I don't really understand anything about Mahjong as it's played here. Obviously I've learned that making a Rising Sun is very good. Guess I'll spend a bit of time over at the
Wiki page and see what I can learn. So far I haven't felt at a disadvantage watching
Koizumi, though. Any other suggestions for places to find a quick tutorial on the game will be appreciated.
Oh, and for those wondering what that "
Black-Scholes" thing was about, it's a formula used to value financial derivatives and develop hedging strategies. Some
commentators have suggested an over-reliance on the B-S model contributed to the Crash of 1987 and may have played a role in the current Crash as well.
Spoiler for lengthy quote from article:
A new strategy known as portfolio insurance, invented by a pair of finance professors at the University of California at Berkeley, had been taken up in a big way by supposedly savvy investors. Portfolio insurance evolved from the most influential idea on Wall Street, an options-pricing model called Black-Scholes. The model is based on the assumption that a trader can suck all the risk out of the market by taking a short position and increasing that position as the market falls, thus protecting against losses, no matter how steep. Nearly every employee stock-ownership plan uses Black-Scholes as its guiding principle. A pension-fund manager sitting on billions of U.S. equities and fearful of a crash needn't call a Wall Street broker and buy a put option—an option to sell at a set price, limiting potential losses—on the S&P 500. Managers can create put options for themselves, cheaply, by shorting the S&P as it falls, and thus, in theory, be free of all market risk.
Good theory. The glitch was discovered only after the fact: When a market is crashing and no one is willing to buy, it's impossible to sell short. If too many investors are trying to unload stocks as a market falls, they create the very disaster they are seeking to avoid. Their desire to sell drives the market lower, triggering an even greater desire to sell and, ultimately, sending the market into a bottomless free fall. That's what happened on October 19, 1987, when the sweet logic of Black-Scholes was shown to be irrelevant in the real world of crashes and panics. Even the biggest portfolio insurance firm, Leland O'Brien Rubinstein Associates (co-founded and run by the same finance professors who invented portfolio insurance), tried to sell as the market crashed and couldn't.