pretty funny spoof "newsletter" calledThe Tuck Profit. In this piece, they "expose" Eugene Fama and Kenneth French:

"I hired Ken French in 1990 when he was a driving instructor in Winnetka. Chicago was pressuring me to partner with another researcher; I couldn't stand the idea so I hired a stooge. The man has never contributed a single idea to my research, and yet his name is constantly mentioned in the same breath as mine. On top of it all, the American Finance Association has nominated him as president-elect! That's a travesty and I won't have it."
- Eugene Fama

Read the whole thing here.

Washing Your Cat

This last summer the Unknown Wife and Unknown Kids adopted a stray cat. He's outside during the day and stays in the garage (at night) since I'm allergic.

I'm not a cat fan, and I'm not in favor of abusing them.

But this is funny - kind of like a washing machine for cats. My kids thought it was hilarious.

Friday Link Dump

No, I haven't died, gotten sick or fired - just temporarily dropped off the face of the earth due to my having bitten off far more than I can easily chew.

The first week of the semester brought with it a paper deadline, preparing for some topics in the CFA program I'm teaching for the first time, teaching the new modules in a city I had to Amtrack to (twice - I teach for two nights a week), and prepping for and teaching my regular class load.

It wouldn't have been so bad, but of course my computer chose this time to crash Sunday afternoon. Ah well, in any event I'm back, reasonably well rested, and done teaching for the week. And since I did my class prep correctly last semester, I don't have too much to do to get ready for next week. So the rest of today is for catching up on research. Here are some links to keep you busy while I torture some data. Some of it's a bit stale, but I haven't been blogging as much lately and stuff has accumulated in my bloglines account:

The New York Times has a good piece on different approaches to "“fundamental indexing."”

The folks at Red Herring examine whether PE and the tech industry (where long-term perspectives and high R&D expenses abound) are a good fit.

TheStreet.com highlights some mutual funds that invest solely in ETFs.

The Capital Spectator is discussingng the odds of a recession.

The Wall Street Journal reports on some cases (maybe a trend) where companies are trying to extract more of the LBO premiums from PE firms. And in a second piece, they discuss "empty voting" - voting with borrowed shares (Larry Ribstein has some very insightful comments here).

Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture chimes in on The Infallibility of The Markets - as he says, they're not always completelyly right, but they are mostly right.

This week's Carnival of The Capitalists is up at David Maister's blog.

Geoff Considine writes at Seeking Alpha: Outperforming the S&P says nothing about efficient markets. All undergrads should read this - it says what we try to tell them that above benchmark returns could come from higher risk, so you have to correct for risk when measuring returns.

And now, for some non-business items:

Craig Newmark links to two pieces:"13 Things I Wished I Learned in College" and how to think like a genius.

According to CNN, caffeine makes you smarter. That's depressing - it means that without all the coffee I drink I'd be in even worse shape (HT: Mises Economics Blog)

And finally, the weird news of the day (compliments of Hedgefund Guy). This is information I probably didn't really need to know, but having read it, I'm stuck with (and now, so are you).

Enough bloggery - back to work.

The Beginning of The Semester - Murphy's Law Edition

I haven't posted much the last few days because of a combination of poor planning, deadlines, and an attack of Murphy's Law. I had a deadline of Monday to submit a paper to a conference (actually, the deadline was last Wednesday, but I know the association people, so I got an extension). In any event, here's what happened:

- The paper was on some aspects of seasoned equity offerings. My coauthor, a graduate student, did the analysis around the date of the actual issue. It should have been done around the date of the ANNOUNCEMENT of the issue. I figured this out on Wednesday, of course.

-So, I ended up redoing his analysis myself. Luckily, I've done a lot of SAS programming (SAS is a statistical software used by a lot of finance academics, among others), so I was able to redo 7 tables of analysis in 4 days.

-I also had to re-write the introduction and results, and conclusions. I should have made him do it, but there was no way he could have gotten it done by the deadline. This isn't bragging -- it's just that I've been doing this a lot longer than he has, I've got a lot of resources (programs to reuse, background in the literature, etc...)

-Classes started today. So, with the paper deadline looming, I figured I'd do my prep on Sunday after the paper was done.

- Of course, that when Murphy struck-- when I opened up my laptop Sunday afternoon (after church), the screen was so faint it was unreadable. Just Damn! I hooked the laptop up to an external monitor, spent about an hour in "Dell Hell" with their technical support folks, and figured out that it was the monitor, and not the processor or hard drive. So, I copied all my data and programs to my office desktop and worked off it.

- I finished the paper around 11:00 Sunday night, and finished my class prep at approximately 1:30 Monday morning (this was after staying at the office until 1:00 the previous night). Then I got up at 6 (thanks to the kids), and taught classes today.

Doing things last minute really makes things interesting. Not easy, but interesting. But everything got done - the paper and the class prep. And I didn't embarrass myself in class (luckily, both classes met before 12:00, so I finished before I ran out of gas).

I even got to have lunch with the Unknown Wife - she just started taking classes in a library science program with a goal of becoming a Media Specialist (what they call school librarians nowadays). Her class ran from 9-12, which is also when mine are done. So we did lunch, paid her tuition bill (the part that wasn't covered by my being a faculty member), bought her textbooks, and set her up on the WebCT system.

But now, it's time for sleep. Then I start all over tomorrow -- I get to finish my prep for the CFA class I teach tomorrow night. I would have done between Wednesday and Friday if the paper hadn't taken all my time, but as they say, "Stuff" happens.

Spiders on LSD

You've probably seen photos of webs made by spiders on caffeine, LSD, or cocaine.

Here's a pretty funny YouTube video on the topic (note: may not be work safe)

Back Home and In the Office

We made it back from Philly, and Unknown Son is still in remission (yeah!). So that's a huge load off our minds. It's been almost two years since he was "clean", but the quarterly checkups continue, and can still make us a bit nervous.

In any event, it's back in the office to finish up a few things before classes start on Monday. In the meanwhile, here are a few links for your reading pleasure:

Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture notes that total margin debt on Wall Street is up 22% since 2005. And he has a chart here.

Professor Andrew Gelman blogs at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science. He's got a book out titled Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models, and it looks promising. The guy knows his stuff.

Lew Sichelman at Marketwatch.com has a good piece on mortgage scams.

Cynthia Koons had a good piece on the market for junk bonds in last Friday's Wall Street Journal. She reports on how lower rates and other features have made LBO companies prefer bank debt over junk bonds as the financing vehicle of choice.

And last but nit least, Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has posted the latest installment of his Yak Shaving Razor series.

Enough blogging - I have syllabi to write and research to finish.

On The Road Again (part 2)

We made it to Philadelphia without incident, but unfortunately the Ronald McDonald House was full. So, we had to stay down the street (we still got a reduced rate - just not as cheap as we would have had at the RMH).

After we checked in to the hotel, we went to the RMH so the kids could unwind for a bit. Then tomorrow, we get his injection. Since I'm working feverishly on a paper to present at the FMA (our national conference), I'll probably camp out for the rest of the day at the UPENN library so I can have access to journals I might need. It's sad - no matter how much time I have, it always seems to come down to the last minute for conference papers. The good news is that we have some nice results, and with luck my Ph.D. student coauthor will have his first "good" conference presentation to put on his vita.

In the meanwhile, here are a few links to keep you busy:

This week's Carnival of the Capitalists is up at Endless Gibberish. I'm pressed for time, so no pick of the week this time.

Mark Hurlburt notes that the January Effect is now 22-2 over the last 24 years.

Irwin Kellner of MarketWatch asks whether the inverted yield curve is bad news of good.

Finally, they had ice in Portland and Seattle. Click here to watch what happens when you mix ice with drivers who aren't used to driving in winter conditions. But don't if you're an insurance agent like my brother - it's too painful.

Enough blogging. Time to put the kids to bed.

On The Road Again

As I've mentioned a couple of times before, Unknown Son was diagnosed with Neuroblastoma (a relatively rare form of childhood cancer) on his 4th birthday.

He went into remission in late 2005, but we still go to see his oncologist every 3 months for a checkup (this stuff is known to recur). So, we drive the clan to Philadelphia tomorrow and stay at the Philadephia Ronald McDonald House for a couple of days while we have tests done at Children's of Philadelphia.

There's wireless at the RMH, but I'm also trying to finish up a paper to submit to the Financial Management Association annual conference (the national meeting for pointy-headed academic nerds like me). Of course, the deadline's Wednesday midnight.

This is all to say, blogging will probably be light for the next couple of days.