Andrew Bunner

The story of Cornwall Capital

2 Apr 2010

When big things happen in the market, someone makes money. The story of Cornwall Capital is about two men who started with $100K, turned it into $15M and then to $120M in 2008-2009 when the financial industry fell apart. They paid a high emotional cost knowing ruinous events years ahead of time. Even as they placed bets the system would fail, they tried to warn the SEC to prevent it.

Going back to that first $100K... the tenet of their fund was that Wall Street undervalued the impact of extremely rare events. Bets on such events are cheap to make--no-one believes they'll happen. Enough of these bets worked that they managed 100x returns. Readers of the Black Swan will like this story.

Their attention eventually turned to the consumer mortgage market and then to the banks who were issuing insurance against bonds backed by consumer mortgages. Soon they were making bets against those banks. Banks like Bear Stearns.

Has anyone read The Big Short yet?

Thanks, Fresh Air, for turning me on to this story!

WPilot ... the future is catching up to the past

27 Mar 2010

Multi-player space-shooter game in the browser... using WebSocket!

It has the feel of an old arcade game, but it's networked and all done with Javascript! (Some flash fallback for browsers that don't have WebSocket)

Immigrants are the consummate risk takers

15 Feb 2010

An author on NPR was trying to explain why Israel has such a successful economy in spite of other adverse circumstances. His thesis in bullet-point form:

To have sustained economic growth, you need sustained productivity increases.
Improvements in technology have historically been the best way to increase productivity.
Innovation in technology most often comes from small companies, less than 500 people.
The type of people who start and join these companies are risk-takers.
Immigrants are risk-takers.
Israel is a nation of immigrants that continues to actively encourage immigration.
Israel has more start-ups per capita than anywhere else (1 start-up per 1,100 residents) and a healthy economy.

I think he's on to something and I'm afraid the United States is doing it wrong.

We let foreign students come here to study, but make it difficult for them to stay. Letting people contribute to the American economy should be easy.

I actually think the process should be easy whether the immigrant is smart or not. Immigrants want to work. And they might have really bright kids.

This concludes "ur doin it wrong part 1". In part 2 (if I remember) I'll explore water-use in agriculture and how Israel manages to cultivate dry sand.

Google Buzz

10 Feb 2010

I've been working on Google Buzz. It's a fun, light-weight way to communicate inside GMail.

Also: If you squint carefully, you can make out a familiar face in the screen shot at http://buzz.google.com :-)

"A new approach to China"

12 Jan 2010

A blog post from my employer: Google: New approach to China

I'm on YouTube as an extra in a "PubSubHubub" promotion video

8 Jan 2010

PubSubHubub" is a simple technology (a protocol really) for allowing real-time updates to flow from publishers to content consumers (like you). Besides getting fresh content to users faster, it's also vastly more bandwidth-efficient: helping to unclog the tubes!

Judging a book by its cover: Part II

6 Jan 2010

We find the old castle in Aqaba just after sunset. It being closed, we snap some photos from the outside and head down to the shore to look around. Walking away a Jordian youth runs after us yelling something in Arabic (maybe). He's got our camera case! ... From some hand-gesturing, we learn that he's deaf. We thank him for the camera case. He stands there smiling, nodding and signing. Not knowing what to do, Angela suggests I give him a dollar. Nope. He didn't want any money--just to give us the case back! Friendly guy.

Judging a book by its cover: Part I

3 Jan 2010

Wandering the streets of Aqaba looking for the old castle, we're approached by three Arab men. Beards, head-scarves, etc. We prepare to fend them off with a "No, I don't need a guide" but before I can wave them away one of them asks, "Pardon me, but can you tell us the way to the beach?" ... Turns out they were from Germany!

Diving in Aqaba

31 Dec 2009

The dives are easy shoe dives here. Except that Angela and I have forgotten basically everything you need to know to dive on your own.

Being spoiled by Western dive shops where they do everything but breathe for you has left us soft and forgetful. When the dive master asked me to put my gear together I blanked, tried to "figure it out" and ended up doing it backwards, low, wrong and wrong. Angela was a lot closer, but when he asked us to do our buddy checks we just looked at each other. "Um... buckles? Air? Done? ..."

We managed to survive, but it was a heavy, long walk both in and out of the water. Putting on fins in the water is much harder than our dive master made it look. Easily five minutes of struggle.

Highlights from the dive part of the diving...

* Angela saw a big sea worm

* Some neat jelly fish

* An Octopus! Our first one that we've seen on a dive. Our dive master poked him out and he "swam" a bit

* Lots of small eels

* A very colorful nudibranch!

* Lion fish

* Many stone fish (if these hadn't been pointed out, we never would've seen them. They don't even move when you provoke them. Come to think of it... I'm not sure all of them were fish...)

* Gigantic beautiful green cabbage color. Twelve feet wide... enormous big head of cabbage!

* Very pretty school of baby fish. At first I though they were bubbles they were so small

Bonus: free Turkish coffee included before and after the dive. Delicious!

Photos from Israel and Jordan