It is claimed that the burger was invented in 1895, in a restaurant called Louis’ Lunch in New Haven in Connecticut. There are of course other counterclaims (my own personal belief, for which I’ve found very little evidence, is that it has something to do with the city of Hamberg). However, what is certain is…
Author: Saeed Amen
Foreign Exchange, General
Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and burger queues
by Saeed Amen •
The noise, the light, the buzz. Locals look forwards, visitors look up. Yellow cabs zigzag along sweeping avenues. Steam rises from sidewalks. Ice rinks throng the winter. Golden leaves sweep past the autumn. Pastrami greets visitors to Katz. Morning awakened by the sun rising over Long Island. Evening, framed by skyscrapers, the sun leaves over the…
Data
An alternative data meal needs to be cooked
by Saeed Amen •
Cooking is perhaps not my forte. My culinary abilities do not extend much beyond extremely simple dishes, but I’m nevertheless trying to improve, with the help of Jamie Oliver (well, his new book “5 ingredients” which seems to have been written for people like myself). I can rustle up a simple omelette. I can bake…
General
High MiFID-2-elity
by Saeed Amen •
If you look up the term “high fidelity” in a dictionary, it defines it as “the reproduction of sound using electronic equipment that gives faithful reproduction with little or no distortion”. It is unlikely that listening to music on an AM radio station would qualify as high fidelity. Even for music played back on an…
General
What was it like to work at Lehman Brothers when it collapsed?
by Saeed Amen •
Given it’s the 9 year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers this week, I thought I would republish an article I wrote on the subject, which first appeared in Business Insider on 30 Sep 2014 It has been six years ago this week, when I could say that green was our color. It wasn’t a bright…
General
Keeping a market perspective
by Saeed Amen •
When I was a kid, there was something distinctly exciting about flying by plane.Whilst perhaps this might be skewed by pangs of nostalgia, I think the main reason, was simply that airports were less busy and it was relatively novel experience flying (well, at least for me). With the reduction in airfares, perhaps unsurprisingly we…
Data, Foreign Exchange, Macro
The right type of market forecast
by Saeed Amen •
Every so often when I was working in a bank, someone would ring up, and ask me what our 5 year EUR/USD forecast was. Trying to create such a long term “forecast” is indeed very difficult. One way is to use a valuation model such as PPP, which attempts to gauge long term fair value.…
Foreign Exchange, General
What price action do you remember from memory?
by Saeed Amen •
Over the years, you begin to build up a mental historical picture for price action. It seems reasonable to expect that we might remember certain market moves better than others and also what were the events which accompanied them. However, which ones do we remember? 2008.. let’s just say I remember the price action quite well…
Python
Making Python massively parallel (& burgers)
by Saeed Amen •
I like burgers. I suspect I start most of my blog articles with a similar sentence. Most burgers are sufficiently large, such that a single burger will suffice for a meal. However, occasionally you get burger sliders, mini burgers of different flavours, which are also easier to share. It is an obvious point that a…
General
Experience counts in coding
by Saeed Amen •
Life is change. I’m not sure if that’s a quote, or something I just made up. However, over the past few decades, the pace of technological change has seemingly accelerated. Does that mean that if you are a coder, for example, your experience can quickly become outdated or does experience count? Just hold that thought,…