"Graham notes that funding, while easy to measure, isn't necessarily the best way to gauge the success of the program's startups. "Getting funded is not success. It's just something that makes success more likely." But if the standard measurement for success is value, and if value is measured by exits, then the 6 years of YC's existence isn't quite long enough to adequately assess this. Of the 300-plus startups, "just" 25 YC companies have been acquired, 5 of them for over $10 million, and Graham says that he's estimated the values of the rest of the companies based on these acquisition figures in order to gauge that the average value of companies Y Combinator has funded to be roughly $22 million.

But coming up with an adequate measurement for success isn't really the point, says Graham. "The real lesson here though is how long it takes to measure performance in this business. We're 6 years in, and we could easily be off by 3x in either direction. Startup outcomes are unpredictable, and the outcomes of their investors doubly so, because it's hard to say whether the big successes are repeatable, or if the investors just got lucky. Even 6 years in, all we can say is that the numbers look encouraging so far.""

"Despite the availability of very detailed data on financial market, agent-based modeling is hindered by the lack of information about real trader behavior. This makes it impossible to validate agent-based models, which are thus reverse-engineering attempts. This work is a contribution to the building of a set of stylized facts about the traders themselves. Using the client database of Swissquote Bank SA, the largest on-line Swiss broker, we find empirical relationships between turnover, account values and the number of assets in which a trader is invested. A theory based on simple mean-variance portfolio optimization that crucially includes variable transaction costs is able to reproduce faithfully the observed behaviors. We finally argue that our results bring into light the collective ability of a population to construct a mean-variance portfolio that takes into account the structure of transaction costs."

"The presence of new kinds of investors (with motivations and objectives different from the hedgers and speculators) has altered commodity markets. The latter are now subject to forces different from those in the periods covered by the research studies. The actions of passive index investors are new factors impacting the prices of commodity futures. I wouldn’t necessarily expect commodities to continue performing as they may have performed in the decades before the 2000s – i.e. registering average returns similar to stocks at lower levels of risk and with low correlations to stocks."

"… It avoids most of the shortcomings encountered with the now classic Black-Scholes-Merton framework. Several convincing computer simulations are presented. Some of them are dealing with abrupt changes, i.e., jumps."

"This “highly sophisticated investor” argument has been used by Goldman, other banks and a remarkably high number of journalists (in my opinion just repeating the crap they have been fed by their sources) as a way of getting the banks off the hook. But it is a fundamentally flawed argument. The CDO bonds that AIG insured were rated AAA. If you have to be a rocket scientist to understand the investment and if anything short of perfect analysis of the bonds means you will be blown up – then by definition the bonds are not AAA."

"Taking a broader view of the entire ETF and ETN market, though, there are still some tax situations investors need to be aware of. Of the roughly 850 ETFs and ETNs currently available, there are different tax implications in using ETF products that deal with derivatives, mostly leveraged, inverse and commodity-type ETFs. ETFs are “looked through” to their holdings and an investor would be taxed appropriately. Read our article on how these ETFs are taxed."