Blessed by the Potato

I don’t really think a completely car-free life is for me, at least not any time in the near future. Wayfare, for her part, has done a remarkable job of going through so much of her life without ever having to drive herself, thanks to public transit, cabs, and most of all, the generous offers of high-class chauffeur services from people such as her parents and myself. Of course, she’s not entirely convinced that that will continue indefinitely, so she maintains a license and insurance even though she never drives. To try to keep her in practice, I offer to take her out driving occasionally. Today, for the first time since she had to renew her license, she agreed to go on a little spin with me — and boy, was it a little spin: we covered all of 8 blocks and two parking maneuvers. However, she is scared of driving, so I would like everyone out there to offer her mad snaps for having the courage to give it a try. Especially since she faced that nightmarish spectre that every driver is afraid they might one day have to face but hope that, for the love of sphagetti, that it is not this day. Yes, right there in front of her eyes:

A puppy.

It was being walked by a group of girls on the sidewalk, but there was no telling when it might decide to run off into the road in front of her! There’s no predicting what puppies might do, they have no respect for the rules of the road, no concept of right-of-way, and worst of all they’re combustable! Well, maybe the puppies aren’t, but if they cause an accident the car is and we could all die in a fiery fiery crash!

All kidding aside, Wayfare is a bit of a nervous driver, but I’m quite proud that she’s finally managed to overcome that and get behind the wheel when she didn’t absolutely, positively have to. She is a pretty good driver, and as silly as it can sometimes be, I suppose approaching the whole experience filled with terror is possibly better than coming at it all excited that you finally get to live out your video game speed freak fantasies.

As long as I’m on the topic of driving, does anyone know where I can rent a Prius in Toronto? There are a number of places that say they have them in their fleets, but none are actually available from any of their locations. Discount and Alamo list them specifically as part of their fleet in Canada, but none of their Toronto locations seem to have them (and I think, through trial-and-error, I’ve tried them all online). Thrifty doesn’t seem to advertise having any Priuses, but a poster on the redflagdeals forums suggests that the Holiday Inn/King location has at least one available (though again, not through their website).

Michael James on Money has written a few good pieces on market timing lately. Trying to time the market is always a fairly risky affair, though it sounds so very lucrative. Basically, there’s a lot of variability in the market, and it goes down a lot, as seen recently. If you could just avoid those downturns (sell your stocks, jump to cash), you could do so much better. The trick is that it’s essentially impossible to predict market downturns in the near term. Since the market tends to go up over time, guessing wrong and jumping out of the market too early makes you sit on the sidelines while your stocks go up and you end up doing worse than someone who just bought and held. Plus, as an in-and-out market timer, you have to guess right twice: first, when to get out, and second, when to get back in. Being wrong on either one can hurt your returns. Michael James ran a number of simulations to show that it’s better to be a buy and hold investor than a market timer, assuming that you can’t actually see into the future.

I had one more variation on the market timing strategy that I wanted to test out, because it’s one that I’ve been using myself lately without really thinking about it. The strategy is basically to be a buy and hold investor, but to time my market entry as money is saved every month. Essentially, to wait until a drop in the market to buy in. For me, it’s worked out fairly well in this market the last few months because, well, recently the market has been insane with big swings in both directions, so it hasn’t been hard at all to wait for a day when everything is down over a percent or two. I thought that this strategy might work because for one thing, you only need to guess right once (when to buy), and for another, it might be a way to take advantage of some of the short-term noise in the market (it goes up and down daily, so you don’t spend very long at all waiting for a down day, whereas with other market timing strategies you might wait a long time for a significant downward movement, or a downward month, and spend too much time on the sidelines). The premise is that you are saving regularly, and have some amount available; $500 on the first of each month in this example. Then, you just pick your moment on when to invest it in the market. Michael James was kind enough to run this scenario for me on his data, and found that investing immediately when the money was available was better than trying to time the market, but this strategy was at least not terrible like some other market timing strategies can be, but it’s still not great. I still harboured hopes/suspicions that with more noise in the data, more variability to take advantage of, that this strategy could be a winner (his data only sampled the market monthly).

To test this, I needed daily historical stock market data, which I found somewhat difficult to come by. I ended up using the NAV chart from ishares which gave me daily data for their S&P TSX composite index from 2001 on. This, I think, should be a very good surrogate for actual daily data from the TSX. While it would have been nice if I had made some nice elegant program in Matlab or something, instead I just bashed together a mess in Excel, which you can download here.

My results? Well, if you wait for any daily change of less than zero (any down day), you do slightly worse from March ’01 to March ’08 (the timer would own ~751 shares of the index fund, vs ~757 for the investor who immediately bought in each month). If you wait for a bigger down day (a negative movement of at least a percent), you do even worse (~749 shares). As one might expect, in “bear” markets, holding off a bit was a better strategy than buying immediately, but overall this was not a good strategy (and bull markets tend to be the norm) — plus there’s a good chance that this result is due to chance alone!

Buy (immediately) & hold it is!

[Oh, and for the curious: saving $500/mo over those 7 years (+2 mo) comes out to $43000 packed away. The “index” here is worth $84.70 at the end, so 757 shares comes out to $64117.90; missing out on ~6 shares from trying to time the market is about $500 you’d be out — just about one month’s worth of savings!]

I’ve talked about the throttling issue before, and now it’s in the news again. This is just getting insane: while I think the internet providers have some right to restrict use on their networks, the combination of severe throttling and caps is getting out of hand. One or the other, and maybe open up the torrent restriction beyond <5 kB/s. It’s particularly galling that they’re doing this to the reseller ISPs who pay more for unfettered access, who can choose to sell high usage plans to those people who’ve been shafted by Bell/Rogers.

In fact, Rogers recently sent out a mailing announcing their long-planned charges for going over the monthly allotment (60 GB for “express”, $2/GB over; as much as $5/GB for going over on the ultra light plan). That alone should be plenty of control over the volume of traffic on the network. If they want to restrict torrents, then changing that allotment to a separate upload and download portion would also be a fix. Preferentially killing one protocol (at all times, not just peak times to boot) is really overkill. (And, as I’ve said before, if the throttling was to go down to say 1/10th the speed offered, people would never even know they were being throttled).

So, I hope the independent ISPs win their suit against Bell.

As you might expect, Michael Geist has a number of columns related to the issue up, and talks about it more sensibly than I can.

We just watched the Steve Carell movie “Dan in Real Life“. I had to make Wayfare watch it since even though I had it, she didn’t want to waste the time to watch it since it looked so bad from the previews. I don’t know who put the previews together, but the movie is nothing like they suggested. It’s actually quite well written, and very heartfelt and warm and fuzzy and sweet. They did a very good job of showing a family interacting together in a big get-together and building up the “love at first sight” relationship with the main character. Moreover, Steve Carell didn’t suck. I don’t typically like him as an actor since in so many roles he comes off a such a complete dufus that you have to wonder if he’s from outer space (though oddly enough I end up really liking what he’s in: the office is funny, despite his over-the-top stupid manager; the 40 year old virgin relied on him being a bit of a freak, and had a good supporting cast, in addition to hitting a little too close to home to not like it), but in Dan In Real Life he actually came across as likeable, normal guy. In fact, I nearly lost it in the talent show scene (damn you Wayfare, I know you’re pumping me full of estrogen while I sleep and it’s fucking with my emotions! I don’t usually get emotionally involved in movies!!) where he’s all opening up for the first time after his wife died and torn between singing backup for his brother and singing directly to the girl he likes…

While I liked it as a romantic comedy that was very down to earth, Wayfare seemed particularly drawn to the huge happy family getaway fantasy. “Oh, I want that!” she’d exclaim as they got together for charades, or played football on the lawn. So of course now that means that if we know you in real life, you’re going to get sucked into charades, football, pancakes, and possibly a talent show sometime in the near future. Possibly on PEI, since that seems to be the sort of magical place where this sort of thing could actually happen.

I have not mentioned recently how much I love having RAID-1 arrays on my work computers. One of the drives recently died, and aside from not using the computer for a few hours today while we waited for the Dell tech to come, there was no stress* and no downtime. All the data was safe on the mirrored drive, the new drive is in place and we are off to the races again. It took a while for me to figure out where in Windows I had to go to rebuild the array (it was the Intel Matrix Storage Manager program and not actually part of the control panel at all), and when I did I found that it was automatically rebuilding the array (though it was nice to see the status of that — looks like it will take about 2 hours to rebuild the 150 GB array). We still have to (and should be doing so more religiously) back up our data in case someone steals the whole computer, but this disaster-recovery is so easy that I’m considering picking up a second hard drive to get a RAID-1 array running at home, too :)

* – there is actually some stress related to a weird bug we were getting in our analysis software. We were getting different results running the same analysis a few times in a row, and it seemed to depend on the memory state of the computer. As we’re trouble shooting that bug, it seems to have gone away around the same time one drive died and we were left working off a single physical drive. We’re now wondering if that was a result of one of the drives in the array in the midst of failing, and the use of virtual memory… I’ll be testing some more later tonight after the array is back up and running 100%.