Its probably too late to comment on this, but just a minor point; A company's valuation determines its ability to access the credit markets. A higher stock price means the company is probably going to source debt at better rates than a similar company with a lower stock price. Company's do care about stock price.

Not sure if HFT will buy all the product on all the store shelves on the off chance that you are going to reach for another unit and might be willing to pay up for the next one. Too much risk, very little reward.

What if the store just restocked everything instantly? (big seller). Whats the HFT guy going to do with all that product he just bought?

Now imagine a scenario where its not a supermarket but a open-outcry farmers market. Farmer A just sold tomatoes for X. Farmer B wants to be the next guy to sell tomatoes for X. He needs to have the fastest response time to be able to yell "tomatoes for X" before anyone else does. Hence the low latency connections.

I don't believe above represents an arbitrage scenario. That would only work if the trader in the middle "saw" these orders before they hit the order book. The way it would work in an electronic market is as follows:

1. A enters order to sell for X. IF the order is not immediately bought, it enters the orderbook and potentially alters the national best offer to X.
2. B enters order to buy at Y=X+C. If offer X still exists, no matter where Y is entered, it will have to be routed to the exchange where X is and trade through X before it can trade at X+0.01, 0.02, 0.03 <= C. This is a rule.

High frequency liquidity providing traders that want to sell at X along with the first order will use their colocation and other speed advantages to attempt be the first order to sell at X after the original order. Other (liquidity taking) algorithms might anticipate a Y buy and buy up X beforehand to sell at Y. That is not arbitrage, its buying low and selling high.

hehe.

India actually happens to be among the handful of countries in the world where consumption of marijuana is legal. It's the *only* country in the world where such consumption is sanctioned by the government. You can walk up to a govt. run store, hand the dude some cash and walk away with a bag of reefer.... good times...

This is almost certainly not the source code in question. You are talking about a standard vwap engine that some firms use to trickle trade large orders. In fact only an idiot pension fund manager would ever call up his broker and tell him to sell 1MM shs of anything. ( or maybe one that's expecting ringside seats to the superbowl in the mail ). Anyway, what used to happen in the "ye olde days" to cop a phrase from another poster is that said idiot fund manager would call up 4-5 brokers at various banks and ask them to price a block of 1MM shares. If you did not consummate the trade with the broker thats on the phone right away, he starts dumping ( or buying ) the instant you get off the phone ( sometimes while he keeps you on the phone ). So that no matter what strategy you used to break up the order, the damage is done much before your flow even comes on the market.

The software in question appears to be some sort of arb engine. Stat arb, index arb or futures arb. These engines typically need pricing data from various markets and execute trades on all those markets. They run a very small shortest path loop with one anchor to figure out whether certain items are getting out of sync ( they get out of sync for example, when a regular joe like you or me leaves a limit order hanging out there waiting for the market to trade through our price ). An engine like this will try to do a closed loop trade that makes maybe a penny or two with 0 risk at the end; ie there is not a great expectation of profit per trade but thousands of these an hour and millions a day add up pretty quickly. Any strategies layered on top of these ( wavelet anaylysis, momentum etc ) will try to increase the 1-2c to 2-5c etc. Based on the stuff this engine was touching and reading the resume on what the dude was doing at GS, this is my best guess.

I think that was the destination code, spelt a little badly.

Delhi went all CNG for public vehicles a long time ago. Smog is no longer a big issue in inner delhi.

Mumbai and Pune are in the process of converting all public vehicles to CNG. Many private taxi operators have already converted.

While elecric energy is a nice solution for city vehicles, I think this is merely shifting the pollution from cities to places where coal or furnace oil is burnt to produce electricity. I know that this can be state controlled etc, but with more and more electricity being supplied to vehicular needs, what's to stop us from getting into a situation where a power plant is "too big to fail"...

I believe that CNG is a nice compromise in that, there is still plenty of it around, it's just as easy to store, transport, distribute and consume as oil and burns more cleanly. New Delhi is a fine example of the positive impact of predominantly CNG burning vehicles. I wonder why we haven't seen some real effort behind pushing CNG vehicles here in the US. In fact, current petrol vehicles can be converted to burn CNG with a minor one-time modification.

ayy... I beg to differ. Tony sleeps with the fishes, I made sure of that. Now, where's that canoli?

I know you are kidding, but the visa system has always been clogged. So I would say the government continues to operate at the same level of efficiency as before. :-)

No, at least while I was a grad student, an (F1) student visa was only able to get you a 1 year apprenticeship after graduation. No way to apply for residency.

If the company you apprentice with for a year decides to keep you on, they sponsor an H1B visa that allows you to apply for residency.

The process of actually getting residency is horribly convoluted and takes between 5 and 8 years to complete. Not to mention all the shyster lawyers out there (yechh).

Funding opportunities for foreign students come from university resources only. They are not eligible for FAFSA, state or local government scholarships.

Fellowships are rare, most foreign graduate students end up getting a teaching assistantship or research assistantship. Undergrads don't even have that. Further, they cannot take up jobs off-campus which generally pay as much or better than on-campus jobs.

So lets fix that problem.

1. Banks need money for credit lines? Lets figure out a way to get them that cash.
2. ATMs in danger of running out of cash? Lets figure out a way to keep them full.

There is no reason for such a broad brush $700 billion "maturity value" purchase of this toxic paper. Oh BTW... do you know that buying the bonds at "maturity value" is the same as giving these banks an indefinite interest free loan?

There is a lot of talk about how the taxpayer ( I hate to be referred to like that ) is going to make a little money... BULLSHIT!!!... the taxpayer is going to have to wait a long long time before the underlying assets recover and these bonds can be written up to reflect an increase in the value of the underlying collateral ( the homes ). And fat chance that these banks are going to pay maturity value on these bonds to buy them back once the credit crunch has passed. A better solution would be to outright put money into the banks, through preferred stocks or warrants, yes it would be massively dilutional and probably wipe out the current shareholders, but at least this way the taxpayer gets the benefit of future dividends and stock price appreciation. In the current plan, we get nothing.