Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2010 May 13

= May 13 =

real or fake newspaper?
During the latter half of the 1980s, on buses in San Francisco, California, I used to see these pictures. They looked like advertisements. But they were for a newspaper called the "Street Fare Journal". Does such a newspaper really exist?24.90.204.234 (talk) 07:41, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Not a newspaper but an organization that published those bus cards to provide brief snippets of literature and art for riders; the cards were the "journal". (You can get a complete set of them for the low, low price of $11,500, apparently.) Deor (talk) 12:40, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
 * ...now, see Streetfare Journal.--Wetman (talk) 19:38, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Shia rituals
Do you know any thing about the ritual called "Shama Gul" in shia's.i would like to know what is shama Gul.Please let me know urgently —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sumaiyajawad (talk • contribs) 10:14, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

during sham e gul they all fuck each other in a dark room, if you were to get pregnant via this orgy you would be considered blessed.

buildings
Does anyone know what this roof is made of and how it is held up? The big white one in the background of this picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Butlins_Bognor_2.JPG

148.197.114.158 (talk) 13:24, 13 May 2010 (UTC)


 * It's the Butlins Skyline Pavilion. Guy ropes and the big metal towers sticking through it hold it up, and it's made of some sort of cloth presumably similar to the "PTFE-coated glass fibre fabric" of the Millennium Dome.  It is an example of a tensile structure. FiggyBee (talk) 13:51, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

Daguerreotype Union Cases
How many Littlefield, Parsons & Co. Union cases were made with the Constitution and the Laws Design? I have researched and found that there were over 350 case designs made, but I cannot determine how may patriotic designs there were and approximately how many of each design were made.Tooelusv4u (talk) 15:39, 13 May 2010 (UTC)


 * The number of "union cases", as the hinged tintype cases were called, that were produced in any particular design could never be determined unless a fairly complete business archive has survived for Littlefield, Parsons & Co. of Florence, Massachusetts, near Northampton. "From 1856 to 1865, the business of Littlefield, Parson & Co. gave employment to from 75 to 199 hands. Very great success attended the business after the first two or three years, particularly the manufacture of the union cases. The demand for these goods was so great that during a considerable part of the time the factory was run to its utmost capacity, night and day, producing daily 89 to 150 dozen cases", reported the writer of a history of Florence published in The Hampshire Gazette 2 April 1867. The successors to Littlefield, Parsons & Co. in 1866 were the Florence Manufacturing Company; any Littlefield, Parsons archives will have passed to them. --Wetman (talk) 18:59, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

UK constituencies
I was looking at File:2010UKElectionMap.svg which I got to from United Kingdom general election, 2010.

I saw a light blue constituency in the vicinity of Oxford and was curious as to which one it was. There is nothing on the map to track it down. I guessed it was Oxford and went to List of MPs elected in the United Kingdom general election, 2010 which is great for getting from a constituency name to a map of where it is. I tried Oxford East (UK Parliament constituency) which shows the one of interest to be just to the east of oxfordshire. But then I got stuck.

How do I look up a constituency name from a (the above) map? My question is NOT 'what is the constituency', although I'd like to know that. My question is HOW do I find out the name? -- SGBailey (talk) 16:04, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't think there is a very easy way to do this. The constituency names are present in the sourcecode of the image, so code for extracting them could be written, but I don't know if this has actually been done. What you want is a more interactive map, such as the one the BBC news website seems to have just taken down hidden behind a terrible search engine. The constituency in question is Buckingham, by the by. Algebraist 16:27, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
 * This interactive map should be the one. Click each time to narrow down of area, then you can pull all the important information. On Buckingham, it won't help: the BBC, wrongly, colours Buckingham as a Conservative seat (click on it, and it becomes "Speaker hold". It's the speaker's (though on a further technicality, he's not speaker until parliament sits); he is impartial (although John Bercow was a Conservative MP). - Jarry1250 [Humorous? Discuss.] 16:28, 13 May 2010 (UTC)

OK and thanks. I presume it is far too much effort to go through 650 articles and add "neighbouring constituencies are ...". -- SGBailey (talk) 22:22, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Quite a few of the seats do name the neighbouring constituencies; for the remainder, the link at the bottom to the list of Parliamentary constituencies in that county should help identify most of the neighbouring seats. Warofdreams talk 14:31, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

is there any more leveraged "long selling" (betting stock will rise) than options?
I thought I was clever in realizing that a certain middling stock ought to about more than double in 2 years' time, but I checked out call options for that time, and lo and behold - the market agreed with me! Instead of having to pay something cheap for the option to sell buy at double price two years from now, I would have had to pay about half of what I would gain!! Too expensive, that's very low leverage. Moreover, at that price, I can just buy the stock! In fact, '''why should I even buy the option in this case? If I buy the stock itself, then at least it can't become WORTHLESS, even if it goes down to half its value, unlike the stock option'''! That's half my question: the other half is: okay, so the stock option wasn't leveraged enough for me. Is there anything thhat is MORE LEVERAGED than a stock option, ie something I would gain more from by than with a stock option? Thanks. 84.153.186.157 (talk) 19:49, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Two comments. 1) You talk about "the option to sell at double price..." yet you think that the price will go up - this doesn't make sense because you would go for a call in this case: if the price doubles, you buy at the strike which is presumably lower than double and you've made a profit equal to the difference minus the premium you paid at the start (ignoring time-value). 2) You said you "would have had to pay about half of what [you] would gain" in 2 years - that's a pretty decent return. Zain Ebrahim (talk) 22:29, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your comments! When I said "sell at double price" what I really meant was buy at my strike price and sell at double price, ie I was thinking of the actual process of exercising the option, and I was thinking in terms of the actual selling when the option is in the money.  But you are right, the option itself consists of a right to buy, not a right to sell, and in fact most options don't actually get exercised.  As for your second comment: What I don't understand is why anyone would buy an option in my position, if they were banking on the stock about doubling, and the PREMIUM on the stock options they are looking at makes it equivalent to buy $5000 of options, which due to massive premium will only mean being $5,000 in the money when the stock doubles, or buy $5000 of the stock outright, which would also go to $10,000.   But in the second scenario, if it goes down from $5000 to $4500, you've lost $500 and opportunity costs, whereas in the first scenario you lose 100% of your investment.  When the market prices options (for a strike price close to double the current trading value!!!) with such an insane premium, why would anyone in my position buy that option?


 * Are you absolutely sure you have calculated the premium correctly ? Stock options are typically sold in lots of 1000 underlying shares, and the premium is quoted per lot, not per underlying share. So an option selling at a premium of $1 per lot is equivalent to a premium of 0.1c per underlying share. Gandalf61 (talk) 09:58, 14 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Further to Gandalf, in your last sentence you mention that the strike price is close to double the current price but from your comments further up, it sounds like the strike is close to the current price. I think you need to tell us the current price of the stock and the option strike price and the current premium. Zain Ebrahim (talk) 10:26, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Hi, thanks! Perhaps you're right and I am mistaken. Further, I was trying to simplify the numbers. Without simplification here is my actual original analysis with annotation: Here are the column headings:
 * here is my actual analysis made a couple of days ago (on the twelfth).
 * Note: all of the listed options are for options expiring the same date, January of 2012 (20 months from now), therefore the rows are just different strike prices. However, note that my position is to sell these options after holding them for one year, when, in my estimation, the underlying stock will trade close to $400.  (It trades at $260 now).
 * Column 1: the strike price.
 * Column 2: premium - The price of that option if I buy it at this moment (aka the premium). Gandalf: did I make a mistake here?
 * Columns 3-7: more trading information (volume etc) of the given option
 * Column 8: intrinsic value. My estimation of the intrinsic value of the given option on May 12, 2011. (ie one year out, well before the option expires).  My position would involve selling the options on this day, and my estimation is that the underlying stock will trade at close to $400 on this date.
 * Column 9: profit - the intrinsic value (how much it is in the money) minus the cost (what it took to get it).
 * Column 10: ROI - the profit column divided by the premium column (column 2).


 * Note: my analysis is that the stock will trade near 400 on May 12, 2011.

Now, here's the thing. When this analysis was made, the underlying stock was trading at $260, and the position is that it will trade at $400 one year from now.  Now let's look at my analysis of buying options, then we can compare it with buying the stock outright:
 * If you skim the ROI column, you can see that the biggest one is for a strike price of $280 -- and this option commands a huge premium (cost) of $48.24!
 * At this point my analysis says that $400 - $280 = $120 in the money, minus the cost of the premium is - $48.24 = $71.76 in profit.
 * $71.76 of profit from $48.24 investment means the return is a factor 71.76 / 48.24 = 1.48. ie if I invest $1000, then it becomes $1480.
 * But here's my problem: We said that the stock currently trades at $260.
 * Which means that if instead of buying the option for my 1.48 factor return, I buy the stock at $260, then I will get a return of 400 / 280 = 1.42 factor. which is nearly as high!.
 * This means two things:
 * 1) the options route includes almost NO leveraging, despite the fact that I am predicting a rise from $260 to $400 - a bold prediction!
 * 2) The option gives almost exactly the same return as buying the underlying the stock - but if I buy the option, I risk losing it all, whereas that simply will not happen for the stock itself!

So what gives? Why is the option being priced so high, and why would anyone in my position buy the option instead of the underlying stock? Further is there any other, better leveraged way for me to make my bold position, betting the underlying stock will go from $280 to $400 in a year? Thank you.

''Note: the reason I am looking at options for 20-months out despite having a position in a price one year out is because there are no options for one year out, only 8 months out, which may not be enough time for the stock to make its move. Therefore my position is to buy the 20 months out option and trade it after a year when it is well in the money. I don't care what happens to the option between when I sell it and it expires.'' 84.153.189.240 (talk) 12:37, 14 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Return = profit / investment. A profit of $71.76 on an investment of $48.24 is, as you say, a return of 148%. But a profit of $140 on an investment of $260 is a return of only 54%. You are not comparing like with like. Gandalf61 (talk) 13:16, 14 May 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks! You're right.  In this case I see that the leverage is much higher than I had thought as compared with buying the stock, however it is still much lower than I expected.  In looking at my chart, can you see whether, as you suggested, I could have made a mistake and not divided out the "lot" of options?  Or is my chart right as-is?  Thanks. 84.153.189.240 (talk) 13:24, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Also one more question, Gandalf and others: why is the $400, which still has respectable bids and asks of $15 the HIGHEST one not only in my chart, but in the sources I looked at for the chart? Shouldn't there be more options, if not 500, 600, 800, 1000, strike price, then at least continuing on to $410, $420, $430, etc - whatever it takes for there not to be any buyers for that market, as the price of that options peters out from $15, to $5, to $1, to $0.50. I don't see why $400 is the cutoff point, when it still has strong demand and supply. Why aren't there these higher strike price options? Thank you. 84.153.189.240 (talk) 13:35, 14 May 2010 (UTC)