Double Blind

Just a friendly public reminder that starting on July 1st:

There are other tax measures in the budget (feel free to read them here) but they are not likely to be of concern to most of the readers of this site. Everybody in the country benefits from the GST cut and most would benefit from the employer credit. I’m still a little miffed that the Conservatives raised the lower marginal rate, but all in all, I’ll be saving a few bucks from this.

There is also a growing disparity in terms of how the provincial government and the federal government calculates its tax credits – the divergence in the two systems will continue to get wider over time and this will make the tax system slightly more complicated. The provincial government should match these measures, especially the monthly transit pass, employment and educational credits.

Produced by some students in Columbia University. FYI, Ben Bernanke is the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, who took over from Alan Greenspan earlier this year. The position is probably the second most important in the USA, behind the President of the United States.

Michael Crichton is the author that wrote Jurassic Park, in addition to other books. Here is a speech he made: Fear, Complexity, Environmental Management in the 21st Century.

It’s a pretty good argument – in air traffic, for example, it’s much more dangerous to see information on the screen that is inaccurate rather than not to see any information at all.

Interesting comments on his post titled the end game and Dover, describing the political impacts of a potentially declining real estate market.

If you told somebody that you were taking out a $300,000 loan and putting it in the stock market, people would look at you strangely and think that you’re a bit nuts. If you did the same thing and put it in a piece of real estate, it makes you smart. It should be interesting to see how the next year goes.

It turns out I got 5/8 games correct in my group of 16 predictions. Considering the odds of such teams as Brazil to win, and the only underdog team which I thought would win was the Netherlands (which they didn’t), getting 5/8 correct is the statistical equivalent as white noise. So my predictions generally aren’t very good, but this won’t prevent me from giving more out. Market odds are in percentages below:

June 30
Germany (50%) vs. Argentina (50%) – Argentina
Italy (76%) vs. Ukraine (24%) – Italy

July 1
England (59%) vs. Portugal (41%) – England
Brazil (69%) vs. France (31%) – Brazil

Market odds to win the World Cup: (plus the change in percentages since the start of the tournament)

Brazil – 27.2% (+5%)
Argentina – 17.0% (+7%)
Germany – 16.6% (+6%)
England – 11.5% (+2%)
Italy – 13.3% (+5%)
France – 7.3% (+0%)
Portugal – 6.0% (+2%)
Ukraine – 1.6% (+0%)

Switzerland defeated South Korea 2-0, although the game wasn’t badly played by the South Koreans at all – they had plenty of chances, but they just didn’t score. At the same time, France beat Togo, and when they scored their second goal to go 2-0 up, I promptly took the opportunity to liquidate my stake in South Korea to win the World Cup at 0.2%. Because I had bought 64 cents extra of South Korea (at 0.2%) in the preceding days before the game, my total loss on South Korea to win the World Cup was $3.64.

So I’m sitting on a net loss in the World Cup, and all I can say is that statistically speaking, I’m a losing player at picking soccer matches. That won’t prevent me from taking small bets in the future, but I am perfectly aware that I suck at picking teams.

Here are some predictions for the round of 16… note the first team placed 1st in their group, which makes them the favourite to win the game.

June 24
Germany vs. Sweden – Germany
Argentina vs. Mexico – Argentina

June 25
England vs. Ecuador – England
Portugal vs. Netherlands – Netherlands

June 26
Italy vs. Australia – Italy
Switzerland vs. Ukraine – Switzerland

June 27
Brazil vs. Ghana – Brazil
Spain vs. France – Spain

So I got dinged again from my previous entry, stopped out for a loss of 16 pips. This is two in a row that I have screwed up. This was an odd trade – four business days is the longest I’ve ever held a bond future before. The market just has not been volatile over that time period.

For the year I am 3/5 on completed transactions and have 4 incomplete (closed early) transactions. I am a total of 65 pips up for the year (a pip is 1/32 of $1000), minus one pip of commission, which isn’t bad, but I think it could be better.

Locally grown and picked strawberries were $2.59 per pound, compared to $2.69 a couple days ago and a record low of $1.99 sometime last week.

I also noticed they changed their pricing strategy for locally picked raspberries – instead of selling at $4.59 per pound, they were selling for a flat rate of $3.99 per basket. I bought one and weighed it (when I got home) at 415 grams. At the per-pound price the cost would have been $4.19, which is a slight decrease in price.

I think the reason why raspberries are more expensive than strawberries is because raspberries are much less dense, and therefore more effort is required to harvest the fruit per unit weight. People are probably scared off by the per-pound figure when they see it relative to all the other fruits (which range from 30 cents per pound for watermelons all the way up to 4.59 for raspberries) and intuitively think that a basket of raspberries will cost them a bundle. Thus, the produce store introduces a fixed cost per basket scheme and this reduces the consumer’s risk of not being able to accurately determine cost.

It worked for me, at least – I bought both.

So far there have been no major qualification surprises except that Ecuador will be continuing instead of Poland.

In terms of marketing pricing in the “team to win the World Cup” contest, the two large gainers (in percentage terms) has been Argentina, Spain and Ecuador – if you had loaded up on them before the first game, you would have been sitting on about 100% on top of your original investment assuming you liquidate your holdings today.

(Updated an hour later: Ghana also would have been high in terms of percentage gain. Both Ecuador and Ghana were relatively low-priced to begin with (less than 0.4%) and as a result you would have gotten about 200-400% gains, depending on how you timed your pricing. Ecuador is guaranteed to make the next round, while Ghana has to navigate through the Italy-USA-Czech Republic group.)

Wednesday will feature four “who cares” games since the teams that will qualify are already determined, but Thursday and Friday will be a feature-packed days that will determine the fates of the USA+Ghana, Czech Republic+Italy, South Korea+Switzerland and even possibly France.

There hasn’t been any trading action by me over the past couple days, except for flipping 100 contracts of USA to win the World Cup (in at 0.3, out at 0.5, for a whole profit of $2). Currently, I only have a positive bet on South Korea.

I subscribe (free) to the Wizard of Odds newsletter since he is a very interesting read. I never play casinos online (or offline for that matter, simply because I don’t believe in playing games of negative expectation), but the Wizard of Odds goes through a lot of analysis to show which games have the lowest edge for the casino. I’ve learned quite a bit from his writings. I also think he has a pretty good attitude on life when you catch him writing about non-gambling issues.

Since the advent of online gambling, people have accused certain casinos of being rigged. There was a post at a forum called Casinomeister that accused a certain casino of giving a relative disadvantage to 50/50 coin flips. The Wizard of Odds posted his analysis here.

While I find this all interesting, I find the forum post that contained the data to be interesting. Not the initial post (which is a simple statistical proof showing that the casino was rigged) but rather the subsequent responses that claim that you can’t use “just a hundred samples to tell whether a coin is rigged or not”.

When dealing with people on borderline statistical issues, you will very often get a lot of naysayers that have no idea how few samples it actually takes to give a 99% confidence interval on a badly rigged coin. Even if the coin is only 55/45, it doesn’t take many samples to show that the coin is rigged. Still, my favourite post is the nay-sayer that said “it would take 100,000 samples before you could determine whether it’s rigged or not”.