I've written about GM and their chances of defaulting a few times.

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,7f056791-b34d-4d40-9554-ad772079878f.aspx

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,49d6809c-0c1b-4dc4-8e4e-d15ad9acb209.aspx

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,a5cd0517-0d1c-41e6-9bfc-f379327afb93.aspx

However, it seems like things could be turning around - it will be interesting to see whether a tie up with Nissan and Renault occurs

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aywBCTuUnDFg&refer=worldwide_news

GM appear frequently on Markit's daily email for greatest credit improvement, and the 5 year CDS is now around 700bps, almost half of what it was at the peak.

I was reading this blog yesterday. The author talks about how some fund managers outperform the market, and a list of names are given. This is interesting to me after having just finished reading "Fooled by Randomness".

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2006/07/outperforming_f.html

Taleb believes that with a big enough pool of fund managers, probability dictates that some will outperform the benchmark, even over a long period of time.

I am currently reading Mandelbrot - the two authors have some contrasting opinions - review to follow

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1861977905/026-8787779-9446068?v=glance&n=266239

UPDATE: After the comment from Barry, I thought I would give my opinion on outperformance. For a number of years I have invested my money using various mechanical strategies including:

• Stephen Bland's High Yield strategy

http://www.fool.co.uk/valueinvesting/2006/vi060630.htm?source=EDSP

• Validea

http://www.validea.com/home/home.asp

As can be seen from the links, these have outperformed their respective benchmarks over a timeframe of several years. If the market were truly efficient this shouldn't happen, unless we are at a particular point in the economic cycle that flatters these strategies. If I didn't believe outperformance were possible I would invest in a low cost tracker.

Other strategies that I've investigated but not yet invested are:

• Joseph Piotroski

http://www.alphaseeker.com/val03.htm

I wrote an application that downloaded all FTSE constituents (around 2200 at the time) from Hemscott and crunched the data to provide me with passing companies. I believe this strategy may be more suited to the U.S. as it requires quarterly reporting.

• Joel Greenblatt

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0471733067/202-3803663-2591064?v=glance&n=266239

I was doing some integration and checking my results using Excel. Look what happens when x should be zero

I was using Excel yesterday for some simple probability work, and what I was calculating as the standard deviation wasn't the same as what STDEV() was giving me. What I was doing was calculating STDEVP().

Difference shown below

http://www.runlondon.com

I was told about this the other day - it used Google maps to measure your distance. I compared one plot with the car's odometer and it was within 5%.

Taleb has a blog on Wilmott

http://www.wilmott.com/blogs/kurtosis/index.cfm

and delivers a lot of lectures through 7city/Wilmott.

To summarise, Taleb proposes that success can be attributed to luck rather than skill. In theory, given enough investors, it is possible to produce another George Soros or Warren Buffett. When people fail, they put it down to bad luck, when people do well, they put it down to skill.

Futhermore, because the human mind tends to focus on the short term, people underestimate the risk of the "fat tail" event (one of LTCM's founders used this as an excuse for why the fund had failed). Taleb has a company, Empirica LLC, that takes advantage of this by buying options - on a typical day he will lose a small amount of money, but when a big market movement occurs (people selling the options underestimate this risk), he will make more than the amount he has lost, in theory.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0812975219/026-8787779-9446068?v=glance&n=266239

I started using these tools at the weekend after they were recommended at the first CQF lecture. I think it is a good idea as it is easier to keep copies of work than paper.

Firstly, the text is entered using WinEdit

http://www.winedt.com/

and is then compiled and opened using MiKTeK

http://www.miktex.org/

A good help file can be found here

http://tug.org/tex-archive/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf

Free Office developer event in London

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-GB&eventid=1032301774

An update after Part 2

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,19dadf64-9907-40cb-bf00-a27237df036d.aspx

At the start of the Football World Cup, Betfair were placing England as second favourites (I think at 7-1). I'm assuming this is because the majority of Betfair's market is from England, and were therefore placing lots of money on their home team, as I did not believe they were this good (I don't really follow football - but English football always seems to underperfom).

I didn't place any money, but if I had I would've probably laid England, as I as confident they were not going to win. I remember England being fifth favourites after the group games, but I'm not sure if their odds had lengthened as there were now fewer teams in the tournament.

For the England vs. Portugal game, I predicted that Portugal would win on penalties (note that I also thought Brazil would beat France, so don't follow my betting patterns!). I started to watch the game while also sitting in front of the P.C. to see how in-play betting worked.

Below are a few screenshots - note how the matched figure gets larger as time progresses (to prove I have the screenshots in the right order)

• Potential arbitrage - Lay > 100%

• Rooney gets sent of. My contact at Betfair explained that markets are suspended to allow people to take offers off the table (Betfair is not quite real time - people at the match itself may gain an advantage and could then have the potential to have an unfair advantage.)

• Potential arbitrage - Back <100%. This happened soon after the market reopened

• the arbitrage got larger!

• This occured during extra time. Lay of 116.9%

This shows that there may be opportunites after all

As an aside, I had a look at Betfair after the France vs. Portugal game had finished. Note how someone is still offering 1000-1 on Portugal. I guess they are hoping that someone hadn't seen the final score - France won.

This site is quite interesting

http://www.sportsarbitragereview.com/

http://www.informationweek.com/software/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=189401599

This will help people trying to roll out .NET 2.0 across to their customers - .NET 2.0 isn't supported on XP SP1

http://www.noelwatson.com/blog/PermaLink,guid,67354eb5-9e30-485a-9498-83a97d2c2bb7.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/default.mspx

I downloaded this as I was struggling to upload data to an ftp site with IE7 Beta 2. IE7 Beta 3 is slightly better in this respect as it prompts me for a username and password, but doesn't allow me to view the ftp site in Windows Explorer. I have also attempted to get the ftp upload to work in Firefox but with no sucess. One thing new to IE7 (I think Beta 3) is the following warning

when copying info. from the clipboard. I think this would get annoying after a while.

http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=GM

This is useful for analysing characteristics of U.S. stocks (volatility, drift etc.) but is more limited for U.K. companies

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/fin/quote/quote-12.html