"Chromosome flooded bog" was downright poetic. Kudos.

Welp got me.

#10 What kind of utter moron bought bitcoins in this obviously speculative bubble? Holy shit.

edit: I mean, no offense if anyone bought any bitcoin recently or anything. Except, you know, you might be a moron. But whatever makes you happy.

I'm not sure you'll be able to find a cheaper option than HSBC USA for the transfer. I am not an expert in currency exchange though.

Quesadilla from Freebird's
New Spock's Beard album
...Everything else is for food until I get back to my i49 air fare.

#72 Be a bank. The bid/ask spread for individual currency trades like what you want to do is pretty high. Why do you want to move European currency to the US?

Definitely sell now.

Bring back Standin and make the casters all hate you.

Or do something even worse like Haunt or Canalzone. Seriously if one of those maps ever shows up in ESEA, I'm done casting. Finito.

Edit: Actually, you know what? Standin might not be nearly as bad to cast with the player outline plugin. HMMMM.

#67 If you work on Wall Street, what matters is the risk exposure of your company, not you individually. You can be as specialized as the firm wants you to be.

#70 None really, unless you have good sources of insider information that you can make a lot of money with. Just make sure the company you're using doesn't charge fees, and check its performance against a benchmark like the S&P 500 every so often.

You want a soul, you have to work on the Street long enough to afford one. Should only take about 5 years at current rates.

Don't worry about it.

Macroeconomics is inextricably linked to politics. Since the economy affects investments, I think it's still somewhat on-topic.

The bond market itself doesn't directly affect the equity market. The interest rate affects both. Currently, the Fed has set rates almost as low as possible because the economy is in a demand-driven recession and they're trying to kick-start investment. Meanwhile, our federal government's deficit has been shrinking, which is actually not what you'd want to happen in a Keynesian paradigm. When demand is low, you want the government to pick up the slack until unemployment and demand return to normal. Government "crowding-out," which happens in a fully-employed economy, does not happen in a situation such as ours. The supply of money in the economy has tripled and federal spending has gone way up - and inflation has remained very low since the recession.

Once demand recovers, the Fed can raise interest rates and the government's spending will automatically go down (mainly because a large source of recession-driven spending, unemployment insurance, will be reduced). I don't see the mechanism to cause a dip in the stock market.

And that doesn't look like a bubble to you? I already said modest inflation would eat away at your wealth and you should invest in a diversified portfolio. There's nothing wrong with inflation around 2-5%, though. It's an economic incentive to invest rather than hoard wealth.

Over the period from 2008 to now, gold has done better than the market: https://www.google.com/finance?q=INDEXDJX%3A.DJI&ei=6NlkUYj3D4_AlgOBCA
(ugh that graph doesn't link correctly, but you can select the correct comparison and time frame for yourself)

I would not expect gold to continue its trajectory.

Edit: Oh, by the way, that graph counts inflation double, since it's showing both gold appreciation in nominal dollars and dollar depreciation. Seems kind of dumb.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/fredgraph.png?&id=CPIAUCSL&scale=Left&range=5yrs&cosd=2008-02-01&coed=2013-02-01&line_color=%230000ff&link_values=false&line_style=Solid&mark_type=NONE&mw=4&lw=1&ost=-99999&oet=99999&mma=0&fml=a&fq=Monthly&fam=avg&fgst=lin&transformation=pch&vintage_date=2013-04-09&revision_date=2013-04-09

In what way is the value of the dollar tanking? Help me out.

Edit: Private discussions won't be happening over steam, friends list is full. You can email salamancer.tv@gmail.com I suppose.

Finance itself is fairly important for understanding how companies are actually valued.

I say physics because physicists tend to be acquainted with obscure mathematical and physical models that are sometimes useful in finance. A lot of the derivatives and futures contracts that came out of the '80s and '90s quant-jockey period of finance were dreamt up by physicists thinking to themselves "hey, we can buy this, why can't we also buy this-squared?"