GOSHtastic - Game shows, Options, Software, & Hardware!

Background People interested in the stock market might be inclined to have a cool stock ticker in their room or office.  While it's not quite as useful as a whole bunch of monitors displaying entire panels of quotes and graphs, it does provide at least a mesmerizing distraction, not to mention your room now looks at least a little bit more like a real trading floor in a big office.  This was the original use case for BriteBlox , the modular LED marquee designed by #DoesItPew and myself.  Not only is the marquee itself modular (i.e. you can configure it in various lengths, heights, and shapes), but ideally the control software is modular, leading to a design where any coder can develop plugins to drive the board from any data source they can convert into animated pixels. Unfortunately, we haven't gotten the software quite to the point where it is incredibly easy for third-party developers to write plugins; right now, they would actually have to integrate the feature ...

The one-dollar.us Options Scalper was another project that had a lot of potential during its time, but would have required some startup capital (VC attention) and more care and nurturing in order to really get off the ground.  Now I feel like the guys at Quantopian are quite on the right track, but they too have recognized that designing an intuitive interface for stock options analysis will be difficult... plus there's just so much data!!!  Nevertheless, Dan Dunn at Quantopian seemed to like the interface I provided, but they're designing the interface I ultimately wanted to provide so I'm just going to let them finish it up. ;)  (Plus, they know a little more Python than I do, which seems a great programming language choice for this task.) The scalper was designed as a means to learn and study option decay in a graphical manner.  As weekly options were relatively new back in 2011, I decided those would be a great target because there's not a lot of data you nee...

Publicly-traded stocks and other equities often feature options, which are essentially derivatives of the motion of the underlying equity.  Stock options are also publicly-traded (unless you're at a company that still gives stock options as performance bonuses).  They allow individuals to reduce risk in their portfolio, or (infinitely more fun) to speculate on the movement of the underlying stock or equity.  There are two forms of options, and just like regular equities, two ways to play them.  In American-style markets, you are free to exercise options at any point prior to expiration.  I'll spare you a crash-course in options, since you can get the jist of how they work in many other places. However, many tutorials gloss over a glaringly obvious fact that must not be intuitive to many people, based on my personal experience.  It's also extremely simple:   It is never optimal to actually exercise a call early , unless the underlying stock is about t...

Do rising interest rates affect companies with high debt-to-equity ratio? If you know what a debt-to-equity ratio is, you would likely say Yes , as it increases the cost of the capital you use to finance your business.  If your business uses debt to pay its current obligations, then uses next month's/quarter's/etc. revenue & profit to pay down that debt, you are pretty much: Operating on a month-to-month basis, where a bad month could really hurt, and Exemplifying the ancient Chinese proverb "Americans spend tomorrow's money today" (well, if you're not in America, it's still a dangerous game to play). The Investopedia.com definition of the debt-to-equity ratio is: A measure of a company's financial leverage calculated by dividing its total liabilities by stockholders' equity. It indicates what proportion of equity and debt the company is using to finance its assets. Now, most smart businesses only use debt to finance aggressive gr...