The Market Structure Map
December 3, 2014
Euclid could have been a hedge-fund manager. The Greek mathematician and father of differential geometry defined our understanding of three-dimensional shapes in roughly 280 BC. Thanks to Euclid we know what a cube is, and that right angles are all equal. In 1982, mathematician James...
November 26, 2014
Happy Thanksgiving from Austin, TX! Many of you are out too, seeing family for the holiday. Looking back at 2014, this Market Structure Map from Aug 27 was one of the year’s most widely read. Curiously, some of the same economic data points including the...
November 19, 2014
You’ve got to know what to measure. Every time I interact with anybody from an airline to my company’s communications providers, I get a survey. “How’d we do?” It drives me crazy. It’s like Claymation customer service: Move something, take a picture. Move something, take...
November 12, 2014
Ticks are blood-sucking insects, about how regulators have viewed spreads between stock prices. Country singer Brad Paisley sings that he’d like to walk you through a field of wildflowers and check you for ticks. As a kid in tick country on Oregon’s Snake River breaks,...
November 5, 2014
What are the implications? Posing that question is a great conversation-starter unless you’ve just asked your teenage son about a substance you’ve found in his room that is not (currently in your state) sanctioned by the government, or if your party is on the long...
October 29, 2014
“I’m going to write a four-letter word meaning intercourse,” my speech-class colleague Jim announced, striding to the chalk board. It was 1986. Stunned, the rest of us stared open-mouthed. The chalk clicked. Jim stepped back and with a flourish gestured at what he’d written. “Talk,”...