His writing in Downriver is so self-absorbed that borders on repulsive. His characters lack motivation. The syntax is at times unbearable.
I can't help comparing the book to London Fields (in fact he refers to Amis as a contemporary in his forword), and Sinclair just doesn't stack up to Amis in any way, shape, or form, so to speak.

(2) How can I help?

(3) What do I gain?

I pay for the downtime as well, since in their view this is my fault. You know, for being a foreigner.

Or, see the original here. Graham pointed this out.

The guy in the foreground with his head blurred out, wearing the white linen, is always reading A Course in Miracles and that sort of thing. I can't remember his name.

Ben: I don't see any hangers in your catalog, but you sell them right?

Clerk: Yes. Let's see... page 143. But, they usually sell out as soon as we get them in. I'll check if we have any. No. Let me see if any of the surrounding stores have any... No.

Ben: When will you get more in?

Clerk: I don't know.

Ben: Is there anywhere else I can get hangers around here?

Clerk: I don't know.

Ben: Thanks anyway.

Demand > Supply -> Order more hangers. Right? What's next, toilet paper shortages?

So, out of curiosity, I built up the state model using BE. I'm now thinking BE makes lot of sense for trade life cycle. I've pitched the idea before, but I think trying to write a trade engine from scratch has made it really obvious how valuable this is.

Now I just have to figure out how to do this in Python. I'm thinking for each trading day I create a new object and then progress it through with a bunch of flags. Yay for non scalable approaches!

I'm also starting to wonder if my one language to rule them all approach is a good idea. I use Python for most everything, with occasional calls into C for a couple libraries I need that don't exist in Python. Python interoperates natively with C, so this isn't a big deal. That said, it'd be nice to be able to call something mathy (Matlab, R, S+, even Mathematica), and there are about a billion things in Java that'd be nice to have.

I don't want to use Jython because I'm not convinced it has a future. The integration to the Ameritrade API is already as much code as my entire arbitrage program. Likewise, the cluster code is easily 3x the size of the arbitrage code. Then there's the market data scraper which is probably 5x the arbitrage code. Integration is hard... That said, I really like the idea of keeping it all in Python so this problem doesn't get worse.

In related flawed reasoning, there are trillions in outstanding lottery tickets. Every time a person buys a lottery ticket, the state is potentially obligated to pay millions of dollars. It's only a matter of time before everyone wins the lottery at once and the state is required to pay out millions to each of millions of lottery players.

End the lottery! It may seem like a boon to public resources now, but soon the bubble will burst and this house of cards will come tumbling down!

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"2. Derivatives are unregulated, not traded on any public exchange, without universal standards, dealt with by private agreement, not transparent, have no open bid/ask market, are unguaranteed, have no central clearing house, and are just not really tangible."

Um, no. Anyone heard of CBOE?