Yes, breaking it down by security type could be another useful approach -- where debt issuance, for example, might incur a lower fee than equity. What I was envisioning in the back of my mind was more along the lines of lower fees associated with assets somehow associated with the same entity -- for example, different debt series, or different PTs.

In your case, for example, I've had the sense that you might be considering moving into an underwriting type of role; if that were to happen, then I could imagine an exchange offering you a reduced-cost way of bringing new listings to market, some of which might otherwise not have happened at all.


In some cases, this type of 'grandfathering' in based upon past performance could have unintended and negative side effects on quality as the effects of past accidents dissipate into mediocrity and reversion to the mean.

For a real world example, one of my own decently performing investments in the fiat world has delivered around 14,000%, and just a single quarterly dividend payment is now nearly enough to return the whole initial cost. But such numbers are entirely irrelevant to the question of whether that investment is still a good investment, right now or whether it's now just going to muddle along. What really matters is what is happening with the current value of that investment over relevant timescales -- and not merely whether some past event led it to grow in a way which has not been repeated. Were my portfolio made entirely of investments which have done well in the past, its current performance would be substantially worse than it is now.

My point is just that incentivising issuance on the basis of performance over a single window of time might not necessarily be in the interests of the exchanges.


I imagine this will cut out a huge swath of the types of not yet profitable startup businesses which might be of greatest interest to market participants attracted to Bitcoin-denominated exchanges in the first place, not to mention those at a stage of development where they're most likely to want to tap the capital markets in the first place. But it's a start!

Yep, I hear you -- in this particular context it makes much more sense than in some other contexts, where the rationale which you've set out doesn't fly quite so well.


Yep, I hear you there too; I wonder whether any or all of the exchanges have considered lower listing fees for this sort of thing? That could benefit everyone by enabling new listings from established issuers to appear (along with trading volume) that would otherwise not be cost effective and which would thus not generate listing fees anyway.


A great recipe for implosion...


I'm still getting a sense of how the market behaves, and experience from observing one listed asset doesn't seem to yield much of anything that can be applied to others. Some have ludicrous spreads, some are quite tight; and in at least one case I observed directly, individuals have been so keen to take new positions that they'd rather buy at market than buy a mispriced call and immediately exercise it for a lower total cost -- go figure. I wouldn't have expected this fund to trade at a 7% premium immediately after launch, but nor would I expect it currently to be trading at a 1% discount to NAV. Hopefully as things settle down, as participants have a moment to digest things, and as participants' expectations converge with what can be realistically achieved for a reasonable level of risk, we can get a better sense of when it makes sense to soak up excess shares or provide new ones.

Um...yes... We're saying the same thing, except that you're suggesting I'm assuming something I am not, and you're suggesting I am seeing an opposition where I am not. (Why would I think, let alone assume, that those interested in redemption are interested in chasing yield? Why would I think being safety-minded is in any way opposed to wanting easy redemption? I'm not following...) Compare:


In other words, I'm suggesting the primary shareholder base of Ukyo.Loan is disinclined to chase yield (i.e., not ones for "taking on massive risk in return for speculative profits" in your words); those safety-minded participants are more concerned about redemption at face value (i.e., "have a strong interest in having access to redemption" in your words).

So again, there's no "assumption" here, and there's no being "opposed to one another" rather than being "actually complementary". On the contrary, you've nicely restated my own words...


Just so. Moreover, many are presented, either explicitly or implicitly, as perpetual loans, as if the intention is only to service the debt but never actually to repay it. Folks can get all hung up on interest rates without paying nearly as much attention to the eventual return of principal.

I'm guessing we're probably using the word 'correlation' in different ways... To my mind, correlation does not need to be 100% in order to be correlation (even "direct" correlation).

But semantics aside, the underlying principal is the same: I am merely suggesting that if this has anything at all to do with the market's pricing of Ukyo.Loan (and in fact I suspect it has little to do with it -- see below), then the market is discounting the potential future returns at a higher rate than seems to me to be justified by publicly available evidence. The publicly available evidence suggests that Ukyo.Loan has, more often than not, paid out at above the guaranteed rate; the publicly available evidence suggests that BitFunder itself continues to generate significant trading volume and significant commissions; the publicly available evidence suggests that the sentence "Additional dividends provided when the site does well" has accurately reflected Ukyo's intentions and behaviour.

As to why I suspect this all has little to do with the market's pricing of Ukyo.Loan, my interpretation of others' comments on the loan suggests to me that market participants are far more concerned about the 'get out free' clause of the contract -- i.e., redemption at face value -- than about the buyback provision which ensures they will not be bought out at less than 110% of face value. My sense is that many market participants are much more keen to chase yield via the latest promiseware companies than to accept a lower potential return in exchange for a lower probability of losing large amounts of cash; those yield-sensitive participants are likely under-represented in the shareholder base of Ukyo.Loan, which is likely more populated with safety-minded participants entirely disinclined to chase yield.

I have now edited the report to include the following explicit addendum:


Hopefully that will remove any room for misinterpretation. 

Of course other things are not equal, and nowhere in the rest of the analysis do I make any suggestion whatsoever that they are equal, that they should be equal, that I wish they were equal, or that I would like other people to believe that they are equal. Nowhere in the rest of the analysis do I even return to the 200% idea.

I was simply illustrating what it means for bond prices to specify the market's risk adjusted perception of returns. I could have used a factor of 1000% instead of a factor of 200% to make exactly the same point, and it would make no difference whatsoever to the rest of the analysis.

Why would I want to make the point at all? Because the Bitcoin community has a whole bunch of things floating around called 'bonds', and most of them have very little to do with how real bonds operate. (By analogy, the Bitcoin community also has a whole bunch of things floating around called 'futures', and most of them have very little to do with how real futures operate.)

For folks who already understand exactly how bonds normally trade, they can skip over my sentence about price versus yield entirely and move on to the actual point of the analysis -- which is the suggestion that trading at anything less than 110% appears to be guaranteed safe due to the structure of the offering. Or, just for kicks, they could choose to nitpick that sentence, steadfastly refuse to engage with the actual substance of the analysis, and engage in a little ad hominem insinuation.


There was no logic, and there was no analysis or comment that was in any way "based on 'all other things being equal'". There was an illustration of how real bonds trade, nothing more and nothing less.

Can you understand how it might strike some folks as being just a teensy bit disingenuous for you to argue as if to suggest that I am simply ignorant of the fact that other things are not equal -- all while tenaciously ignoring the central point of the entire analysis, which is the 110% argument?


OK, more than a teensy bit disingenuous.

If you read as far as the four candidate explanations I offered as to why market participants might apply such extreme discounting of future yields, you will find that I am assuming that other things are not equal and questioning the degree to which extreme discounting might be justified by those candidate explanations. As I mentioned in my reply to Peter Lambert, obviously market participants will assign a discount rate to future returns from the loan. I am not suggesting that market participants should not apply any discount rate at all, I am suggesting that the discount rate which is implicit in the loan's pricing is higher than ought to be inferred from publicly available information.

Yes, your suggestion that "people buy assuming that the dividend will usually be at the lowest possible value" falls under the very first candidate explanation I suggested:


In other words, when people assume the dividend will be at the lowest possible value, they are assigning a very high discount rate to future returns that are specifically due to BitFunder's success. Of course they should assign a discount rate of some kind, because future returns due to BitFunder's success are entirely unknown. My point is that the discount rate which has been implicitly assigned -- if this putative explanation in terms of people's assumptions about the dividend is correct -- is, in my view, higher than it ought to be, given publicly available information.

Obviously: other things are not equal. That's why it was phrased as a conditional: if...then.  

For everything that follows, I cannot escape the feeling that you're looking for an argument and have chosen to argue with a whole slew of suppositions that are not my own and which have little if anything to do with what I have actually written.

Is it possible that you simply read 110% as 200% all the way through? I say that because all throughout what follows, you seem to be magnetically attracted to .02 (i.e., 200%), while I am discussing 110% (i.e., .011)...


I have no idea whether Ukyo has sufficient liquid assets to buy back at twice face value, but I think you're missing the entire point that when other things are equal, this is how real bonds trade out there in the real world: bond price goes up to bring yield down to an appropriately risk adjusted level.

By citing risk as a factor which is not equal, you're not somehow backing up your disagreement with my conclusion, you're merely ignoring the remainder of the analysis.


(I'm assuming that Ukyo is rational and that no rational market participant would issue inflated dividends right before buying back a loan at 110% of face value; I didn't think that needed pointing out.)

However, the logic of your argument is spurious, because it assumes the consequent in the conditional: if he needs...back to current levels. What is at issue here is exactly what would make for a rational current level; if you already assume that the current level is rational, then there's no need to make an argument to that effect.


Suppose the price collapsed back to near IPO. Then forcibly buying back shares would occur at 110%.

Remember what I actually said, as distinct from what you seem to be incredibly keen to argue about (and I get that as a bond issuer yourself, you have a strong vested interest in this matter):


You get that, right? We're not arguing about whether anybody should actually buy Ukyo.Loan at twice face value -- or, at least, I'm not. (Maybe you are?) The relevant number here is 110%, not 200%.


Remember what I actually said:


You get that, right? 110% of face value, not 200% of face value? And we're not talking about liquidity at 200% of face value...


Wow, now we're really moving far beyond the other things being equal proviso. If you're keen to argue about something I was not saying, why not just compare it to investing in all other possible investments, rather than merely J-D?


Here again, I can't avoid the feeling that you're taking advantage of the opportunity to create an argument with someone else's views than my own.

Folks holding the Ukyo.Loan might be interested in some thoughts I've offered about it in the monthly report for the BTC Growth fund, where I mention that the fund has acquired around 11.6% of the outstanding units:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=266828.msg3165622#msg3165622

Comments welcome.

Executive Summary

During the month from the fund's initial offering on 15 August to 14 September, net asset value after fees increased from 0.0998 BTC per share (i.e., .1 BTC per share at the offering, net of the exchange's 0.2% transaction fee) to 0.1012 BTC per share. This represents an increase during the month of 1.403%, or 18.20% on an annual basis.

Gains in equity derivatives and forex derivatives offset losses in equities, while a backdrop of debt delivered less volatile returns. As a new fund, the cost of moving from cash to new positions with sometimes exorbitant bid/ask spreads was significant, creating immediate losses -- relative to market bids -- which in some cases approached high single digits in percentage terms.

The fund's initial allocation of capital ensured that no single entity held more than approximately 30% of the total, achieving sufficient diversification that even the complete failure of an entire exchange or an entire asset would have left the vast majority of our capital safe and untouched by such an event.

Context and Environment

During the period, the predominant trend in Bitcoin-denominated 'equities' -- a term which, for convenience, I'll treat as including revenue sharing operations -- was negative, with the most striking exceptions being would-be mining companies that engage in little or no actual mining. Market participants willing to speculate on individual 'faithware' companies -- i.e., those which aspire to become mining companies one day -- and willing to concentrate capital in a small number of such speculative positions, would clearly have outperformed the fund's losses in equities.

The predmoninant move in BTC vs. USD, by contrast, was positive, while volatility remained subdued for nearly the first three weeks. The fund's position was not optimal with respect to volatility, but being delta positive relative to BTC vs. USD enabled it to benefit from the directional move nonetheless. Market participants taking entirely unhedged long positions in BTC vs. USD, especially during the first part of the month, would have outperformed the fund in this area.

Listed debt showed no such sustained directional moves, and the fund benefited from its higher weighting in debt than in equity.

Liquidity and open interest remained anaemic in both equity options and forex futures; with respect to the latter, during much of the month, our own positions represented 5% or more of all open interest in the contracts in which the fund was active. (And as I have argued elsewhere, the Bitcoin economy still lacks a credible and cost effective forex options market, as distinct from a forex futures market; forex options would have made the fund's operations significantly more efficient and straightforward.) The fund's ability to execute otherwise viable strategies using derivatives was significantly constrained by the low liquidity, especially in equity options, as well as by repeated platform failures on our home exchange, which compromised the timeliness of option re-pricing. In addition, the exchange's requirement that put writing be covered 100% by actual cash means that writing such options at all -- even if they are never purchased, let alone exercised -- creates significant opportunity cost by preventing the capital from being deployed elsewhere.

(The 100% cash requirement contrasts sharply with much lower standardized margin requirements familiar in the fiat world. Among other differences, no bona fide market exists for Bitcoin-denominated equity options, and market makers are entirely absent. Therefore, an investor who is short in-the-money puts cannot, except in artificial examples, simply close the position. Instead, they remain on the hook for the full exercise, even if much of the required capital can be immediately recovered by liquidating the shares.)

During the period, the fund's initial allocation of capital ensured that no single entity or platform -- including individual exchanges -- held more than approximately 30% of the fund's total. This is signficant not only from the perspective of reducing counterparty risk and company-specific risk, but also from the perspective of mitigating impact from the types of platform failures mentioned above. During the entire period from when we began logging platform failures on 17 August to 14 September, there were only 6 individual days on which we didn't log at least one outright failure or other anomolous behaviour by at least one of the platforms we used. The most common such failures were CloudFlare error 524 and BTC-TC's "Access Temporarily Denied" message. (With regard to the latter, it seems a stretch to suggest that such frequent failures are solely a result of correctly functioning defenses such as packet filtering or rate-limiting measures.)

A platform problem of my own, in the shape of my primary work computer's abrupt hardware failure on the afternoon of 9 September, compromised my personal efficiency during the entirety of the week. Thanks to redundant backup strategies, data loss was never an issue, but the job of diagnosing, replacing, and re-configuring, all while working from two older and less capable backup machines, came at a distinctly inconvenient time.

Finally, fund participants should note that entering any new position at all in a listed asset entails either waiting a potentially very long time for suitable market sell orders or absorbing the sometimes exorbitant cost implicit in the bid/ask spread. As a new fund, therefore, it should not be surprising that we have conceded non-trivial amounts of capital to the spread simply as a result of entering positions at all.

For the purposes of calculating net asset value, individual positions have been marked to market using either the 7-day trading average where platforms provide this information directly, or the instantaneous market value where they do not.

Individual Securities

The fund has been active across around a dozen platforms and many different businesses, but as illustrative examples I will offer some thoughts on two specifically, with a view to highlighting a little of the fund's general approach.

ASICMiner

Without entering into meta-arguments about the sustainability of Bitcoin mining or the wisdom of investing in it -- topics which I have addressed elsewhere and which many others have addressed at greater length and in greater detail -- the fund does have some exposure to ASICMiner, a security which attracts broad interest and which in passthrough form offers sufficient liquidity to support meaningful and profitable derivatives strategies. Primarily for the purpose of applying simple derivatives strategies on BTC-TC, the fund began establishing a position in ASICMiner shortly before the share price corrected severely in the second half of August.

The timing resulted in an immediate and negative hit to the value of the fund's position.

However, while the overall position is relatively small, the results of the fund's follow-up action are illustrative. Thanks to healthy option premiums, 6 of the fund's shares were sold at net prices above the market at the time, while 16 shares were purchased at net prices below the market -- providing a cost basis as low as 1.2 BTC each, compared to a market price at the time of around twice that. (Notably, such low net entry points are outliers, due more to inefficiencies in the market than to anything exotic in terms of the structure of our strategies.)

As I have suggested previously, "investing in mining" need not be a black and white, do-or-don't issue; nor is it either a guaranteed way to print free money or a guaranteed way to destroy shareholder value.

Ukyo.Loan

During the month, the fund acquired roughly 11.6% of all outstanding units of Ukyo.Loan, making it the second largest holder of the loan as of this writing.

Ukyo.Loan, issued by the owner and operator of the BitFunder exchange, is a peculiar creature. Unlike a normal bond, it was not offered at a discount to face value, to be redeemed at that face value upon maturity at a specific date, and with the interest rate therefore set implicitly by the price at which it trades. (In this sense, the loan is similar to other 'bonds' in the Bitcoin world.) Instead, its 'face value' serves two purposes and two purposes only:

• Interest, paid in the form of dividends, is guaranteed to be at least .05% of face value per day.
• Units can be redeemed for face value on demand.

The loan is also described explicitly as being "Similar to Graet.Loan", but it differs in two very significant ways. First, the interest paid indirectly reflects the success of the BitFunder exchange itself, with the Ukyo.Loan specifically described as a sort of roundabout investment in the exchange and the description further indicating that "Additional dividends provided when the site does well". Therefore, while the interest rate never drops below .05% of face value per day, it can climb significantly above that rate. Second, while the units can be redeemed for face value on demand -- a fact which effectively places a floor on the price at which units should trade -- any buybacks must, according to the contract, occur at "110% of the last 30 days average market price".

The combination of these two facts suggests that Ukyo.Loan should trade so as to reflect the market's aggregate estimation of its risk-adjusted return. Unlike Graet.Loan and other similar loans, there is no overhanging threat that units will be bought back at face value, so there is no mechanism in place to force units of the loan to trade near that value. On the contrary, those willing to hold the Ukyo.Loan (and not looking for a quick exit via sale to another party) appear to be essentially guaranteed to break even or make a profit when buying at any price below 110% of face value, since they cannot be forcibly bought out at anything less than 110% of a 30-day trailing average that should never cross below face value. (Trading below face value would offer 'free money' arbitrage via immediate redemption at face value, so while it might occasionally happen, the probability of a 30-day trailing average below face value should be negligible.)

Given the absence of any cap on the unit price created by the threat of a forced buyback at face value, those who are willing to hold Ukyo.Loan at a price of .01 BTC per share for .05% daily yield relative to face value should, other things being equal, be willing to hold it at twice that price in return for twice the yield -- a price of .02 BTC per share for .1% daily yield relative to face value.

(ADDENDUM TO THE ORIGINAL: For anyone who either accidentally or intentionally would like to interpret the previous sentence as implying or suggesting, in any way, shape or form, that I somehow believe that other things are equal, I am making no such suggestion. I am, on the contrary, illustrating how normal bonds trade in the real world. And in the real world, we can assume that other things are not equal when yields change; that is why bond prices change so as to bring the risk adjusted return of a bond in line with the risk adjusted returns of other comparable assets. That is also why higher yields typically correlate with lower quality offerings: issuers of lower quality, higher risk paper must pay higher yields in order to counterbalance their higher risk.)

Yet historically, the price of units of Ukyo.Loan has barely responded to radical changes in yield. From inception (19 July) to 1 September inclusive, by which time the bulk of the fund's purchases had been completed, the loan paid out the equivalent of 10 days of dividends at its normal rate, then 11 days at 150% of its normal rate, then 20 days at 200% of the normal rate, then 4 days at the normal rate. (The loan continued to pay out at its normal rate from the beginning of September to this writing.) Despite the fact that the yield climbed to 200% of the guaranteed rate for a sustained period of 20 consecutive days, the price per unit barely budged during that time, trading at no more than 20% above face value. (Up until 11 August, it traded largely at or very occasionally below face value.) For reference, paying 20% above face value reduces the effective return of the loan from approximately 18% per annum to approximately 15% per annum, or from approximately 36% per annum -- when it is paying 200% of its guaranteed rate -- to 30%.

As far as I can tell, the most plausible justifications for such extreme discounting of potentially above-guarantee returns as reflected in the unit price of Ukyo.Loan are along the following lines:

• Potential holders believe BitFunder is doomed, and therefore future returns from the loan will not benefit significantly from its success.
• Potential holders believe Ukyo is extremely untrustworthy or is extremely likely either to alter the loan contract unilaterally to the detriment of creditors or to breach the terms of the contract altogether. (Note that such ex post facto unilateral contract modifications are permitted by BitFunder.)
• Potential holders are so strongly wedded to the 'get out clause' provided by face value redemption on demand that they will not pay anything for higher yield that is not accompanied by a higher guaranteed redemption price.
• Potential holders have not fully attended to the difference between the buyback provision for Ukyo.Loan and the analogous provisions of related loans which rarely deviate significantly from face value.

As for the first two, I personally have no idea whether BitFunder is doomed, and I have no idea whether Ukyo is so untrustworthy as to effect a radical and unilateral change to the contract to the detriment of those holding the loan. However, to the extent that either of these types of explanations plays a role in current pricing of Ukyo.Loan, I believe the market's pricing reflects a degree of skepticism about BitFunder and/or about Ukyo's trustworthiness that is unsupported by publicly available evidence. As for the second two, it seems likely to me that any influence from factors like these is apt to decrease over time.

The upshot is that Ukyo.Loan appears to me to be mispriced, and I believe there is a worthwhile probability that this mispricing will be corrected over a time horizon relevant to the success of the fund.

Liquidity Facility and Subscriptions/Redemptions

As many participants will be aware, the fund's initial offering of 20,000 shares on 15 August was entirely subscribed in less than 30 hours. Immediately following the initial offering, the fund traded as high as a 7% premium to NAV, but the fund refrained from interfering with the market's natural pricing activity and provided no further liquidity either on the bid or ask side. (As described in the listing documents, the fund may optionally provide additional liquidity when bids or asks fall significantly below or above NAV, respectively.) Some days later, after the initial flurry of activity had settled, the fund did offer limited additional liquidity above NAV, but just one additional share was issued before other market participants stepped in and enhanced liquidity.

Subsequent to this report, the fund may make additional shares available for a time somewhat above NAV.

Note that without interference or 'management' of the spread in any way, the market has already set a difference between bids and asks for the fund which frequently ranges from less than 1% to a bit over 2%, with the spread widening somewhat during the days immediately prior to this report. For the avoidance of doubt, I have no intention of turning the routine maintenance of a wider and less favourable spread into an ongoing profit engine for the fund. The reality is that although wide spread market making by funds' own managers can create the appearance of a performance boost that may appeal to the casual onlooker, in fact it represents an indirect trading tax on fund participants, a tax taken directly out of participants' pockets when buying, when selling, or both. This practice is designed to subsidise early and ongoing shareholders' returns on paper by taxing newer shareholders' and departing shareholders' trading activity. It has nothing at all to do with real fund performance. After all, a trained monkey can generate 12% 'gains' per year simply by skewering participants with a 5% bid/ask trading tax on a monthly churn of only 20% of a fund's total capitalisation; double the spread or the monthly churn, and presto, easy 24% annual 'gains'. It's remarkable that this practice survives at all in a community which is otherwise justifiably hypervigilant about schemes designed to pay early investors using money extracted from later ones.

Finally, a few individuals considering relatively large positions in the fund have been in touch, and I have discussed with them the option of direct share transfers. Since it benefits the fund not to have to pay transaction fees on new share subscriptions, potential participants considering positions in the fund of 5000 shares or larger are welcome to get in touch with me about arranging direct transfers, internal to the exchange. Note that as with any other new share issuance, this facility will only be made available during a period immediately following publication of the fund's latest NAV. (It has, therefore, not been made available to anyone prior to this report.)

Reporting Schedule

I believe it would be useful to synchronise fund reporting with calendar months, rather than with anniversaries of the fund's initial offering date which, as luck would have it, fell squarely in the middle of a calendar month. Therefore, I'm considering extending the next reporting period so as to cover thru the end of October, rather than thru the middle of October. Unless or until any public announcement is made about synchronising the next reporting date, however, it is safe to assume that it will continue to fall on an approximately monthly cycle and will therefore next occur around mid-October.

Trust Ratings

As I mentioned in the fund's listing documents, I have no particular interest in amassing trust ratings for a pseudonymous WOT account. However, if participants in the fund feel it is appropriate to do so, I would invite them to consider leaving trust feedback for my forum account, not as a reflection of positive or negative fund performance, but rather as an indication of how they regard the trustworthiness of my management of the fund. (It is virtually certain that the NAV of the fund will go down as well as up, but hopefully variation in fund performance need not imply variation in trustworthiness!)

The first monthly report for BTC Growth will be published in summary form on BTC-TC and in both summary and detailed form on the fund's discussion thread on Monday 16 September at 1 pm UK time. For reference, this is 8 am in New York and 8 pm in Beijing.

For more information on the fund itself, please see the listing documents:

https://btct.co/security/BTC-GROWTH

Please don't. I have no interest in trying to swing anyone's attitude about anything, and I have no intention of spending time on phone-based hand-holding to help anyone feel more at ease.

As I have indicated previously, the detailed documentation which I have already provided reflects a tremendous amount of my personal time and effort, and it is incumbent upon potential participants to read and evaluate what I have already spent that time and effort providing. If potential participants find that this material is in any way insufficient, then they should not phone me to ask for still more personal attention, they should simply make the decision not to participate.

I mentioned the site for those who might like to take a moment to read and understand something I'd written there. In your case, unfortunately, you've passed up the opportunity for substantive engagement in favour of criticising the traffic levels of a new site that's barely 4 months old and contains just a couple dozen articles. And no, not everything in life is an SEO project with success measured in the millions of page views; sometimes I just like to write. I make no apologies for that, to you or to anyone else.

As for some earlier personal insults about SEO, yes, I have a little background in that. "Greg's High Performance SEO" isn't the most popular WordPress plugin in the world, but enough people have found it helpful to their work to have downloaded it a couple of hundred thousand times.


Wow, yet more demonstrations of a really convincing determination to avoid anything of substance...

Anyone who takes the time to read and understand anything I have written on the topic -- including picking up my book if they feel the need for "real math" -- will immediately comprehend that my 1990s-era work on quantum decoherence was specifically aimed at debunking quantum theories of mind. Only someone either hell-bent on hurling personal insults or determined to avoid anything deeper than "skimming" could believe that I have anything whatsoever to do with quantum theories of mind, except to debunk them.


Now it seems to me you're just being offsensive. To the best of my recollection, the only person who has sought to comment on my intelligence at all, in any way, is you -- and you have now done so repeatedly. You have either disingenuously or grossly ignorantly misrepresented my writing on quantum decoherence, you have strung together a few words and phrases about puts and calls without delivering much in the way of actual meaning (and certainly without offering any meaningful engagement with anything I have written), and you have steadfastly refused to offer anything at all of substance or even to do more than "skim" the relevant material I have provided -- apparently preferring instead just to twirl around and spray insults in all directions, in the hope that something will stick.

For my part, I have much better things to do with my time, and it leaves me feeling dirty and grimy even engaging with another human being at this level of conversation.

I would suggest again that for the benefit of those of us who would like to carry on more meaningful and less grossly disrespectful conversations, you might consider setting up your own thread elsewhere for your accusations, rather than continuing to pollute this one.

Super -- and many thanks for the speedy reply. I'm sorry to hear you've been ill, especially over the weekend; take good care of yourself!

Although a double payment went out on 1 September to cover the missing one from 31 August, as of 3 September we're now back to being behind by one day again, since no payment went out on 2 September. Any news?

Wow, Ytterbium. You've done a masterful job of lowering the tone of the conversation right down into the gutter.

If you'd like to invest as much time reading material that was actually written by me as you've invested in denigrating my character, I would welcome your input. And if you'd like to offer any substantive criticism -- for example, on any of the strategies I've discussed on Psychological Investor, or on anything else relevant to asset management -- then I'm sure that could go a long way toward restoring the conversation to a more civil and productive level.

However, if you envision your principal contribution as leveraging your anonymity in order to hurl abuse at me or at others, then I would encourage you to consider whether your efforts might be more welcome over in the section specifically dedicated to scam accusations.

As some participants might be aware, up until a certain threshold fund size, the SEC does not require that hedge funds disclose their holdings or their trading activity; thus, analogies based on whether the SEC or some variant is present or "missing" don't seem to bear directly on the question of disclosure for a fund of this size. (Some participants will also be aware of academic studies suggesting that funds which do not disclose their trading activities tend to outperform otherwise comparable funds which do.)

More to the point, however, there is a reason why the listing documents include a Not-So-FAQ: it was in hopes of making some of these questions not so frequently asked. The bottom line is simple: if potential participants lack confidence or want the fund to become something other than it is so that they can feel confident, then they should not participate.

The 'Bible' of options investing is McMillan's Options as a Strategic Investment.

Incidentally, the 796.com 'futures' are futures only in name; they're something more akin to a CFD and look quite a bit like a messier version of the BTC.sx offering. ICBIT offers 'real' futures. (There's another BTC/USD derivative available which you'll sometimes see mentioned, but unless you fancy usurious implied volatility and bid/ask spreads, it's hardly worth exploring.)

More on the general topic of Bitcoin derivatives is available in this article:

Bitcoin Derivatives, Liquidity and Counterparty Risk

Updates will be posted in due course over at the main thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=266828.0

I intended specifically to refer to more than one person; I intend whatever I write here to be of use to whoever happens along to read it. If any potential participants feel they need individual private consultation, this is not the place for it.


Your conclusion is not only erroneous, but grossly so. Basic accounting does not permit companies simply to whip up some profit statements out of thin air, unsupported by detailed records, including detailed records of assets, liabilities, and just about everything else.


Again, your conclusion is not only erroneous, but grossly so. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but we're now descending into the absurd: how do you imagine a company would even begin to report taxable income by reporting only a balance sheet? It's a rhetorical question: I am not looking for a reply.)

More generally, I hope that you and any other interested readers will appreciate that this thread was opened before the fund launched, specifically with the intention of providing a venue for anyone with an interest to ask questions, make suggestions, and evaluate for themselves what was being proposed. (And it certainly was not opened to provide an ongoing opportunity for tutorials on basic accounting or UK law.) I put a great deal of time and effort both into the preparation of the original listing document and into the discussions which took place on this thread before the fund launched.

However, the fund has now launched. As you will hopefully appreciate, that means I now have one or two things that are occupying my time with regard to actually managing the fund -- an activity which I consider altogether more pressing than investing yet more of my time here on the forum, re-hashing the same questions which were already discussed before the fund launched.

Re-hashing the same types of questions represents a direct subtraction from the time that I can spend actually managing the fund: it is, in a very real sense, a direct drag on the returns of the fund. I understand that since you are looking to launch a fund of your own, it would naturally be in your interest to occupy my time as much as possible with extended discussions about basic accounting and even your accusations that I am "making it very easy to run a Ponzi out of this". But I hope you will appreciate that my willingness to engage in this exercise is severely limited, and in my eyes this exercise is directly contrary to the interests of those of us who are actually participating in the fund -- including me.

Maybe my reluctance to take time away from fund management for re-hashing or for discussing basic accounting sheds some light on why my first response to many questions is going to have to be "RTFM" or even just simply to remind potential participants of what it already says in the listing documents: if the information which I have already spent a great deal of my time providing is in any way insufficient for your needs, then do not participate.