Buffalo wedding

The first thing that strikes me about the place are the green neon pyramids that deck the skyline driving in at night. At the airport the guy from Dollar is optimistic about the Bills season. Not so optimistic about the Sabres. This place feels like a bigger Schenectady. On a good roof deck overlooking Tupper Ave I can see a neon party bar bike ready to go. The party bike reminds me of China.

Banked and Unbanked

• 7.7% of US households were "unbanked" in 2013. Unbanked refers to not having an account in an insured institution supervised by the FDIC. "Underbanked" households, who may have an account but have used "alternative financial services" (AFS) in the past year including money orders, check cashing, remittances, payday loans, refund anticipation loans, rent-to-own services, pawn shop loans, and auto title loans, accounted for 20% of US households, comprising 16 million adults and 8 million children.
• 34% of unbanked say that a job loss resulted in them dropping banking services: 20% said that a new job allowed or required them to open up a new bank account.
• 95% of recent Chinese immigrants to New York City surveyed in Sunset Park, Brooklyn in 2013 said they were "banked." 15% described themselves as undocumented. 60% immigrated from an urban region in China. These immigrants had an average of 1 child, 10.5 years of education, and self-rated their English ability as a 2.1 on a scale of 5.

Deferred gross margin

• On bigger projects where income is accrued in installments, instead of being closed to the income summary, it's closed to a contra-A/R account called "deferred gross margin." It's shifted to "realized gross margin" when cash is received.
• Revenue recognition practices for a company are required to be listed by the SEC, usually they are written after the financial statements in Special accounting notes.
• Foreign exchange markets have been one of the most affected by financial regulation due to accusations that big banks were rigging markets.

Hughes Reef

1) Hughes Reef is the land formation in the South China Sea, only above water in low tide, where China has created a 14-football-field-sized island to aid its claims to ownership of the important shipping channel and airspace.
2) "Subprime" credits in the personal loan market are defined by Equifax as having credit scores lower than 680 on a scale from 300 to 850
3) Labor force participation rate is the share of the population either working or looking for work. In the US, its shrank to 62.9% from 66% between 2007 and 2014. 4) This past December, 3.6% of jobs were unfilled, the highest vacancy rate since 2001--this rate is much higher than in 2007 (recession), suggesting current workers may not be suited for available jobs.

Manspreading

1) "Manspreading" is the male act of taking up too much space on public transportation, needlessly using seat space that could be occupied by others
2) Cost of goods sold (COGS) is accounted for by taking the initial inventory, adding purchases of inventory, and subtracting the ending inventory.
3) Inventoriable costs are all "expenditures directly or indirectly incurred to bring inventory to its existing condition and location." Some freight costs that do not result in "bringing inventory to salable condition" do not constitute inventoriable costs.

Pink sheets

• "Pink sheets" refer to a daily publication compiled by the National Quotation Bureau (NQB) of bid-ask spreads for OTC stocks. Companies "on the pink sheets" (they switched to an electronic medium in 1999) do not need to meet minimum SEC requirements; they are therefore seen as more risky investments because of lower barriers to entry in the marketplace.
• Standard deviation of prices in a marketplace works as a stand-in for measurement of risk in a market. That is, over increasingly shorter terms, the risk of movement and the risk of large swings are both bigger on average in markets where returns do not cluster as well around moving averages.
• It is interesting to note, however, that appearances of risk are a function of time. Over time, using a buy and hold strategy, it can be very advantageous to own high-risk investments in a growth environment. It's this continued world growth that makes stocks, over time, create higher returns.

Artificial intelligence

1. Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not intelligence, intelligence is not wisdom. The best computers now are able to process information in between the information and knowledge areas, albeit at very high speeds.
2. Bits correlate with speed, bytes correlate with size of files. 4G mobile processing speed is 5-12 megabits/sec for downloads, 2-5 Mbps for uploads.
3. Pfizer has fallen behind rivals in the race to develop immuno-oncology drugs in-house, explaining their interest in acquiring AstraZeneca for $118B earlier in 2014 (failed) and current partnership with Merck to develop perhaps 20 different immunotherapies.