investor tools
MIT’s Real-time Inflation Calculator
Dec 20th
Professors Roberto Rigobon and Alberto Cavallo at the MIT Sloan School of Management started the Billion Prices Project which, directly pulls data from online retailers from around the world. In the US, the software is tracking 550,000 items from 53 retailers. The best part – since it’s all automated, the numbers are updated daily! The goal is to predict the CPI before they even announce it. You can see from the charts below that the two track reasonably well together.
Daily BPP Index vs. CPI
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Annual Inflation (over last 365 days)
If they start to vary widely, which one should be considered inaccurate? Via the NY Times.
Wikileaks Ben Bernake & quantitative easing
Dec 10th
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke on CBS’s “60 Minutes” last year:
PELLEY You’ve been printing money?
BERNANKE Well, effectively. And we need to do that, because our economy is very weak and inflation is very low. when the economy begins to recover, that will be the time that we need to unwind those programs, raise interest rates, reduce the money supply, and make sure that we have a recovery that does not involve inflation.
Bernanke on “60 Minutes” this year:
BERNANKE One myth that’s out there is that what we’re doing is printing money. We’re not printing money. The amount of currency in circulation is not changing. The money supply is not changing in any significant way. What we’re doing is lowing interest rates by buying Treasury securities. And by lowering interest rates, we hope to stimulate the economy to grow faster. So, the trick is to find the appropriate moment when to begin to unwind this policy. And that’s what we’re gonna do.
And the Fed is buying Treasury securities how? By printing money.
Hey, maybe it’ll turn out to be a good idea, but at least tell us the truth. Increasing the money supply is as you said Ben, “effectively” printing money.
Sharebuilder Promo Codes = 5 Free Automatic Trades & 2 Real Time Trades
Dec 8th
I was pretty skeptical, so decided to try them out on my own account, and to my surprise they worked! I haven’t used my Sharebuilder account – mainly got it for the account opening bonus, since they have no minimum balance requirement, my account is still technically open. Voila, I now have 10 free real-time market trades and 38 automatic trades in my account.
How To Use
To enter the codes into your account, first log in to Sharebuilder, and then go to the Account > Overview > Promotions tab shown below.
In the marked box, enter a code. If it works, you should see a confirmation that says something like:
Thank you for referring ShareBuilder to your friends! Your 2 real-time trades have been credited to your account and are available to use immediately.
(I guess these codes have something to do with referring somebody. I’m not sure and I’m not the one referring you here. But it does seem to show up fine. They’ve been around for a while but I’d use them fast if I were you.)
How To Verify
To see how many free real-time trades you have, click on the top Trade tab > Real-time Trades and look for “Market Order Trade Credits”. To see how many free automatic trades you have, click on the top Trade tab > Automatic Trades and look for “Automatic Investment Trade Credits”. Note that these may have different expiration dates. Here’s what I see:
Codes
In case they get removed, here are the codes. Just cut and paste:
TAF2RA*2VvUQt
TAF2RD*c48Ugc
TAF5AR*2AsFg5
TAF5AW*1FkJgR
TAF2RG*2VvUQt
TAF2RX*2VvUQt
TAF5AC*2AsFg5
TAF2RM*2VvUQt
TAF5AZ*2AsFg5
TAF5AA*t9sUKs
3AIP*GEJZOH
