Sunday August 24, 2008 links for 2008-08-24
- A Few Speculators Dominate Vast Market for Oil Trading - washingtonpost.com
"It is now evident that speculators in the energy futures markets play a much larger role than previously thought, and it is now even harder to accept the agency's laughable assertion that excessive speculation has not contributed to rising energy prices" - Woot : 10 Things To Look For At The Olympic Closing Ceremony
<cough> - Get Paid to Twitter Using the Adjix Link Shrinker
While I'm happy enough with Amazon affiliate codes in book links, this service seems to cross the line and I'd expect it to cost whuffie to use it. Am I over-sensitive? - Posted manually. Doesn't look like delicious posting jobs on my account are even attempting to run any more. I just opened a new ticket but fully expect an "it's experimental and we don't support it" reply from the Yahoo support people.
Posted by webmink
( Aug 24 2008, 05:06:00 AM PDT )
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Simon, I beg you, instead of just quoting tub-thumping American politicians on the subject of oil prices, please think.
These speculators do not buy oil. They do not sell oil. They trade futures contracts, which means they are betting on the future price of oil. (The Post article completely fails to make this distinction.)
The mere fact that someone is placing bets (no matter how large) on the future price of oil does not influence its actual price. No more than placing a bet (no matter how large) on the result of a football match means that you actually influence the result.
This is why regulators constantly say (and are constantly derided by populist politicians for saying) that speculation in the futures markets is not responsible for high prices. There is just no simple causal link between the two.
(Of course it's not impossible that Vitol is part of some grand plot to manipulate oil prices. But if they are, then simply trading in futures is not how they are achieving it.)
Posted by Al on August 25, 2008 at 02:15 AM PDT #
Simon,
We just launched Adjix last week. We've received a ton of attention, globally, and we've been a little misunderstood, too. Off the bat, several bloggers wrote that Adjix was the cure all, revenue generator, for Twitter.
However, just like other link shorteners, Adjix allows people to create ad-free links too.
Two key differentiators of Adjix is that we collect detailed link data for each Adjix link (who clicked on your link? when? how many times?).
Also, we allow people to use their own domain name once they create an Adjix link. For example, if you create a link with Adjix (http://adjix.com/h29c) you can configure your DNS so your domain shows up in the link (i.e. http://example.com/h29c or a working example would be http://links.hlelo.com/h29c).
- Joe
Posted by Joe Moreno on August 27, 2008 at 09:33 PM PDT #