Get on Board the SWIFT Boat

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The New New SWIFT Boating (Cracks in the Facade): Does the blogosphere have anything intelligent to say about the SWIFT controversy?

It’s kind of a dusty and underwhelming topic to the majority of us who do not make a lot of international transfers and transactions — and the people who might well be upset or incommoded by it (commercial bankers, I mean) don’t tend to blog, and wisely so.

So, no, generally speaking.

Bimbos de Mama Go 1-1

Copa do Mundo FIFA 2006: Italy whomps Ukraine, but Argentina falls to Germany on penalty kicks.

Therefore, my personal theory of World Cup dominance is 1-1 today.

Mortarboard Marketing Mashup

Is that an op-ed or a self-promoting ad? (Investment News): The “reverse spin” column of one of my favorite trade rags — I have high regard for all Crain’s titles, really — tees off on a pet peeve I share: advertorials from Academia, Inc. and the editors who let ‘em get away with it. See also Harvard Should be Crimson Over IT Op-Ed:

Mere mortals have to buy ads to tout new products. Not Jeremy J. Siegel, professor of finance at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and author of an investing classic, “Stocks for the Long Run” (McGraw-Hill, 1994). The Wall Street Journal gave him beaucoup space on its editorial page to expound on his latest theory about stock valuation, which he calls the “noisy market” hypothesis.

Sic Semper Auditoribus

Court Hears PCAOB Lawsuit (BankNet 360):

A lawsuit aimed at disbanding the federal audit regulator created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was heard in court Thursday, but no ruling was made.

U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson heard arguments from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board that the lawsuit should be dismissed, saying the plaintiffs should take their case to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees the PCAOB.

Feed of the Day

Platform Wars (Atom) by Phil Jones of Brasilia, Brazil. Click to go right to the Blog URL.

MySpace Meets the Fantasy League

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Marrying the online commons to the American pastoral, now that Joe Sixpack can no longer even afford the bleachers …

ESPN Wants to Be MySpace for Fans: It was a cabal of Disney and ESPN folks — flacks, flocks — who launched Newsvine — about which more here and here.

This is intriguing, though: I’ve often thought that the hugely popular fantasy leagues — I myself have managed the Ceara Cangaceiros through three mediocre beisbol seasons on the evil Yahoo! — were the real social network pioneers …

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — ESPN is hoping to become the MySpace of the sports world. In September, it will unveil as part of ESPN’s Sports Nation property the tools for fans to create profiles, contribute to sports blogs, post opinions and link to favorite articles.

Advanced Eurocombinatorics

The Bolsa de Madrid. Source: ES.Wikipedia

DB Approaches the BME (Bloomberg): Some are assuming this means DB is giving up on its Euronext bid, but I have no idea anymore.

The BME has only just demutualized.

Caveat Emptor Note

I’ve said it many times: I am not a trader, or even much of an investor, so don’t come here looking for tips.

My wife’s current crusade to flip an office space we own in Sao Paulo is much more advanced than any wheelings and dealings I have ever done. I’m strictly a “deposit the checks and throw the extra into a CD” kind of guy.

I do have a modest sum in ETFs and index funds, though, just for fun and edification. As an admirer of the late George Plimpton, I like to see what it feels like to do things if I’m going to write about them.

So I thought I would follow up on a fubar I experienced recently with a limit order I placed with Fidelity for EWZ | iShares MSCI Brazil Index (ETF).

Dems: Damn the Hedges, Full Speed Ahead

New hedge-fund bill pushes SEC registration (via Albourne Village)

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — A bill was introduced Thursday in the House of Representatives that would give the Securities and Exchange Commission authority to force hedge-fund managers to register with the agency as investment advisers.

The Securities and Exchange Commission Authority Restoration Act of 2006, introduced by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass.; Rep. Michael Capuano, D-Mass.; and Rep. Paul Kanjorski, D-Pa., would amend the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 to require registration by hedge-fund managers.

Collegiality and Cash Markets

This could be an excellent case in point for the con side in the debate over the Creative Commons: Teachers are selling study guides online.

WASHINGTON (AP) — For all those teachers who take work home at night, creating lessons they hope kids will like, the reward is a good day in class. Now there could be another payoff: cash. Teachers are selling their original lectures, course outlines and study guides to other teachers through a new Web site launched by New York entrepreneur Paul Edelman.

Tokyo Contrite

Tokyo Stock Exchange learning tech lessons (UPI Mooniewire):

In its analysis of the recent information-technology problems at the Tokyo Stock Exchange [Price: $2,500 -- Ed.], an analyst at Financial Insight’s Asia-Pacific IT benchmarking advisory service pointed out that the bourse needed to be vigilant about continuously update its system.

From the Telecoms Ecology Watch

A new mobile telephony “ecoystem” emerges, aimed at dominating the food chain in emerging markets:

A worldwide program called the “3G for all” was formed with 9 mobile operators uniting in a bid to make available to consumers handsets based on WCDMA standard. The group includes China Mobile, Hutchison Group, Vodafone and Orange.

I Me Me My

trendwatching.com: July 2006 trend briefing — add “youniverse” to the NMM collection of egocentric network business model branding: “MySpace,” “WeMedia,” “iTunes,” — and the grand-daddy of them all, “personal push-button publishing” — which continue to trend upward in the buzzmarket at the expense of brands that emphasize collectivity, such as Tribe …

We spoke about MASTERS OF THE YOUNIVERSE in December 2004. Back then, this is how we described this phenomenon: “At the core of all consumer trends is the new consumer, who creates his or her own playground, own comfort zone, own universe. It’s the ‘empowered’ and ‘better informed’ and ’switched on’ consumer combined into something profound, something we’ve dubbed MASTER OF THE YOUNIVERSE. At the core is control: psychologists don’t agree on much, except for the belief that human beings want to be in charge of their own destiny. Or at least have the illusion of being in charge.

Dude, that’s just so totally Matrix …

The State of the 4th Estate

While their worries are changing, the problems that journalists see with their profession in many ways seem more intractable than they did a few years ago.

The State of the News Media 2006 (Project for Excellence in Journalism): a study that backs, anecdotally, many of the harder findings of the International Federation of Journalists study released recently.

Beyond cutbacks and pressure to help advertisers or corporate siblings, journalists have other worries as well. Five years ago, people in the news business shared two overriding concerns. As we said back then, “They believe that the news media have blurred the lines between news and entertainment and that the culture of argument is overwhelming the culture of reporting…Concerns about punditry overwhelming reporting, for instance, have swelled dramatically in only four years.”

Deep Strategy

IBM boosts supercomputing powers of Deep Computing centres (press release): See also Blue Gene, Super Money Machine.

IBM today announced that it will significantly boost the availability of supercomputing power offered through the company’s Deep Computing Capacity on Demand (DCCOD) centers.

IBM also announced today that it is responding to corporate client demand and will for the first time add significant UNIX-based capacity based on POWER5 technology.

Breaking the ICE

More info on overseas oil deals needed: Senate (Washington Post): The NYMEX-ICE cold war heats up over the political question of the year — who is to blame for soaring energy prices?

The report by the Senates Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations finds that U.S. regulators, including the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, lack the ability to track “futures look-alikes,” over-the-counter contracts that are based on U.S. futures contracts and traded overseas.

In particular, the panel said that U.S. crude oil, gasoline and heating oil contracts traded on the Intercontinental Exchange Inc’s ICE London bourse were impacting energy prices and large trades should be reported to U.S. regulators.

Troll Toll on The New GNU

Red Hat slapped with patent suit (VNU): A first test of the patent-proofing written into the LPGL — and a nasty surprise, inherited along with the JBoss stack, one that sent shares a-sliding by more than 6%.

Firestar Software has filed a claim against Linux vendor Red Hat for an alleged patent infringement in one of its software products.

Guide to Hybrid Securities

Guide to Hybrid Securities (GT News; free with registration): Could be educational.

The use of hybrid securities is rapidly increasing across different industries and geographic sectors. But despite the hype, there is still mystery surrounding them. This five-part guide takes an in-depth look at how corporates, banks, insurance institutions and investors are using hybrid securities and also answers treasurers’ questions.

Well, so they didn’t spend a lot on the copywriting. Normally, hype is laid on for the specific purpose of mystification. Cite me one case of hype that ever clarified matters.

Still, I do appreciate the offer to pierce the mystery, and accept it in that spirit …

Commons Counterblast

The MSFT-CC dialog box — evidently not localized for PT-Br yet. Source: Maestros Del Web

What moves a movement?: Becky Hogge of Open Democracy articulates what a lot of my Brazilian cumpadis are saying to me as well: How do we know Redmond’s embrace of the Creative Commons is not another exercise in embrace, extend and extinguish?

How do you move a movement? The question lingers in my mind after three days here at the iSummit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, because behind the energy and excitement of the Creative Commoners gathered in their hundreds in Copacabana to share experiences of the free culture sphere, a niggling uncertainty persists.

Three days before the summit began, Creative Commons, the organisation behind the suite of legal licences revolutionising copyright on the net, announced they had teamed up with a company that many in the movement view with deep mistrust, Microsoft, to produce a tool embedded in Microsoft’s Office suite allowing users to attach Creative Commons licences to files created in Word, Powerpoint and Excel. Although the collaboration was relatively small, the ideological significance, to some, seems great.

Bump

The days of wine and roses. Source: Investor’s Daily

FRB: Press Release–FOMC statement–June 29, 2006: You probably didn’t hear it here first, but the Fed was nice enough to e-mail with the news at 2:16 pm.

The Federal Open Market Committee decided today to raise its target for the federal funds rate by 25 basis points to 5-1/4 percent.

The Business Press Stays High on Thai

Thai Bourse And Subsidiaries Restructured (press release): Though it gets much less coverage than China and even Vietnam, the Thai Bourse story strikes me as an outstanding example — Russia is another — of “emerging market” coverage with an astonishing capacity for ignoring political and other glaring risk factors.

The Board of The Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) has restructured the executive teams of SET and its subsidiaries to further enhance their capabilities to prepare for the ever-changing external environment.

Those Wicked Widgets

When the homeland gets ugly, the tough move their ops offshore. Pictured here: The Principality of Sealand.

I hate to have say it, but a process of elimination in collaboration with my Web host’s help desk confirms it: The door to the recent denial of service attack on the New Market Machines was opened by the JavaScript blog widgets I love so dear.

May Was Serial Murder Month

Hedge funds lose this year’s gains in a month of turmoil (HedgeCo).

I ask again: What ever happened to the “hedge” in “hedge fund”?

The recent market turmoil has wrong-footed a wide swathe of hedge funds, many of which have seen their gains this year wiped out in the past few weeks, according to figures obtained by the Financial Times.

Nearly every category suffered, but Japan-focused funds have been particularly hard hit due to the fall in the Nikkei.

How BP Hosed Hank Hill

Or should I say, how it allegedly hosed Hank Hill (above), the loveable, lumpenproletarian propane-salesman protagonist of Fox’s “King of the Hill” — a prototype of whom appeared as a hapless, RV-driving comic foil in Beavis and Butthead Do America …

U.S. Accuses BP Of Manipulating Price of Propane: Part of a trend toward civil actions aimed at energy traders and market markers after the CFTC declared energy markets free of manipulation.

Trading Scheme Drove Up
Heating Costs, Officials Say;
Company Disputes Charges
By JOHN R. WILKE in Washington and CHIP CUMMINS in London
June 29, 2006; Page A1

Traders at global energy giant BP PLC secretly and illegally cornered part of the U.S. propane market in early 2004, driving up heating and cooking costs for millions of mostly rural Americans, federal investigators charged.

Alt.Finance and the Anti-MSM

Above: Radio Pancevo was priced out of business by the Serbian FCC equivalent during the Kosovo crisis in 1999. Source: Radio Netherlands

“Big think” alert: Skip this post if you are not up for a meandering think-out-loud.

It was the NMM post Press Freedom as a Structured Product — on the Media Development Loan Fund — that first got me thinking about the role of alternative finance — the “hedge fund industry,” if you must use that misleading misnomer — in business models for the so-called “new public-service media.”

I’ve collected a few scattered data points on that theme since: BBC’s hedge fund investments; the alternative investment structures that support certain projects of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society; the role of strategic consultancy-VC complexes in the “WeMedia ecosystem“; the innovative structure of joint ventures like the Xinhua Financial Network; and others.

Now, I think maybe this article from the Ford Foundation-funded Infowar Monitor — Militarizing the Media Monopoly, by Konstantin Kilibarda – has given me some leverage on the subject, or at least a broader framework of historical and institutional information in which to understand these issues.

If the Mob is So Smart, Why’s It Got No Health Insurance?

The great Organizations and Markets — a fellow dweller in the WordPress.com gated suburbs — weighs in today on the “mass-sourcing” or “crowdsourcing” business model:

If crowdsourcing projects attract mainly hobbyists, participating for fun or to impress their (virtual) friends, expect lock-in and substantial first-mover advantages. If participants do it for the money, however, the crowdsourcing landscape may be much more competitive.

This seems to be the same dichotomy that Mr. Phipps of Sun recently argued was a false one, however.

Trainspotters Meet Judge Roy Bean

UK bankers face Enron extradition: Royal Bank of Scotland bankers must face the music in Texas, after failing in their efforts to have the Longhorn State declared a rogue nation.

Poor sods.

Three bankers formerly employed by UK-based NatWest bank are to be extradited to the US to face Enron-related charges after having their appeal turned down by the European Court of Human Rights.

Kludge of the Month

CambridgeDocs Announces xDoc Structured Finance Toolkit for Extracting Data from PDF-Formatted Securitization Reports (press release): The misadventures of Adobe’s PDF format have left a breadcrumb trail of data points through this blog that I will need to connect up at some point.

One obvious problem, in the age of “structured data” for business, is the convertibility of the damn things.

Oh, sure, it’s easy to convert a number of different formats to PDF.

But back again, in shape to be folded, spindled, mutilated and otherwise efficiently reprocessed? Jakob Nielsen (above) renders the verdict.

Here, a lot of high-powered talent has gone into solving one aspect of that problem. Based solely on the press release, I declare it the kludge of the month.

CAMBRIDGE, MA – June 28, 2006 – CambridgeDocs, LLC, a leader in the field of unstructured data management and enterprise publishing, today announced the release of the xDoc Structured Finance Toolkit, a new application that automates data extraction from PDF-formatted financial tables. With this new capability, financial services companies such as banks, brokerage firms, insurance companies and other financial institutions are now able to eliminate the otherwise tedious and error-prone process of cutting-and-pasting critically sensitive financial data from tables within structured finance reports like CDO and ABS remittance reports.

DTCC Hems and Haws

Media Statement | DTCC Clarification on Fails to Deliver:

I don’t remember the DTCC coming up much today at the Senate hearing on hedge funds today — though I do remember Sen. Hatch sort of pretending not to be able to remember what it was called or what it did.

But I have not read the complaint in the primer brokerage lawsuits in order to gauge the DTCC’s exposure to the case.

In any event, for whatever reason, a press communique is out today, aimed at clearing up misconceptions about the global clearinghouse’s annual statistical report on “failures to deliver” — in plain English, deals that fall through when one party, the buyer, does not hold up its end for some reason or other.

DTCC, of course, processes nearly every kind of transaction imaginable, among which are the kind of securities lending deals used to leverage the kinds of short strategies under discussion.

This misinformation, the DTCC alleges, has been perpetuated by “certain third parties [that] have persistently misinterpreted or misrepresented [the statistics], seeking to buttress their contention that the levels of FTDs is evidence of abusive short selling and ‘naked short selling.’”

SIFMA: Global, Catholic, Apostolic

SIA + BMA = SIFMA (Investment News):

The boards of directors of the Securities Industry Association and the Bond Market Association today voted to merge the two organizations, creating the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, or SIFMA.

The merger is subject to a vote of approval by member firms by the end of July.

‘AdSense Arbitrage’

Revisiting the Subject of AdSense Arbitrage (Search Engine Roundtable):

Essentially, people make money by bidding on less expensive terms to drive people to a page with AdSense or some other Publisher Network ads. When people click on those ads, the money that the site owner makes for the click exceeds the money that he spent to drive the traffic to the site. With a good enough “conversion rate,” this can be very lucrative. Note that we spoke about this in April when covering a SEW thread [Publishers and Arbitrage: Sucking the Life Out of Search Results?]

CFTC: We’ll Flatten The World If We Have To

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Proof that I’m an idiot? Or doublespeak?

CFTC Chair Wants Level Playing Field — or so he says. But what does that even mean?

NEW YORK (AP) — The top U.S. futures regulator, addressing the issue of when foreign markets that let U.S. traders participate electronically should be subject to U.S. regulation, said Tuesday that he wants to avoid interfering with legitimate market forces but hopes to promote a level playing field for competition.

I Pledge Allegiance to the Bull …

You Leaving Me?—Mother Merrill Asks Some Top Producers If They’re Fixin’ to Depart (Registered Rep): Merrill Lynch admits administering questionnaires to brokers whom they suspect of contacts with outsider headhunters — a document that the would-be sellers of labor in the free market characterize as a “loyalty oath.”

The existence of such a document underscores the fierce nature of the recruiting war being waged over top producers among retail brokerage firms in recent months. Recruiters say that top advisors industrywide—$1 million producers who are largely fee-based—are being romanced by rivals: Signing bonuses of 150 percent to 200 percent of trailing 12-months production (including cash and stock) are being inked.

Sun: First, Kill All the Lawyers?

Sun: Open source is about self-interest (ZDNet).

For open source to prosper, people need to stop thinking of it as “free” and instead think of it as “connected capitalism,” delegates at an open-source conference in London were told on Tuesday.

Simon Phipps himself, the keynoter in question, prefers InfoWorld’s coverage of the talk, however:

Matt Asay is right on target with his summary of my keynote. Read this and then ask yourself whether the ZDNet guy was even at the same event…

Terrorism, Yes, But Extortion Goes Too Far

Patent Terrorism: Terror of the Intangibles (IP Frontline). I was mildly shocked and amused the first time I heard presenters at an ABA panel on intellectual property law refer to “IP portfolio managers” as “terrorists” — especially since so many lawyers in the room at the time were there to learn how to be “patent terrorists,” to wage asymmetrical warfare as well as to counter it.
I certainly never thought that this kind of private club-talk would ever see print, however.

But here it is, in an article by an Indian IP consultant, alongside an extremely tacky portrait of a hooded “patent Bin Laden ” (above):

Patent terrorism is perpetrated by ‘patent trolls,’ who are also called ‘patent terrorists.’