MBS Basics

MBS Basics.

Structured Credit, Sub-prime, Presentations and Articles

Good overall introduction of CDO market:

The CDO market: Functioning and implications in terms of financial stability

Fancy presentations by WSJ on Mortgate CDOs:

The Making of a Mortgage CDO multimedia graphic from The Wall Street Journal

Portfolio.com explains what CDO's are in an easy-to-understand multimedia graphic

Redirect Standard Out, The old (C) style

We have a third party library that outputs some debug/trace information when executes, this is of course not very nice when you have a command line application that calls the library.

The solution we used is to have a wrapper around the library, which redirects stdout before the call and restores it after.

An initial attempt to do this with Windows APIs (GetStdHandle/SetStdHandle) was unsuccessful probably because C runtime keeps its own handles. So, we had to go down and dirty to the low level C APIs (and this works fine):

    //keep a handle and close stdout
    int handle = _dup(1);
    _close(1);

    // call the lib function here

    //restore stdout, close the copy
    _dup2(handle, 1);
    _close(handle);

C++ Development with Eclipse

Eclipse has been the only Java IDE I can comfortably use. And while I'm writing C++ code on Windows, Visual Studio is naturally my first choice. But what should I do if I need to develop Linux C++ code (okay, I know vim and xemaces are out there...)?

Luckily, there is Eclipse CDT (C/C++ Development Tools). It seems basically build (with make) and code completion works nice and neatly. What I'd like to test next is to see whether the relatively "tricky" things, such as code completion with templates and smart pointers, might work with this...

Markit and DTCC form derivatives trade processing JV

Markit and DTCC form derivatives trade processing JV.

The partners say the new company will provide a single gateway for confirming OTC derivative transactions globally and the initiative will accelerate the adoption of electronic processing services across the rapidly growing $454 trillion OTC derivative market where around 50% of transactions are still confirmed on paper.

Randomness

Something as simple as generating random strings can actually be complex. What if you want the strings to be truely unique? What if you have constraints on what chars to use and the length of the output?

The article here has a few methods listed, along with their respective pros and cons.

PInvoke Interop Assistant

I have been using PInvoke.Net most of the time for P/Invoke translation of Windows APIs. Just found out that Microsoft has officially released a tool that does the same called PInvoke Interop Assistant.

The tool relys on a Windows API signature database file, so it won't work with any non-API third party DLLs. Given the way C/C++ compilers name mangling works, a generic signature translator is probably mission impossible anyway.

Since this doesn't really provide more functionality than P/Invoke, I guess I might just stick with PInvoke Visual Studio Add-in.

WSJ: Study Casts Doubt on Key Rate

Banks May Have Reported Flawed Interest Data for Libor.

For Three Minutes, China stopped

On Monday, May 19th 14:28pm, exactly one week after Sichuan Earthquake, a quarter of world's population stopped to mourn for the wictims.

What can record this better than the number of searches processed by Google.cn search engine?

A Moment of Silence

Three days of national mourning for more than 30,000 victims of 5.12 Sichuan Earthquake.