Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

The last 12 months have taught me a lot about markets and even more about people, so here’s a little list I’ve compiled:

When the Gravy Train stops, those on it will scream bloody murder
As summed up by Dealbreaker’s very fitting “To Kill List” about those opposed to the bailout. “Help me!”, “Save me!”. You can also note in the comments about 70% are for the bailout after the Dow plummeted, whereas 70% opposed it prior to the fall. There’s about as much spine as in an amoebae to be found.
Look guys, you had a good run, you where lucky for a number of years, but now the house has finally won and come to collect. There’s only so long you can defy gravity, no bailout will change that. Now go find a nice janitorial job.
Lending more money when lax credit was the root cause is like prescribing more heroin to the junkie to get him off the drugs.

Don’t ever listen to “experts”
..and suffice to say, don’t ever give them your money. There is no substitute to learning for yourself, no one will ever be more careful and thoughtful with your money than you. Most of the so called “money managers” and “personal bankers” are nothing but Excel-jockeying salesmen.
It seems to me most money- and fund managers rarely go beyond overtly simplistic PE-calculations in their “analysis”. Macro economics, what’s that? Question forecasts and creative bookkeeping, huh?

The Efficient Markets Hypothesis is well and truly blown out of the water
Never have so many been caught with so much money put in all the wrong places. In a market full of bipolar drunken lemurs a person with brains, knowledge and mental discipline to stick to his convictions could make a killing.

There is no free lunch, ever
For the longest time, I was wondering how people who obviously made less money than me could live in palacial homes in swanky parts of town, driving new italian sports cars, when I was living in a small, damp studio flat, barely even daring to dream about that sort of lifestyle.
The answer was quite simple: they where credit junkies. They thought they could game the system in perpetuity, rolling over debt into new debt (all the while it was growing).
Game over.

When everyone says you’re wrong, you’re probably right (it might just take a while)
I have been railing against fiat currency, central banking and the debt culture for years. After a while I was starting to doubt myself in the face of everyone else laughing at me.
Turns out I was right after all. People are herd animals, they will blindly follow the herd even if it is straight into the abyss, and anyone straying from the herd will be ridiculed.

Government rewards it’s own failure with more power
The credit crisis should spell the definite end of the 40 year experiment of fiat currencies backed by nothing but thin air, hopes and wishful thinking. We cannot effectively plan food production via central planning, why would anyone think it would work with monetary policy?
Market based interest rates and asset backed REAL money should be taking over. The Credit Crunch is the ultimate failure of central planning 18 years after the fall of the Soviet Union.
What will happen instead is probably free market capitalism being blamed (watch it already happen), and the central planners grabbing even more power.

For some time, I’ve been thinking there are a number of blogs I like, but I’m not necessarily interested in all the subjects covered.

For that reason, I spent an evening and a bit last week putting together a simple service to solve just that, say hello to GrepMyFeed!

Simply put, you just enter the URL of the feed you want to filter, a name for your new custom feed and the names of the categories/tags of the feed that you either interested in, or not interested in.
It is a one step process with no registration to create custom, filtered feeds from any RSS/Atom/XML feed you may want, and you can create as many custom feeds as you like.

It can probably be equally useful for feed readers, who just like me only want a subset of content from a blog, or for feed publishers who want to give users more options.

I have created a custom feed for this blog at http://grepmyfeed.com/feeds/feed/FalerOnSoftware for those who are only interested in my software related posts. My old, full feed will remain as it is at http://faler.wordpress.com/feed

For those interested in a bit of history, the “Grep” bit is obviously a play on the unix utility grep, and the service itself is built with Apache Wicket, Wicket RAD and JPA, deployed on Amazon Web Services using EC2, Elastic IP and Elastic Block Storage.

The service: Grep My Feed >

I was writing some tests today, and realized that some code it was calling had a number of bugs in it. As a result I told the guy who had written it that “Your bugs have code in it!”. Freudian slip, should be “Your code has bugs in it”.

After Apple missed out on dominating the PC industry in the 80′ies, and almost went bankrupt, it seems they are intent on trying to alienate as many of their friends as possible with a sequel of the same tactics:

Some people have rightfully voiced their concerns and irritation with what seems to be arbitrary iPhone App Store rejections. The less arbitrary ones have been where an application has clearly been in competition with an Apple application.

To get rid of the noise being made, Apple is no extending their developer Non Disclosure Agreements (required to participate in the iPhone developer programme). I’m flabbergasted at the displayed combination of arrogance, cluelessness and insecurity Apple are showing.
Way to go in alienating and annoying your greatest advocates and resources!

Now I happen to believe there is some merit to Apple acting as a gatekeeper for iPhone apps, to avoid a barrage of malicious or buggy applications being sold, but that’s where I think it should end. I’m pretty sure the marketplace itself can work out what applications have a high enough level of “utility”.

By discarding applications based on the utility perceived by some random Apple employee, or discarding them based on Apple wanting a virtual monopoly on the software category, they are actually missing out on potential innovation and as a consequence revenue.
Would Apple have seen the utility in something like Twitter if they could have stopped it before it took of? Would they have seen the utility in Facebook or blogs before blogs and social networks became popular? It is highly unlikely in each case.

In the past I was a strong proponent of the Spring Framework, in its early days I successfully managed to get it adopted on several projects as a result of a combination of persuation and persistent nagging.

Spring was born out of and addressed the shortcomings of the J2EE specification, and clunky frameworks like Struts back in the day, and it did a pretty good job at plastering over most of the warts and cracks.
But since, new and better frameworks have come around, Springs place as the first jar dependency to be added is no longer assured – simplicity and testability won, in large extent because of the principles esteemed from Spring, and perhaps to the detriment of Spring itself.

Most newer and mature frameworks these days are easily testable, simple to use, do not require miles of xml configuration and can be easily run and tested outside a container (even web frameworks) – and as such, they don’t really need Spring anymore.

At the same time the community around Spring has morphed into some bastardized “not-invented-here” factory of duplicated and sub-par efforts, it seems the Spring guys are trying to duplicate the functionality of each and every other major open source project in existence. Spring Web Flow comes to mind as one of those inferior efforts.
A lot of this is probably driven by the fact that Spring Source, the company behind Spring has grown out of a small consultancy shop into a somewhat larger and VC funded company existing to capitalize on the Spring brand (and the easy, but rarely successful way of doing so is by extending the brand).

I can’t help but to think that all the mentioned factors have driven Spring to be more of a solution looking for a problem these days, than the great solution to annoying (and now solved) problems that it used to be..

Wicket RAD 0.5 has been released in source format at SourceForge, and been put into the Maven repositories.

This is more of an incremental release with minor changes and additions, so for any current users I believe an update will mostly be a matter of doing an “organize imports” in Eclipse (or your IDE of choice) to correct any classes that have been repackaged (most likely “FilterCriteria”, which has changed place).

For a full release statement, see the official statement on the Wiki.

Bloomberg TV where just talking about the Federal Reserves balance sheet. Apparently it had only capital of 4% at the end of last year, do keep in mind that a lot of the investment banks in trouble at the moment have had similar ratios of capital to total assets.

Considering the amount of toxic assets the Fed is taking on through bailouts at the moment, one has to wonder: who will bailout the Fed when they get in trouble? It is a question of “when” rather than if at this point.

My guess is that they will inflate their way out of trouble, putting the dollar in the toilette and giving foreign creditors the finger. Net result: the good old US and A  and its people will become impoverished through higher taxes, higher interest rates and a devalued dollar. The federal government will no longer be able to fund any further budget deficits as its credit rating crates.

I think we are closer and closer to looking at The Great Depression 2.0

(Via a Wicket Diary)

It seems to be in vogue to blame short sellers for the collapses of financial institutions, as an example, british tabloid The Daily Mirror today had a big picture of a hedge fund owner who’s made millions short selling bank stocks with the headline “Greedy Pig”, and an accusation he was at fault for the seeming collapse of HBOS.

It’s disgusting, and the disgusting bit is the Daily Mirror and the general media bandwagon.

Short sellers can no more cause the collapse of a company than a mild wind can cause the collapse of a sound building. Their behaviour is merely a symptom of a cause: the cause being a company who’s fundamental value is non-existent.

A company with a sound balance sheet, good liquidity and stable cashflow can never collapse, no matter how many short sellers short its stock. On the other hand, a company with a balance sheet loaded with toxic liabilities, no liquidity and little cashflow is in real trouble, short sellers or not.

Short sellers may be vultures, but anyone who knows anything about vultures knows that they are not predators, they only eat carcasses and circle around dying animals until the drop dead. The financial companies that the short sellers have been the walking dead, and they got to that point all by themselves.

Blaming anyone else for pointing that out is merely shooting the messenger.

I wrote a piece a little over a year ago criticising the predictive, statistical risk management models employed by many organizations in general, and financial institutions in particular. At that time, the full extent of the Credit Crunch was still unknown, but reading it a year later it almost seems eerily accurate in the way I pinpointed many of the failings that have been at fault for the current crisis.