Aug 11, 2015

…or, Managing and Mitigating the 2014 CNH FX TARF blowup (Author’s note: I wrote this a year or so back for a few friends on Finance Twitter who wanted to know what FX TARFs were and what effect the huge vol overhang from USDCNH TARFs would have on the spot market. I figured that the shenanigans in USDCNY yesterday made it an appropriate time to dig this up and republish it for a wider audience.

Feb 10, 2015

(I was going to turn this into a tweetstorm, but it’s a bit over the line for what would be a reasonable-length tweetstorm and also I am an old fart who thinks tweetstorming is unwieldy. Am I the only one who thinks tweetstorms are kind of annoying? Apparently I am.) The big news in bitcoin-land today is the nine-figure-USD evaporation of the Mycoin exchange in Hong Kong (the SCMP article is paywalled but also worth a read) which turned out to have been a ponzi scheme.

Feb 25, 2014

Amid the fiasco of MtGox’s apparent collapse last night (acquisition? rebranding? god knows), some kind person leaked MtGox’s “Crisis Strategy Draft”. It’s an internal Powerpoint that appears to describe a plan for shutting down MtGox and relaunching it as “Gox” - a new, trustworthy Bitcoin exchange from the people who brought you this. And this. And there is _so much_ icky stuff in there. On page 2, there’s the admission that they’ve been robbed of nearly 750,000 BTC - call it $400 million and you’re not far off.

Aug 13, 2013

So despite having been away from Disneyland-with-the-death-penalty for more than a year, I can’t resist keeping up with the news from Singapore’s spectacularly dodgy S-chip stocks - the Chinese small-caps that infest the lower reaches of the SGX because it’s the only exchange that will take their listing fees. And one of them - an abalone-farming firm named Oceanus Group - dropped an absolute humdinger of an announcement a few days ago.

May 19, 2013

An eagle-eyed colleague recently pointed me to the case of CLS Bank v Alice, where Alice Corporation is trying to enforce a set of patents against CLS Bank, the little-known (but systematically vital) central settlement point for interbank FX trades. The judgment itself is interesting because it tries to rule on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions (that is, business methods implemented “on a computer” instead of “in real life”). Alice’s patents specifically refer to computer-based implementations of certain processes, rather than the processes themselves, and the Federal Court was asked to rule whether the computer-based implementation might be patentable even when the business process itself isn’t.