Yew Jin's Sometimes Blog

I'm obsessed with making bread lately, according to my wife. Given that I am writing a post on it, I will not deny that accusation.

Over the weekend, I made bread that took 10 minutes to prepare, and just over an hour to bake. It's so simple, that even I can make it. I will just link to the articles I used - the recipe really works. It's unbelievable.

Boule (Artisan Free-Form Loaf)

No Knead Bread: so easy a 4-yr old can make it!

I was watching an episode from Futurama season 7 (it's back baby!) with the Mrs, and she is just amazed at how amused I was at the show. Honestly, I prefer the earlier seasons which were on Fox and not Comedy Central as there are too much allusions to sexual references.

In any case, I thought about it and hypothesized that the humor comes from the show depicting stereotypical concepts as opposed to more "realistic" scenarios given the premise of being the future. For example, the planet which had multiple tornadoes involved the Professor screaming "everyone to the basement!", and the next scene showed the crew scurrying to the basement, complete with a big wooden basement door seen in so many movies.

The Mrs looked at me, and sniped, "yeah, I can see why that's funny".

I laughed.

A few days back a stray long-standing buy limit order for LVLT was executed, and despite my usual optimism for all-things technology and the Internet, I decided to quickly turn around and sell the stocks for a small profit. Why? There are a number of factors, but the two main ones are: Negative free cash flow (note to self: discount macroeconomics and technology trends when stock picking), and also freeing up cash for other businesses which are even more undervalued.

Berkshire Hathaway (of Warren Buffett fame) had sold insurance that would resulted in a pay-out if France won the World Cup. Now that's an interesting policy underwriting! This was disclosed in an interview with Warren Buffett earlier this year.

Businessweek speculates that the counterparty could be Carrefour SA, Europe’s biggest retailer, as it had a promotion in which customers buying flat-screen televisions would have been reimbursed if France won the tournament.

Source: Buffett Wins World Cup Bet as France Falls to Host [businessweek.com]

A picture is worth a thousand words

I used to email myself file changes to keep certain files in sync between computers - I wished someone just told me about Dropbox earlier! Dropbox syncronizes all your files in your Dropbox folder to all your Mac, Windows and Linux computers, and it does it in a really simple way - Dropbox creates a folder which looks like a local folder (and in fact the files are stored locally as well so that you can access all your files even when you are offline), but is really synchronizing in the background. This happens so fast that most files take just a few seconds before the changes appear on all of your computers. 

The price is right too - Dropbox is FREE for 2GB, and $99.95/year for 50GB. If you sign up using my referral link, we both get 250MB more (that's win-win in my books): https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTg0NTA4NTA5

As a bonus tip for Mac users, Mac OS X can easily create encrypted disk images to store in Dropbox as a layer of security. You simply open the disk image, copy/modify/delete files, and it is all kept in sync.

Covestor just updated their investment model for sharing portfolios - basically for the convenience of mirroring a model investor's portfolio, you pay fees for the brokerage for commission, to Covestor for the platform and the model investor for sharing his portfolio.

I must admit that I did consider sharing my portfolio, but realize that nobody will bother to mirror my trades anyway - but hopefully this pipe dream of a secondary source of income might one day be realized. Personally, I am still not convinced that my returns are better than the market indices, especially with such short history (1 year+). In fact, consider this my fair warning to all: It's really hard to beat the market, and you do want to know if your fund manager exhibits skill?

As one of our readers wrote of another piece, "All the math made my head hurt." Sorry about that -- I suspect that this piece falls into the same category. So here's the Cliff's Notes version: Out of over 400 diversified funds studied during the 1987-97 period, by definition half showed above average performance, but in almost all cases it seemed likely that this was due to random variation, and not skill. In only one case was there unequivocal statistical evidence of skill. When the same tests were applied to major league batters, abundant evidence of skill was found.

By way of comparison, consider the best performing mutual fund for any given year. Such funds tend to do somewhat better than average the next year, but no better than average in following years. In contrast, in every case the National League batting champions demonstrated strong statistical evidence of skill in the 11 year period following their batting crowns. Put another way, batting performance persists, mutual fund performance does not.

Everyone keeps asking how much I am paid at Google. However, I have been championing that "just" cash compensation cannot be the sole motivator for Googlers. Once you pay someone enough money, then "autonomy", "mastery", and "purpose" are much better motivating forces. This explains the (surprising?) success of open-source projects like Linux operating system, and Wikipedia (hey you do not even need to pay someone!).

Below is a great video that explains this.