The most surprising thing about the reactions to Steve Jobs’s passing has been the outpouring of love toward the memory of a man who didn’t do the sorts of things that rich men do when they want to be loved by strangers. Jobs has been treated as something of a secular saint by Apple fans, [...]

I had asked a quant on the Portfolio Armor team recently for a rule of thumb about the best time to sell options before time decay accelerates (so, for example, an investor could roll his protection while recouping some of the cost of hedging). He said he’d check the academic finance [...]

- Gold: sold those GLD puts for a 101.5% gain on Tuesday; reversed polarity and bought a few calls. No strong opinion on gold, just thought I’d try this after seeing Tim Knight’s end-of-day video on Monday, which suggested GLD might have hit a support level at the bottom of a channel (though his video [...]

Looking back at an optimal put hedge on GLD
In Tim Knight’s after the close wrap-up video Thursday (“Fire, Walk With Me“), he noted how precious metals had fallen out of bed recently. Below is a look at what happened with an optimal put hedge on the gold-tracking ETF GLD Thursday. Then, [...]

The first outpost of Naked Pizza opened in New York City last night. I’d been interested in trying it since I read this article about it by Rob Walker in the New York Times Magazine a couple of years ago, so we headed over last night and picked up a Superbiotic pie and some bread [...]

Downtown Douala, Cameroon

After reading that Cameroon was home to one of the world’s least livable cities (Douala), I figured there was no reason anyone would want to visit Cameroon. But this FT article over the weekend by Stephen Cave offered one, “Of man and beast“. From the article:

Many of the other problems [autoimmune diseases, diabetes, [...]