Day: February 1, 2008

Like all good open source projects, this one was born out of a frustration. I wanted to be able to write entries for my personal site when off-line, but the only good software I could find to do so, Blogg-X, refused to work for me. The installer for the latest version wouldn't run on Linux, and the previous version failed to login to a current Joomla site.

What to do? Of course, write your own. I thought for a while and realized that the approach taken by Blogg-X is wrong: there is no benefit in tying Joomla and Java, especially for content editing. What you really want is a local copy of your site, make modifications on one or the other, and then merge them into a synchronized site. 

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Ok, the market and I saw this coming: Microsoft just announced last night they were going to start an unsolicited bid for Yahoo! at a share price of $31. There had been rumors (confirmed with the bid) that Microsoft and Yahoo! were talking about a merger, but (as Microsoft confirmed) they went nowhere fast.

As an ex-Yahoo!, and one that cares about the company a lot, I am sad to see one of the flagships of the Internet (potentially) disappear, but it was a catastrophe long in the making. At the same time, the transaction makes perfect sense for both parties involved at this stage in their life, and I wish the best to both bidder and biddee (that sounds so like bidet…). 

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Now that we have a perfect way to make money, let's look at the risks associated with it.

Here is a list of risks, and we'll discuss how they affect the trading below:

• There is no change in behavior: the undersold contract stays undersold, and the oversold contract stays oversold until it matures
• Of the two components of the multiplied expected value we picked the wrong one
• Intrade finds out about this method
• Method trading becomes a large part of overall trading, skewing the values
• Intrade runs out of business

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