Someone actually tried to follow this advice starting in September 2007: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5934 . Needless to say, it did not work out well for them and they almost went bankrupt due to spiraling margin debt.
The difference between a mortgage and margin debt is that mortgages aren't constantly marked to market, and you can continue to own the house even if you're temporarily underwater on the mortgage. Whereas with margin, you can be forced to sell if the value of the assets you've bought underperforms.
The paper that was linked suggests using derivatives rather than directly taking out loans, which are financially convertible. Specifically it says buying deeply ITM call options for several years out strike date.
I think that there's a common thread that underlies the development of intelligence in both humans and Portia spiders. We both evolved in an environment where we were at a sensory and physical disadvantage to our prey. We both relied more on understanding the behavior of our prey in order to hunt. In the case of early humans, we adopted a style of hunting known as persistence hunting.
Persistence hunting ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting )is a general hunting strategy in which a hunter chases their prey over a very long distance(15-30 miles). Eventually the prey becomes weak and succumbs to exhaustion. On its own, that's not very special -- both dogs and hyenas adopt a very similar hunting strategy. The key difference is that humans lack the extremely sensitive sensory abilities that are used by other persistence hunters.
In the absence of such senses, early hominids had to predict where prey would go and accurately pursue them over very long distances based on very small amounts of visual evidence. In short, early hominids hunted by simulating the minds of their prey. If you look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=826HMLoiE_o (a documentary on persistence hunting), you can watch some Kudu tribesmen literally simulating where an antelope will go.
It certainly seems to me like lucking into an evolutionary niche where you get caloric benefits that are directly linked to how well you can simulate the fairly-complicated minds of your prey is pretty much a recipe for extreme selective pressure in favor of general intelligence.
The story is a little different in the case of Portia, given that they are apparently at a visual advantage to their prey. However, I think the examples mentioned in the article make a strong case that Portia's comparative hunting advantage is in planning the best attack method based on the behavior of a given type of prey.
One of the better proposals to fix whatever market structure issues we have is to move to "frequent batch auctions", in which a micro-auction would occur every 30 seconds or minute, which would amount to a similar thing. I'm not aware of any research that discusses whether such a system would be workable in the presence of the existing continuous trading market.
So lets say at tick one 1 see that only 50% of the buy orders were filled.
At tick 2 I want to buy 100 shares. But maybe I'll guess that only 50% will be filled this tick too, so maybe I should submit a buy order for 200 shares instead? This kind of game playing can lead to highly unstable outcomes.
If you think time priority orders are viewed as unfair, think what random matching would mean. It would mean that you could put in an order 6 months ago and watch it repeatedly never get filled as your price point was hit over and over again.
That chart understates the cumulative return of McDonalds by 20%, since it is just a graph of price appreciation and does not include the effect of reinvesting dividends. The proper cumulative return for McDonalds over that time period is actually 64.7%, assuming reinvestment of dividends.
I found this book helpful: The HIPAA Roadmap for Business Associates ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1484067010/ref=oh_aui_searc... ). It goes through some of the basics of HIPAA, what kinds of policies you need to have and why, and includes some example policy templates similar to the ones being graciously provided in this article.
Saying that we're due for another pandemic is quite simply the gambler's fallacy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_fallacy . The odds of a pandemic may well be higher than recent experience would indicate, but pandemics still occur randomly.
On the other hand, there's a very good reason why HFT liquidity has evaporated in previous crashes (such as the 2010 Flash Crash) -- the exchanges broke trades in an unpredictable fashion, so that any attempt at market-making would have opened the market maker to considerable risk.
Let's say you step in during a major market crash and buy AAPL when it's trading at $200/share. Let say it then rises some more to $300/share and you sell, only to see the price recover to $500/share. What happens if the exchange breaks your original buy at $200? Then you end up being short on the way from $300 up to $500, even though you were right about the direction of trading and contributed liquidity during market distress.
They've theoretically instituted a fix for this ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Flash_Crash#Trading_curb ) which will make it clear in advance what trades will be broken, so we'll have to see how HFT and market making responds in the next crash. Bid-ask spreads tend to widen significantly during market distress, which should actually increase the profitability of being a market maker during a crash.
The difference between a mortgage and margin debt is that mortgages aren't constantly marked to market, and you can continue to own the house even if you're temporarily underwater on the mortgage. Whereas with margin, you can be forced to sell if the value of the assets you've bought underperforms.