Southpaw

• Southpaws are so-called because ballparks, in being designed to have the sun out of the batter's eye in the afternoon, are arranged with left-handed pitchers' throwing arms always facing south. It has nothing to do with lefties propensity for being submarine pitchers, or lefty pitchers coming from the southern states.
• Chinese ESL speakers sometimes confuse "he" and "she," referring to women as "he" and vice versa. The difficulty stems from the Chinese word for he and she being exactly the same (ta). In discussion today, someone repeatedly kept calling the lady sitting beside her "he" this, "he" that. No one said anything as we understood what the speaker meant; the sense of lack of regard for gender was actually kind of cool.
• Canada can have terrorist problems, too. It will be interesting to see how shootings at the state house in Ottawa changes Canada's participation in the war on terror inside their country and abroad.

Tekmira

• Tekmira (NASDAQ:TKMR), Mapp Biopharmaceutical (private), and Chimerix (NASDAQ:CMRX) are all racing to develop better drugs to fight Ebola, and are presented with a rare opportunity to use experimental cures on human patients afflicted with the disease
• To meet its 2014 budget, Venezuela would need the per-barrel price of oil to rise to $162 (Business Insider)
• The lower half of US households ranked by wealth held just 1% of total assets last year, down from 3% in 1989 (WSJ)

Snapsaved

1. Firms choose FIFO to accentuate profits, as COGS is usually lower for older inventory, therefore increasing apparent margins. They choose LIFO to create favorable tax situations, as newer, more expensive inventory creates lower margins but a lesser tax burden. If given a choice, many firms will choose FIFO for accentuated profits and save explanations for the notes on SEC reports.
2. Nothing can ever be erased in the digital age. Snapchat just got burned by website Snapsaved.com, which apparently hacked SC servers and grabbed thousands of photos. Considering half of SC's users are between 13 and 17 years old and are known to use the service to send racy photos to one another, this puts the company--who was just valued by Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers at $10 billion, in a very sticky situation.
3. The patience of the PRC trumps youthful idealism. Despite violence in Hong Kong last night, it looks like protesters are blinking first. HK government is pulling a Bloomberg and sending in fire hoses and hack saws to dismantle tent-towns and barricades. Flare-ups of violence are looking limited and not significant enough to grow protest crowds back up to last week's levels.

Bumbershoots

1. The term, "bumbershoot," when used in insurance, refers to a kind of umbrella coverage used to insure marine risks--which can extend well beyond blue and brown waterways into transportation and, basically, anything that moves. According to Investopedia, "shipyards use this policy for protection and indemnity coverage as well as liability protection under the Longshoremen and Harbor Workers Act." The word "bumbershoot" may be a portmanteau of the words "umbrella" and "parachute."
2. "Elbowing" for some people on Metro North includes brushing them with your fleece sleeve while trying to type on your laptop, three-aside during rush hour. The lady sitting next to me this morning would not have lasted long in Beijing.
3. 17M cars are slated to be sold in the US in 2014, approaching an all-time annual record. If the number of total cars to be sold globally continues to increase at a 5% YOY rate, we can expect about 87 million (new?) cars to be sold worldwide in 2014. Growth is being pushed by China, where people are now buying more than 20M new cars every year. That's about 3 cars per second, all year round.

Kaizen

1. "Fair day's work for a fair day's pay" comes from Frederick Wilhelm Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management (1909). You work a full day, you get paid for a full day. Not too flexible in terms of give and take. Reminds me of the way managers in Beijing will prorate monthly salaries by the day and even down to the hour and minute for late workers.
2. "Esprit de corps" would appear to come from Henri Fayol, an early 20th century Turkish immigrant in France and coal mine manager. It's one of his 14 principles of management. From military to modern management consulting, this phrase is all over the place now.
3. Beginning in the 1990s, Toyota has really been tearing it up in terms of management theory. Some vocabulary: "Kanban" refers to visual indicators of depleted resources on a supply chain that can quickly and easily signal a line manager that he needs to order up a new batch of a certain material, enabling just-in-time manufacturing processes. Kaizen might be translated as "good changes," the key to continuous improvement methodology; instead of momentary, sweeping change--which throws things into chaos--things should be improved modestly, subtly, and continuously to maximize retention, employee support, employee satisfaction, and ultimately, customer satisfaction.

Causation and correlation

1. In choosing stocks to serve as comparables/competitors to your target company, correlation does not always suggest causation. In evaluating Hertz, we saw enplanements being a key indicator of increases or decreases in rentals, and picked UAL as a comp. Because WYN hotels are all over the place, up and down market, price conscious folks might forgo a plane ride and drive to them with off-airport rentals. But people don't buy UAL and WYN with the same motivations they buy HTZ. They're connected, but they're not causes--they may be effects, or indicators, but that doesn't make them great comps. Gonna check out UHAL and some others tomorrow, then try to figure out what "psychometrics" means.
2. Just watching Shark Tank: after waling in and being laughed at while debuting their idea, the Hoodie Pillow is gonna be a $100 million product, all based on the force of the salesman and solid contextualization. Almost anything can be sold to almost anybody.
3. Bank loans are essentially a line of credit (similar to a checking account for individuals) offered to companies for durations somewhere in between money markets and repurchase agreements and longer-term debt. They can sometimes involve what's called a revolver--a loan "window" that can be accessed from time to time by the company, for example on a seasonal basis to purchase inventory, and then is quickly paid down again. Taking a look at the credit markets for a company's bank loans and bonds, and the prices of these instruments, can be a good way to get a sense of future equity share performance.

Burying the lede

Instead of swinging for the fences, let's try an exercise at the end of the day trying for 3 big takeaways--things learned in class and everywhere else.

1. Practicing for interviews are like preparing for a class. They work well when you have a flexible schedule, some bullet points to hit on and return to, and one great overarching theme to be returning to again and again, the "hedgehog idea." Get out the big points first and return to them--don't bury the lede.
2. Calculating the alpha of a short position is a little tricky. For example, you own 1 share of GOOG short. On Monday, GOOG moves down $0.50, but your benchmark trades up $0.50. What's your alpha? Your alpha for the day is zero. You "benefit" 0.50 when GOOG's price declines, but the overall gains in the market wipe out your gains in the individual stock.
3. Cartels use violence and thugs, shock and awe tactics to discourage competition because of a lack of other economic deterrents. As opposed to a monopoly, which could be supported by governments or laws for strategic or economic purposes, cartels are usually put together by force and only remain together with continued use of force.