Not only are the Masters of the Universe simply gamblers, they’re bad gamblers who pursue sucker strategies that are doomed to fail.

You can see it when they, uhh… gamble.

On May 8th, 9th, and 10th, Michael Geismar (co-founder and President of the $4.6 Billion Quantative Investment Management hedge fund) went to the SkyBridge Altermantives Conference at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.

In one of those improbable success stories they use to delude the high rollers he won about 700K and the notoriety of the incident drew it to the attention of Felix Salmon who used it as a cautionary tale of risk-taking attitude.

This is why SALT will always be in Vegas, and why Vegas will always welcome SALT with open arms. I’m sure the casinos made very good money on SALT even after accounting for Geismar’s winnings, and they’ll probably make money from Geismar too, on net, over time. If nobody ever won big money, no one would gamble at all. But in the end, the house always wins – and all of these hedge-fund managers are smart enough to know that. And still, left to their own devices, what they do is gamble, and they even layer on silly “risk management” techniques which don’t reduce risk at all – in this case, after a losing hand, Geismar would bet a little less, reckoning that somehow “laws of averages” would help him as a result.

I’ll point out Michael Geismar is a hedge fund manager and is not connected with JPMorgan in any way I’m aware of.  More interesting is this description of the precise money management decisions which led to this 7,100% return.

Michael Geismar’s $710,000 blackjack breakfast

Lawrence Delevingne, Absolute Return + Alpha

May 24, 2012

After a stretch of good cards, Geismar had doubled his money to about $20,000. He then started to bet larger amounts with every winning hand, first $1,000, then $2,000 or $3000. He also scaled down his bets after one losing hand, using laws of averages but not card counting. That basic scaling strategy worked well, and Geismar got to about $200,000 early Wednesday morning. By that point he was up so much he bet $10,000 for every hand win or lose. And he kept winning.

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As the other players started beating the dealer, Geismar began backing them up. Backing up is the blackjack term for betting on anoter person’s hand. Bellagio casino rules impose a $10,000 limit on an individual player’s own hand, but players are allowed to bet on each other’s hands, meaning one player could place $9,000 of his money on top of anther player’s $1,000 bet. In this way Geismar was able to bet the hands of several players, though his total bets could not exceed $30,000 per round. Geismar’s bets were usually much larger than those he was backing. He often used $5,000 chips on each of the other 4 player’s hands, and he often went right to the limit during a run of good cards, using his up-and-down scaling bet strategy. He was also betting $10,000 on each of his hands during the good streaks.

You see, this is in fact worse than no strategy at all.  Indeed, it’s a strategy to suffer catastrophic losses.

Guest post: Michael Geismar’s blackjack strategy

By Felix Salmon, Reuters

June 5, 2012

(M)athematician and blackjack expert Jonathan Adler

The idea that after seeing a bunch of one side of the coin on past flips you are more likely to see the other on future flips is called the gambler’s fallacy. The fallacy comes from the confusion between the long run outcome (with a large enough sample size, I expect half of my coin flips to be heads and half to be tails) and the outcome on any one flip (since I have seen a bunch of heads before, I need to start getting tails to balance things out in the long run).

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(O)nce the player sees their hand and the dealer’s card there is generally a single best action for them to maximize their potential payout. This set of best actions is called “Basic Strategy” and is well known. The player really doesn’t have much choice in terms of what they do on a single round; any decent player will just take the optimal move based on what’s showing. Assuming the player always takes the best possible action, for every dollar they bet in a round they should lose around half a cent.

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There are two main ways to legally attempt to overcome the fact that each hand on average loses you a bit of money. You can either change the odds to be in your favor, or you can try and change your bet amounts to make it less likely you will lose. Only one of these methods actually works.

By changing the structure of the game, you can make it that your average hand has a positive return. This was famously done by a group of MIT students using a method called card counting. The students exploited the fact that unlike our coin tosses from earlier, hands of blackjack aren’t truly independent events. That’s because each round of blackjack comes from the same shoe of cards, so if you keep track of what cards have been played in earlier rounds, you will have a small amount of knowledge on what cards you are likely to see in future hands. When there are mostly face cards and aces remaining in shoe then the player is actually at a slight advantage to the dealer. If you only place bets when the deck is to your advantage then you can make yourself money. The MIT students counted the number of face cards that had been seen already to estimate what proportion of remaining cards were face cards. When there were a high proportion of face cards left in the shoe they would make large bets.

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Another way to try and overcome the expected loss on each hand by having the casino change the rules for you. If you’re a high enough roller, sometimes casinos will entice you to play by giving you discounts on your losses. When they offer these discounts on losses, they attempt to run the math to ensure that you should still be expected to lose money on your trip, however as described in the article it’s not clear they always get it right.

Most people don’t have the skill and manpower to count cards, they don’t have enough money to warrant a discount, nor do they have any other way to get the odds on each hand in their favor. So to try and overcome the house edge, they will try to cleverly alter the amount they are betting on each hand. A betting strategy, or a martingale, is a set of rules to determine how much a player should bet on each hand to try and compensate for previous wins or loses. This is different from counting cards because it doesn’t take into account what cards are left in the shoe; it only uses how many times the player has won or lost.

For example, let’s say you and your spouse go to a blackjack table with $1,024 $1,023 and hope to win an additional dollar. Your spouse suggests you just play one hand and if you lose then walk away, but you have a better idea in mind. On your first hand you bet a single dollar. If you win you do walk away, but if you lose you bet two dollars. If you lose twice in a row you bet four dollars, if you lose three times in a row you bet eight dollars, and you continue to double your bet until you get a win. Any time you win a hand you will wipe out all of your previous losses and you’ll get a dollar in winnings. The only way not make of money is to lose 10 straight hands in a row, and since losing 10 straight hands in a row is extremely unlikely, you expect to almost always make the dollar you were hoping for. Or in terms of the coins from before, instead of betting a dollar that a coin will flip heads, you bet $1,024 that out of ten flipped coins at least one will be heads. If you win you get an extra dollar, otherwise you lose all of your $1,024 $1,023.

If you followed your spouse’s advice, you would have slightly less than a 50% chance of winning a dollar, and slightly greater than 50% chance of losing a dollar. By not following their advice, you have around a 99.9% chance of winning the dollar, and a 0.01% chance of losing all the money you walked in with. In fact because the amount you would lose when you get ten bad hands in a row is so catastrophically high, the expected amount you win overall is still negative. Your clever betting strategy didn’t actually change the house’s advantage over you; all it did was push the risk out so that you lose very rarely and when you lose you lose big. You can mathematically prove that any betting strategy you use, no matter how hard you try and optimize it, will fail to change the fact that the house has an advantage – you’ll still lose money by playing.

…

Once the bank has increased their leverage, this becomes similar to the betting strategy in blackjack. Most of the time, the bank’s pair of investments will yield a decent return. Every once in a while, Microsoft will decrease in value while Google increases, and the bank will lose much more money than if they hadn’t hedged at all. Just like the person using a betting strategy, they have pushed their risk to the tail events: only when the market moves in a particular way will they lose money, but when it does, they’ll lose big.

As Wall Street has created more and more complicated financial products, it has become nearly impossible for a buyer to determine how much of the product’s return is due to shifting risk to the tails. In terms of blackjack, consider a person who tells you they can get an average return of five cents for every dollar you give them to play, but doesn’t tell you how they do it. Unless you watch them play, there is really no way for you to know if they are actually changing the game like the MIT students, or if they are just employing a betting strategy and at some point will lose all of your money.

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The lesson here is that whether on Wall Street or the strip in Las Vegas, it’s easy to confuse increasing the chances of winning with shifting risk. Increasing the chances of winning improves the amount you should expect as payout. Shifting the risk makes it so that most of the time you get a good payout, but every once and a while you lose catastrophically. As a culture, we should be trying to ensure that the people making financial decisions are looking to do more of the former and less of the latter, especially given the systemic consequences of recent catastrophic market collapses.

It’s where the money is.

Europe Fears Bailout of Spain Would Strain Its Resources

By LANDON THOMAS Jr., The New York Times

Published: May 30, 2012

At the root of Spain’s financing crisis has been a drastic outflow of foreign capital from the country – one that, paradoxically, has been accentuated by the European Central Bank’s much-vaunted program of providing low-cost three-year loans to European banks so that they might buy their governments’ bonds.

…

But in the case of Spain, the program evidently bought time by making the country’s underlying problems all the worse. Spanish banks have by far been the most aggressive participants in the cheap-loan program, having borrowed more than €300 billion from the E.C.B. And much of that money was spent on Spanish government bonds.

…

It’s not just Spain, either.

Italian banks have also been enthusiastic buyers of their government’s bonds, and they own 57 percent of bonds outstanding. As in the case of Spain, foreigners have been obliging sellers and have sold €242 billion worth of bonds to local banks, bringing their share in Italian bond holdings down to 35 percent as of this March compared with 51 percent late last year.

It is worth noting that just before the restructuring of private-sector Greek debt in March, foreign investors owned 32 percent of the bonds outstanding, a higher proportion than what foreigners now own in Spain.

The fact is this notional overestimation of wealth is going to have to come of the pockets of the rich because that’s where the money is.  If you seized everything from the bottom 50% it simply wouldn’t be enough.

Florida: Hundreds of eligible citizens in Miami-Dade Co alone told they are ineligible to vote

By Gaius Publius, Americablog

5/29/2012 09:15:00 AM

So how does this play out? Here’s one way – Falsely disenfranchized Floridians appeal to Obama’s Justice Dept. Eric Holder makes noises that “this is an outrage.” Republicans make noises that “this is just political, and besides (shh, Holder has, well, melatonal ties that disqualify his etc., but shh).”

The White House, certain of November victory anyway, decides to back down. No need to ruffle R feathers.

Holder then makes all the right public noises, but does little to actually block this. (My best guess at the explanation: it’s a matter for “the courts,” plus something about the “states.”)

I really really want to be wrong. Let’s watch together, shall we? 115,000 purged eligible voters isn’t small beer.

Morons AND Assholes.  Stupid AND Evil.  Masters of the Universe?  Pampered Privileged Pricks!

The IMF on UK macroeconomic policy: Part 1

Martin Wolf, Financial Times

May 25, 2012 4:43 pm

How long then is a change in policy supposed to wait?

I find it hard to believe that the Fund staff disagree that action is needed right now. It is far more likely that they (and, not least, the IMF’s Managing Director, Christine Lagarde) felt unable to take on the government of what remains an important member country. That is also what the BBC’s Stephanie Flanders suggests in her excellent post, “IMF: ‘Great Policies: Shame about the Economy‘.”

The time for aggressive fiscal consolidation is when the economy – by which I mean spending by the private sector – is strong, not weak, as it is now. What, then, is the argument against using fiscal policy more aggressively, to support the economy now? As Jonathan Portes, director of the National Institute for Economic and Social Research, notes, it is very hard to make one.

The principal argument against any fiscal action now, apart from the hope against implausible hope that monetary policy is going to do the job, even though interest rates are almost zero and the Bank of England has indulged in substantial “quantitative easing”, is that it will destroy the government’s credibility, lead to a rapid spike in interest rates and so weaken the economy, rather than strengthen it.

The IMF on UK macroeconomic policy: Part 2

Martin Wolf, Financial Times

May 28, 2012 5:52 pm

(A) willingness to make determined use of fiscal policy should also reduce the uncertainty of decision-makers about the likely direction of the economy. If businesses think the authorities are not determined to sustain demand, they are right to be more cautious. Ultimately, the government insures business against the macroeconomic risks of investment, via its determination to sustain demand in a slump. But the government has shown no such determination, with effects on the willingness of business to invest that we now see. Thus, the very determination to act might make a huge difference to the outcome for the economy.

In brief, the endlessly repeated “credibility” arguments against a change in fiscal policy are feeble. The UK has fiscal levers at its disposal and should use them.

What is true, however, is that a change would weaken the government’s credibility. But this is because the government made an unwise commitment.

(h/t Herr Docktor)

Obama the Warrior

Glenn Greenwald, Salon

Tuesday, May 29, 2012 07:59 AM EDT

Miller (Link Here) devotes himself to debunking one of the worst myths in Washington, propagated out of self-interest by conservatives and progressives alike: namely, that there is a vast and radical difference between the parties on most key issues and that bipartisanship is so tragically scarce. In the foreign policy context which is his expertise, Miller explains that – despite campaign rhetoric designed to exaggerate (or even invent) differences in order to motivate base voters – the reality is exactly the opposite.

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The article (Link Here) describes in detail how “Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical” – an actual presidential-led death panel (as always in American media parlance, “Terrorist” means: individuals alleged by the U.S. Government – with no evidence, transparencey or due process – to be Terrorists). Specifically, Obama himself “insisted on approving every new name on an expanding ‘kill list,’ poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre ‘baseball cards’ of an unconventional war.” In total secrecy – with no transparency or oversight of any kind – he then selects who will live and who will die.

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One of the most glaring myths progressives like to tell themselves and others is that the GOP refuses to praise Obama no matter what he does. This is patently false. Virtually every one of the most far-right neocon Bush officials – including Dick Cheney himself – has spent years now praising Obama for continuing their Terrorism policies which Obama the Senator and Presidential Candidate once so harshly denounced. Every leading GOP candidate except Ron Paul wildly praised Obama for killing U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki without a shred of due process and for continuing to drop unaccountable bombs on multiple Muslim countries.

Monaco is the preening face of Formula One which is the only reason it has survived practically unchanged while the other great courses have been warped almost beyond recognition.  It’s a short twisty funnel of doom where you start where you finish unless you park.

And by park I mean flaming chunks of twisted metal or mechanical failure.

The study of entrophy is hugely depressing-

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

The thing about young people is that each slice of their existence represents such a large portion of the whole.  It takes close study or direct comparison to detect the decline.

Nothing is what it was and implosion is never far away.  We circle the drain.  The makeup is cracking and the surgeon repaired throat wattles…

Well, wattling.

But the point is the decaying facade of western civilization is on display today.

‘I think it’s time I was thinking of getting back to New York.  Let’s have a meal somewhere and I can phone the airline for plane times.  What day is it, we seem to have lost a weekend.  I need a drink.’

‘You need a lynching.  You’ve upset my friends and I haven’t written a goddamn word.  I’ve been too busy looking after you.  Your work here is done.  I can never come back here again.  This whole thing will probably finish me as a writer.  I have no story.’

‘Well I know we got a bit pissed and let things slip a bit but there’s lots of colour.  Lots happened.’

‘Holy Shit!  You scumbag!  This is Kentucky, not Skid Row.  I love these people.  They are my friends and you treated them like scum.’

• Formula One Official Site
• Speed Racecast

Pretty tables to come.

Pretty tables done.

• Random Japan by: mishima
• Late Night Karaoke by: mishima
• On This Day In History May 26 by: TheMomCat
• Edumacashun Preznit by: ek hornbeck
• Cartnoon by: ek hornbeck
• Open Thread: What We Now Know by: TheMomCat
• Cholera: Haiti’s Epidemic by: TheMomCat
• My Little Town 20120523: My Dad the Salesman by: Translator

DocuDharma

Ah Monaco.

The ships, the lights, the sounds, the money.  Everything Formula One is about except, of course, competition.

Not that Formula One is usually about competition.

This year is a shiny abberation but you can’t learn much at Monaco.  It’s old and slow and there’s no place to pass or park which makes it a perfect yellow flag companion to the turn left Brick Yard and the stomping ground of Scuderia Marlboro which is all show and no go.  You want action?  Rent Grand Prix (I understand Eva Marie Saint is hot in her torpedo bra).

Shall I seem cynical?  Perhaps, but the truth is that I didn’t even bother watching practice where teams are testing fiddly aero bits they’ll never use again in search of extra downforce which will allow them to drive on the top of the tunnel like Men in Black.

Iconic.  That’s the word I’m looking for.  One “R” away from a trip through the dryer though waving steamy hot metal over your pleats and creases is so satisfyingly mindless.

How the Ecclestone and the mighty have fallen.  Live broadcast tomorrow @ 7:30 am on Speed (GP2 @ 6 am).

• Formula One Official Site
• Speed Racecast
• Interactive Track
• History

Oh, surprises below.

• Late Night Karaoke by: mishima
• On This Day In History May 25 by: TheMomCat
• Third Way Electoral Victory! by: ek hornbeck
• Cartnoon by: ek hornbeck
• Propoganda Is Not Just Misinformation by: ek hornbeck
• The Social Security Administration’s Equality Problem by: Robyn
• Popular Culture (Music) 20120525: Moodies – A Question of Balance by: Translator

DocuDharma

A proud conservative and supporter of the privitization of education.

After all, Kaplan Prep is the only profitable part of the Washington Post.

Obama Campaign Proud of Bashing Teachers’ Unions

By: David Dayen, Firedog Lake

Friday May 25, 2012 9:38 am

It looks like we’re going to have six more months of the Obama campaign trying to prove that their candidate has conservative values and believes in conservative ideas.

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(T)he question becomes, why does Stephanie Cutter, Deputy Campaign Manager for Obama 2012, feel so strongly about needing to broadcast that teachers’ unions don’t like her candidate? Is this a typical approach for campaigns? Don’t you normally want to tout support rather than opposition?

Not when it comes to teachers’ unions, apparently. And who needs them, they only represent 3.2 million members in the National Education Association and 1.5 millionb in the American Federation of Teachers. And they only represent one out of ten delegates on the typical Democratic National Committee Convention floor. It makes perfect sense for the head of the party to display his independence from such a marginal group.

Education “reform” is a pretty contentious topic with a split in the Democratic coalition. But Obama has always lined up on the opposite side of the unions on the matter. Not only that, he boasts of it.

Of course this is a pattern. The previous tweet from Stephanie Cutter highlights the President’s commitment to austerity, proudly stating for the record that federal spending has slowed down under Obama to the largest degree since the Eisenhower Administration. So we’re going to have six months of the President’s allies stating the record, showing all of Obama’s conservative positions on a host of issues. You would think this would be the role of, say, a primary challenger to the President from the left. But no, it’s the President’s own campaign doing this.

…

His education policies are generally disfavored by teachers’ unions, and I should add, disfavored by reality, because the data on charters and teacher evaluations is weak to the point of totally being debunked.

Not that reality should stand in the way.