Rhody Trader

Yesterday I finished a very good little book that I’ve been reading during my daily commute. It’s Reward Systems, by Steve Kerr, which I picked because I have been involved in managing groups and organizations for several years now from a variety of perspectives.

Reward Systems was a fantastically enlightening, though concise and quick, read. I can see myself referring back to this book again and again. I found a great deal of valuable information and insight throughout the text, giving me all kinds of thoughts about ways to better motivate people and teams, and effectively reward them for performance.

The one little disagreement I had with Kerr, the author, was in regards to negative reinforcement. He is generally against it, but my experience is that in certain organizations, if handled the right way in conjunction with a reward system, a negative reinforcement approach can provide real benefit. I think most successful athletic coaches will tell you the same.

Aside from that, though, I found Reward Systems to be a fantastic management resource. I’m going to strongly recommend it to colleagues and contacts.

I went through the upgrade to bring this blog up to WordPress version 2.7 the other day. It definitely is a change.

To start with, the dashboard is totally rearranged. It’s also quite customizeable, but even still it takes a bit of getting used to when you first start working with it. I think I’ll probably grow to like it, but for now I still have to try to find things a bit.

My one gripe is that I’m having problems with scheduled posts not appearing when they are scheduled.

Last month I found out I was going to be the victim of a corporate restructuring or downsizing or whatever you what to call it. The bottom line is that the analytic product I was working on was being eliminated. I’ve expressed my view that it was a short-sighted decision, but it was made well above my pay grade, so my input wasn’t sought.

Since that time I have been in various discussions to shift to another group in the company. For a while there it looked like I was heading for a position in London to fill an economist position on the European fixed income desk. It would have been an interesting move from both geographic and market focus angles. I’ve wanted to make a London move for years now, and very nearly did so in 2000, but at that point I took a detore into coaching collegiate volleyball.

Alas, I won’t be heading for London this time either. A forex analyst position has opened up on this side of the Atlantic. After some discussion with management it was clear that taking this position was the best option all the way around.

So I’m heading back into the forex arena somewhere around the start of 2009. Obviously I’ve been trading it all along, but I haven’t been a professional analyst in that market since the late 1990s. This will definitely be interesting. Things have changed a lot since then. When I left that market it was still almost exclusively an institutional one. Since then the retail side has exploded. That’s going to make things really interesting on this second go-round, I think.

The Fed could be a big buyer of long-dated Treasuries as a way to help stimulate the economy. That’s what Big Ben said yesterday. I’m a little bothered by this. If the Fed isn’t lowering short rates – basically because it can’t do much more there – but is dropping long rates as a result of its purchases, it will flatten the yield curve. A flatter yield curve isn’t a good thing – at least for encouraging bank lending and generally improving the profitability of the banks. This strikes me as contrary to what we should be after here.

But then to my mind the bigger question is loan demand. The Fed and Treasury can get rates down to near zero, but if no one’s borrowing it doesn’t matter an iota. Consumers seem to be more inclined to reduce debt at the moment, not increase it. Lower rates will definitely help refinance debt, but that’s not the same as stimulating new debt-based spending (houses, cars, etc.). To the extent that this sort of thing eases personal and family budgets, it could help lower level spending – assuming folks don’t just put the excess to work paying down debt.