Pedro Larroy [random thoughts]

If you hold stocks, real state, a vehicle, oil wells or almost any asset, you probably have noticed how it has decreased in value. I keep an eye on the price of commodities, and although I was fully aware of the price drop of oil, reality struck me bluntly when I was refilling my small 50cc motorbike gas tank with the usual 5€, only to see a lot of gasoline spilled on my motorbike seat and to be reminded that volume is measured in liters, not in euros. I think sometimes we fail to act on things even when we know about them.

I think I can give an hypothesis of what have happened with the money supply and how economic regulation not only doesn’t prevent bubbles and bursts from occurring but it most likely reinforces them.

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India follows MIT opencourseware, with those great lectures on a wide range of topics. I’m viewiing the ones by professor Dasgupta on Artificial Intelligence.

Inmortal, indestructible, opposed substances come from it and when one stands above other, a reaction that restablishes equilibrium comes paying mutual retribution following the disposition of time.

Looks like we had a good rebound those few days before the U.S. elections; money is flowing or just short closing? Luckily I had considered this could happen and closed my short positions in futures to cover my portfolio at a small profit.

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Seen in engineer’s finance:

http://www.engineersfinance.com/blog/2008/11/02/being-more-productive-at-work/#more-129

“We spend a lot of time trying to find ways to be more productive. To do things faster, better, cheaper and spend our time more effectively. But instead of just doing more in less time, maybe we should focus on actually enjoying the work we’re doing instead.”

Also I liked: http://www.engineersfinance.com/blog/2008/08/21/risk-it-the-earlier-the-better/

What is cheap may still get cheaper, EuroStoxx 50 has estimated PE of 7.6 for 2008, and dividend yield of 6.2% This might be a good time to pick some stocks for a long term portfolio. Specially with interest rates going down. If history is going to repeat again, and the crisis doesn’t turn into a down spiral, then it’s likely we will enter into “stage 2″ at some point in the near future. Althought I like to rotate some part of the portfolio to dollars, It’s not easy for me to find reasonably priced companies in dollars that I can understand well.

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From Oct-24 to Oct-26 I’ll be in Madrid in the V rankia financial meeting about investing in the middle of the crisis. I’ll be happy to meet and have lunch with some financial gurus and share investment experiences with others. I’ll fly from Barcelona at 16:20 just after I get out from work. See you in MAD!

Past weeks observations about price trends in oil & gas companies and the worsening economic conditions triggered some changes in my portfolio. Basically I sold all my energy stocks, which have given a good return.

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I just graduated again!

View video in youtube

I'm building firefox myself tuned for speed, and without the nasty fsync problem.

It's relatively easy following the build documentation, but there are some nice tricks for speeding things up. So basically what I had to was ensuring I had all the prerequisites installed.

My build system is debian lenny x86_64.

hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/ src

My .mozconfig file:

ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser
ac_add_options --enable-debug
#ac_add_options --enable-static
ac_add_options --enable-libxul
export SQLITE_NO_SYNC=1
#here doesn't seem to work
export CFLAGS="-gstabs+"
export CXXFLAGS="-gstabs+"
#arch selection
#ac_add_options --target=i686-pc-linux

I added: "-DSQLITE_NO_SYNC" to: db/sqlite3/src/Makefile

Then compile with:

make -f client.mk AUTOCONF=autoconf2.13 MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS=-j20

And generate package with:

make package