Bank of America's $4 billion accounting error

Report on New York Times. Click here.

Millionaire Psychology

Len Penzo says this is how the typical millionaire who doesn't want to draw attention to himself, acts.

Mathew Marthoma Loses His MBA

Statue of the Stanford family [Source: Wikimedia Commons]

According to his profile on Wikipedia, Mathew Marthoma is known for Insider trading allegation. He has one more reason to be known for, now.

Within a month of being found guilty of his involvement in "possibly the largest single insider trading transaction profit in history at a value of $276 million," Marthoma went on to become the first in the history of Stanford to have his degree taken away by the reputed business school because he was admitted under "false pretense".

PoetsandQuants has a 3-webpage long story on it. Previously, he was kicked out of Harvard for forging his law school marklist (couldn't find any picture of his, so I've put up the picture of the founding family of Stanford University instead).

On February 6, 2014, Mathew Martoma was found guilty of insider trading. Wikipedia says, "Martoma allegedly advised Steven A. Cohen to sell shares of pharmaceutical companies Wyeth and Elan Corporation based on tips from two doctors", about "the Alzheimer's disease drug bapineuzumab during clinical trials overseen by the FDA." He was accused of generating possibly the largest single insider trading transaction profit in history at a value of $276 million.


The sentencing is in June and Marthoma could face up to 20 years in prison. He has time until May this year to seek a lenient sentence. Forbes reports that when Federal prosecutors and agents offered him a deal in return for his cooperation in the government’s further investigations in the insider trading allegations, Marthoma fainted. Interestingly, he is the second fund manager from SAC to faint during the trials for insider trading.

In India, when politicians turn up at the courts to face allegations, they usually clutch their ribs and complain of chest pain. And, here, we don't arrest corporate folks for things like insider trading. Do we even consider it a crime in India?

Other Indians who forged marksheets:
Bitty Mohanti, the rape convict from Orissa/Odisha who ran away to another state, assumed a new name, identity and a bunch of marksheets, went to Kerala, joined college and became a bank official in a nationalized bank.

Easy way to learn Chinese

(Image Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Entrepreneur ShaoLan Hsueh is now teaching the world how to learn Chinese characters in an easy-to-remember way. The concept is quite interesting, but she isn't teaching the viewer/learner how to pronounce those characters (or, maybe I didn't have the patience to watch the video until the end).

Here is the video and a short writeup about it on the Business Insider website.

But after watching the video for a few minutes, there was one question on my mind - what is the Chinese character for "the lady in leather costumes is not wearing brassier"?)

The real Satoshi Nakamoto (of Bitcoin fame) finally stands up

Physical Bitcoins (Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

There are two things, rather concepts, that I really cant quite bring myself to believing in - cloud computing and Bitcoins. The moment I hear someone mention any of these two terms, the default state of mind goes from "I'm listening in good faith" to "what exactly is he/she trying to con me into?" mode.

Bitcoin has always been beyond my boundaries of understanding. Each time a negative story about it hits the web, almost all the leading "opinion influencing" websites immediately go on a spin-doctoring overdrive to fix the damage. This actually worsens my distrust in the phenomenon/concept.

According to a Fox news story that is quoting a Newsweek report, Bitcoin was not invented by a genius kid from Tokyo, who chose to call himself "Satoshi Nakamoto", but by a 64-year-old Japanese American whose name really is Satoshi Nakamoto.

Here is the story on Foxnews.com.