Ninepence for fourpence
1st Earl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor
Living in Korea was a big adjustment because a coffee is going to be a little more pricey than what it is in the States. Wages aren't as high either.
I found that options traders - the Amex was mainly an options exchange - routinely conspired to keep as wide as possible the spreads between the prices investors paid and the prices floor traders paid for the same securities.
The supply price and the demand price should be roughly the same. You're not supposed to have two different prices. According to economists.
Proprietary stock-index arbitrage is but one aspect of program trading. Arbitrage will take place whenever there is an imbalance created in one or more markets that are similar.
Apple makes really good products, and Samsung makes really good products. It's really a two-horse race. Where I think Apple is exposed: the price points of Apple's products are just so high by comparison with Samsung's.
As long as gas is cheaper than bottled water, we can't be in a position of dictating to the consumer what to buy.
Bigger spreads mean bigger gaps between what buyers pay and sellers receive. For example, a spread of 10 cents a share means that the buyer pays $100 more for 1,000 shares than the seller receives.
If one asserts that buying customers below what they charge them is a corporate strategy, this is in essence an arbitrage game, and arbitrage games rarely last.
Relative to oil, however, natural gas is very cheap and very attractive. And I think that natural gas in emerging markets is very attractive. There is very little natural gas infrastructure in places such as China, where there is tremendous demand for natural gas.
Even during negotiation with HAL, Dassault felt that the cost with which the HAL will produce will be far higher than the aircraft produced in France. That was the reality.
The value of an item - in the mind of a consumer - is simply the difference between the anticipated price and the price on the tag.
