Biggest black hole in the cosmos discovered

"The most massive known black hole in the universe has been discovered, weighing in with the mass of 18 billion Suns. Observing the orbit of a smaller black hole around this monster has allowed astronomers to test Einstein's theory of general relativity with stronger gravitational fields than ever before.

The black hole is about six times as massive as the previous record holder and in fact weighs as much as a small galaxy. It lurks 3.5 billion light years away, and forms the heart of a quasar called OJ287. A quasar is an extremely bright object in which matter spiralling into a giant black hole emits copious amounts of radiation.

But rather than hosting just a single colossal black hole, the quasar appears to harbour two – a setup that has allowed astronomers to accurately 'weigh' the larger one."...

Find the rest here.
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Listen to what the man said

Digital Mystery

Photo clues lead to camera's owner

IB Olympiad Week Three (GREEN!)

Liquidation Value: $1,038,799.64 +$232,189.79 on the week

Positions:

Longs:
FDG

Shorts:
CVH
KMB
NVS
VRTX
WYE


Naked option positions (options sold short):
ARTC Feb 35p
EJ Feb 25c
GRA Feb 25c
IOC Feb 20c
LULU Feb 25p
MTG Feb 20c

Woohoo, in the green! The account had been up much more today (another $100k), but once I turned on the program it set stops on DSL, CSIQ and LDK which quickly got hit on top of a few problems with filling 25k market orders. Today was the only day that the program ran this week but I hope to have it on all next week. After the +28.8% gain this week I think I'm back in this thing for the top ten.

Paul McCartney & Wings

If you have been reading Stock Geometry then you know that I have been listening to Paul McCartney & Wings lately. I knew that Paul had a successful career after The Beatles, but I didn't realize so many great songs were actually from his Wings years and not by the Beatles. This all started when I heard Band on the Run the other day on the radio. I was thinking to myself 'what Beatles album is this from..?' I was pretty sure that I knew all The Beatles' albums and it wasn't on any of those. Sure enough, it was a Paul McCartney & Wings song:

I bought a best of Paul McCartney CD last weekend and realized they actually have a bunch of awesome songs. And since Paul is obviously the center piece they give alot more attention to the bassline (McCartney plays bass). This song is kind of cheesy, but Paul rips on the bass!:

Seeing these guys reminds me of a post I did about the Traveling Wilburys. Those guys are in a whole nother realm of music, but they are another example of major musical success for a member of The Beatles after the breakup. Thats really encouraging because my two favorite bands broke up over the last few years. The String Cheese Incident and Phish, like The Beatles, were composed of equally amazing musicians and it was sad to see them call it quits. I'm not too concerned though, I'm sure they'll go on to jam another day:

More of that wicked bass:

Another classic:

Olympiad Week Two

Week two was a hard lesson for the program as volatility continued to expand in the downward direction. The S&P 500 fell a whopping 5.71% last week as the VIX exploded from a low of 18.28 to at high at 29.30, a staggering 60.3% increase! As you may recall my program had written a ton of puts on solar stocks ahead of last week since these stocks have extremely expensive options and made big declines. Well the solar stocks fell pretty much the hardest of all sectors, causing these puts I was short to dramatically increase. I also realized there was a glitch with large market orders on options that take a long time to fill, as occurred with SOLF. As a result I didn't run the program much except for the beginning and end of the week. As a result, written options (puts) that were in the money expired and I got put shares on DSL, CSIQ and LDK.

Liquidation Value: $806,548.01 -$173,520 on the week

Positions:

Longs:
ABT
CSIQ (I was put 25,000 shares)
DSL (I was put 25,000 shares)
LDK (I was put 25,000 shares)
MCK
SDS

Shorts:
IWM
MRX

Naked option positions (options sold short):
LULU Feb 25p

Options that expired worthless:
CAL Jan 25c
CROX Jan 25p
UAUA Jan 25p

Of course I am not happy with the account's 17.7% decline but this week represented an extreme worst case scenario for the program. I have some good ideas about how to fix the problem, certainly the SOLF catastrophe cost me about $160k (16%). This doesn't seem so bad when you consider that my program was aggressively writing naked SOLF puts and the stock dropped more than 50% in two weeks. On the bright side, the program has the potential to swing very rapidly and averaged over long periods of time it should be market neutral. If the market had bottomed and rallied early last week then I'd be sitting over +20% on the week. I'll add more here later, check back.

For those of you who will be doing some coding this weekend try jamming out to this while you write. And if any readers are into the disco biscuits be sure to comment, I can recommend some good shows.

Dolphins Blowing Bubble Rings

Relaxing huh?