I've been working on a fairly intensive project that requires me to merge data from five different databases, and two of the databases are pretty large (13 and 60 gigabytes in size, respectively). I'd done much of the work in the last couple of weeks, and then realized that I was using the wrong date to merge things by. I redid some of my programs that had accessed the different databases individually so that they now pulled all the data in one pass. But it took 9 hours to run. It reminds me of the old days in grad school programming on a mainframe when I'd submit the program as I left for the night and would let it run overnight.
But enough wonkery. It's time to clean out my files. And that means a Link Dump:
Hedge Funds and Private EquityThat's enough for now. Back to torturing data.
It's been a rough couple of weeks for hedge funds that use statistical arbitrage and merger arbitrage strategies. Abnormal Returns has it's usual great roundup of links on the topic.
You know it's a private equity bubble when you see this
Investing
Here are two pieces on insider trading: The New York Times discusses recent research by Najat Seyhun (the "academic god" of insider trading research) on his new approach to weighting insider trading data. His conclusion is that insiders aren't nearly a bearish as we'd thought. And here the Wall Street Journal (online subscription required) reports that executives have been pretty bullish following the recent market correction.
A good example of a stock spam scam (say that three times fast if you can).
Academic Research and Academia
The reputational effects for Directors from Financial Fraud by Fich and Shivdasani
CXO Advisory Blog reports on research by James Doran, David Peterson and Colby Wright on academics views on market efficiency. They find that while most finance professors believe that markets are semi-strong form efficient, about 20% use strategies that seem to fly in the face of that view.
Humor
Raging bull (HT: The Big Picture)
Slate has a good primer on How to speak hedgie that could have been written by Ambrose Bierce.