Just Blame Fred

If I was angry before, you have no idea how much now.

Just looked at today’s issue of the Boston Herald (28-July-2009). This paper seems like a rag, but it did a good story on the Gates affair, including publishing the transcripts of the 911 call.

As the aid told Londo in Babylon 5 before Londo went on a rage and broke everything in his room after he found out he’d been “played like a fiddle”, The Details are Everything.

After reading the transcripts myself, it is clear that:

1. Crowley lied about being told that “it was 2 Black men with backpacks”. The 911 tapes revealed that he was told that there were 2 men, race unknown, maybe one was a “Hispanic”, and there were suitcases. Not backpacks, but suitcases!
2. Whalen, the woman who made the 911 call, was asked about the “race” of the 2 men, but said she did not know.
3. Crowley report back to HQ that he had the ID of “Henry Louis Gates”, which presumably would have his address on it!
4. Crowley claim that Gates screamed and became “belligerent”, but there was no evidence of this in the tapes. Just soft-spoken voices.
5. Whalen has come forward and openly contradicted Sgt. Crowley’s claim of “2 Black men”. She wants to clear her name in this highly charged affair.

What conclusions can we draw from this?

It is clear that Sgt. Crowley is a big fat liar, as are many police. As they were in my case similar to the Gates Incident 10 years ago. Whalen had no motivaion to lie. She was just accurately reporting what she saw, and not one whit more.

Crowley obviously knew that Gates lived at that home when he arrested him. Crowley obviously knew about the suitcases, as he was told that by the dispatcher. Crowley had every reason to believe and know that Gates just got back from a trip.

The facts, to a reasonable person, would lead that person to conclude that Gates was not a criminal, but simply got locked out of his house has he claimed. The reasonable person would see no need to put this distinguished professor in handcuffs.

But we are talking police here, so toss all reason and logic out of the window. Crowley obviously wanted to assert his “authority” over this professor who had done no wrong, and had already proven his identity and the fact that that was his house. Besides, a robber would not want to hang about for long and most likely would have been gone by the time the cops arrived.”I don’t care what “good record” Crowley had before this incident. He indeed did “act stupidly” as the President proclaimed, as did the Nashua Police Anthony Pivero and Eric Nordengren did in my P. Uno case 10 years ago.

Was Crowley’s “stupid actions” motived by race? Or just a general power trip cops typically like weilding on everyone? Who knows? Does it matter, really?

I therefore make a general call to all who have been wronged by rogue cops to take action. Do  NOT let these rogue cops get away with trampling our rights. Do not let these rogue cops get away with their power trips at our expense. Sue them. Go to the media. Video them and immediately upload the videos to youtube. TAKE EVERY LEGAL ACTION you can to put these rogue cops back in their place!

They like saying that “Freedom is Never Free”. Well, let’s get to the freedom first.

911 and Dispacher Audio can be heard here. But here’s the transcripts of the exerpts as published in The Boston Hearld.

I really don’t like Obama, as many of his policies has serious problems that will plunge this country into further debt, and he has failed to end the war and close Guantanamo Bay as he promised.

However, when he said that the Cambridge Police acted “stupidly” in arresting the Harvard Professor in his own home, he was spot on.
mach zehnder modulator
Obama on the Gates Case

I myself have been through similar experiences with police a number of times in my life. And you know, all the tired old excuses grow old after a while. The police always claim to be “doing their job”. They were always “responding to something”. And all the other excuses they pour out.

But where do we brown-skinned people ever get to be treated equally in this damned country? Why are we always the ones singled out in matters such as these? And more importantly, WHEN IT IT GOING TO STOP?

Today, I am avowed to SUE both the police and the 911ers whenever I am harassed by them when I’ve done nothing wrong. My mere existence is not suspicion of bad activity. My mere presence in a place is NOT A CRIME! Sorry, but not all of us have pale skin, nor should we be made to feel inferior or a threat to society just because we don’t. We all have various shades of brown, and what’s wrong with having brown skin anyway?

I am proud of my brown skin, and wouldn’t change it for the world. Actually, I really don’t make much ado about dermal chromatics. I don’t see the point. Why so many stupid humans think it should be an issue. I don’t get it.

I like all people on this planet — all cultures, all ethnicities, all countries. I don’t consider any one person more or less worthwhile just because of their country of origin or their chosen culture, etc.

And I certainly don’t see dermal chromatics having anything to do with the worth of an individual, either!

And so I still scratch my head, trying to understand why this issue of dermal chromatics continues to be an issue in our country.

Sorry, but a man’s home is his castle. Everyone should respect that — including the Police. You don’t go kicking doors in and arresting homeowners out of their own homes just for being there, or just for their dermal chromatics.

Nor do you harass people in public because of their dermal chromatics either, as I have been more times than I can count.

And Police MUST stop abusing their power on everyone, as I’ve witness them giving lots of people a hard time, and not always due to dermal chromatics, either.

Being innocent must stand for something in our country. But currently, it does not. We the People of America live in a country that really considers you guilty until proven innocent.

If a cop ever comes into my home again to arrest me when I’ve done nothing wrong, then that cop can expect an end to his career, as I will stop AT NOTHING until said cop is fired. I will sue him, the whole police force, go public, start protests, and much, much more.

We the Individuals of America must reassert our Personal Sovereignty. We have a right to bear arms, we have a right to privacy, we have a right not to be falsely accused, we have a right to not have our children snatched away when we’ve done nothing wrong. We have a right to not have the government in our wallets, in our bedrooms, tearing up marriages, making men look bad just for being men.

We the Individuals must stand together to Fight the Oppressors. We must take any and all means possible to do so. We must not knuckle under to harassment and oppression. We must not allow rogue neighbors to get away with fingering us to the cops. We must not allow rogue cops to get away with harassing innocents. We must not allow child-snatching social workers from taking our kids away from us.

WE MUST STAND FIRM.

Back in 2000, I used to be a day trader full-time. Everyday I would watch the markets and attempt to capitalize on short term price movements. In order to “predict” those price movements, I would look at lots of data and news every day, and even wrote some software to analyze some of that time-series data to give me a kind of “forecast” for the trading day.

We all know about “price discovery”, being “overbought”, “oversold”, “retracements” and the like. A difference is assumed between the “investor” and the “trader”, even to the point of absolutionist morality. It is seen as a “good thing” by the general public to be an “investor”, and a “bad thing” to be a “trader”. There’s lots of misconceptions about the equities market, and a lot of those misconceptions are intentional by those who stand to gain from the general ignorance and folklore on the part of the public.

Ah yes. But if we didn’t have the “traders” in the market short-term, there would not be enough liquidity for the long-term “investors”. They need each other, it would seem.

But the real question what is really going on needs to be understood and answered to truly understand the equities market.

Firstly, one must understand the basic fundamentals of the equities market. It is a zero-sum game. Exchanges occurs between one trader and another; between one investor and another. The goal of anyone in the equities market — investor or trader — is to find a “greater fool” than oneself to buy the stock at a higher price than one’s “strike price”.

That is to say, that every dollar you make in the equities market came at the expense of someone else, and every dollar you loose in the equities market  goes in somebody’s pocket.

This is a very tough concept for some to accept, because if you listen to all the spin about the equities market, you are lead to believe that the wealth one could supposedly make happens by “magic”. It does not. It happens at the expense of other players in the market.

That reality is played out — rather painfully — by the market “crashes” such as the one we are having now,  where so many loose their “investment”. They are paying for the profit of others before them. Plain and simple. And the sad reality of this is that prices will not rise again until the greatest fools of all jump out of the market in sheer panic and terror.

Indeed, it is a requirement for this to happen. Prices must fall. The giveback must occur. The Faustian bargain must be paid in full. This is the mathematical reality of a zero-sum game.

After you understand and appreciate the inanity of this, consider it even more insane that many are encouraged to put their retirement investments in the equities market.

Why does this happen? Simple. Because the supply of fools are finite, and to carry the market higher so for the Big Players to make a profit, they must suck in legions of smaller fools who don’t know any better.

The party works for a while. The more fools you suck in, the higher the prices are driven. Until, of course, you hit a wall and are unable to suck in anymore fools. Then the prices fall mercilessly, and many see their hard-earned life’s wealth washed away into the pockets of others.

The media calls this a “loss”. It should really be called a “transfer”, because that’s exactly what it is — a transfer of wealth.

They are encouraged to “stay in so they can catch the next uptick”. The sad irony is, of course, that if they would all stay in as they are recommended to by the financial planners, the market would never rise again. It only rises when many jump out of the market, giving up their holdings at prices below their strike, to smarter fools that will simply lie in wait for the whole “Ponzi Scheme” to repeat itself.

Now, with that notion in our minds, we are now in a stronger position to understand the true psychodymanics of the equities market.

I have struggled for some time now to conceive of a good model for the stock market. My latest one goes like this: On a given day, a given stock trades in a limited range of prices, at a certain volume. That volume and price range represents new ownership of that stock at a range of strike prices for that day. Since it is not known who owns what, I turn the issue on its head, and consider each individual stock as its own owner.

Crazy, you say? Maybe. But why not? If one person bought 10,000 shares of XYZ, would not the psychology be more or less the same as though 10 people bought 1000 shares each of XYZ? Or a hundred people purchased 100 shares each?

You are starting to see the picture here. Of course, in actuality, the specific goals of 100 people will probably all be different from each other — some may be doing this in a retirement account; others may be day traders. Some may be a mutual funds management. But that’s the whole idea. If I consider each individual stock as its own owner, then I can assign “flocking behavior” to groups of XYZ that all behave the same way. it allows me to reduce the problem of ownership to its bare elements. If 10,000 shares of XYZ all behave the same way, does it really matter if it had one owner or 10,000 with the same mindset? No, it does not.

When a share is traded, it looses is past owner and has a new owner at a new strike price. So now you have two components to deal with — the strike price and the goal of each share of stock.

When a the market is trading above the strike price of a owned stock, that owner is said to be “happy”. If the market price is trading below the strike, that owner is said to be “sad”.  We can then assign some probability of “ownership flipping” to that stock based on its own goals of greed and fear and the expectation of price evolution.

We can generally state that the probability of ownership flipping increases as the market price moves away from the strike price. But the probability curve is not symmetric for “happy” stocks and “sad” stocks. The probability increases faster for “sad” stocks than it does for “happy” stocks. Also, the details of the dynamics of how the price moves away from the strike is important. Fast moves will increase the probability of a flip faster than slow moves.  Price moves in certain patterns may shift the probability faster than other patterns. External factors such as news will also have an effect on that probability of a flip. Then there are automatic trading systems and the like. The picture becomes rather complex.

Add to that the fact that a flip influences others to flip. One single flip could trigger an avalanche of flips. This is self-organized criticality speaking here.

Now, it is clear that we, for the most part, have no ready access to the ownership space and distribution of the market capitalization of an equity at any given point in time. However, we do have a print of past history of stock price ranges and volumes for fixed intervals (minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years).

So, for any given time period p, where volume v of stock activity occurred, we know that at most v shares of stock are owned over the price range of p. We also know that at least min(t) shares are owned, t being the number of shares traded of a single tick over p. But this amount is so small in comparison that we can safely assume that w — the number of shares flipped during p — will be much larger than min(t) — that is, v >= w >> min(t).

For simplicity, we will simply ignore, for the moment, the possibility of shares flipping multiple times during p, as would be the case with day traders. We will also ignore shorting, but will treat it later.

So, given p₁, p₂, …, p_n, we have D₁, D_{лаптоп2}, …, D_n, where D_i = D(p_i), price distribution for period p_i. Of course, D shall be confined to the price range of the associated period. We also have ξ, the complete set of stock ownership for a given equity, where D_i is a subset that is dynamic on i.