Seeking Alpha published an article of mine touching on this earlier this week, but the tweet below and the chart that follows it illustrate the tl; dr version. Portfolio Armor was designed to help investors hedge, but other uses for it have emerged. One is as a warning flag for investors in securities with high [...]

The Trouble with Tapjoy
Here’s the tl;dr version: if you have a paid app, and are thinking of using Tapjoy’s pay-per-install program to advertise it, don’t. You can get the same result more quickly by taking cash out of your wallet and setting it on fire. The two screen captures below offer an illustration of this. [...]

Well, my tweet, actually. This one got mentioned Margaret Brennan’s “InBusiness” show yesterday morning:
@margbrennan You nearly died once from riding 90 mph on the NJ Turnpike without a seatbelt. Was that emblematic of your approach to risk? $$
— David Pinsen (@dpinsen) December8, 2011

I was hoping to embed a clip of Ms. Brennan reading that tweet [...]

In Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, the passage below takes place during Dr. Heywood Floyd’s flight from the space station to the moon. Although the film version doesn’t give a sense of how long that flight was, the book says it was about 25 hours, so there’d be a lot of time [...]

With a subscription web app, when someone subscribes, you have their email address. That’s not the case with an iOS app, since they are downloading it from Apple. I have email addresses for the relative handful of Portfolio Armor iOS app users who’ve e-mailed me, but not for the rest of them.
That presented something of [...]

More functionality isn’t always better

Last week, a developer/entrepreneur (and MBA, as his email signature advertised) asked me to look at his iPhone finance app. He had heard about Portfolio Armor, and mentioned that his app “covered the full spectrum of corporate finance, including options”. So I checked it out, and indeed it did include [...]

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 [...]