Arbitrage Opportunity: Gelato

Gelaato (sic) in Barcelona sells 180g of gelato for €3.50 and 240g of gelato for €4.50 and.  So you can buy 2160g as either (a) 12 cups at €3.50 = €42; or (b) nine cups at €4.50 = €40.50.  I fully expect to see some 135-pound Wharton MBA in a black suit at the door arbitraging the €1.50 spread.

Lottery Arbitrage

Here's another one that may be old news to everyone but me: apparently Baltimore has traditionally nurtured a healthy numbers racket.  Along came a legalized lottery-- but it it did not destroy the numbers game.  Evidently the numbers guys continued as before, only using the lottery numbers and paying bigger prizes.  I assume the point would be that the numbers guys aren't burdened with all that nonsense about public purpose, support the schools, whatever.  For them, it's only money.  

Amazing That I Am Not Rich

Via Cory at BoingBoing, we learn that the kilogram is losing weight (link):

Physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, southwest of Paris, says the reference kilo appears to have lost 50 micrograms compared with the average of dozens of copies.

"The mystery is that they were all made of the same material, and many were made at the same time and kept under the same conditions, and yet the masses among them are slowly drifting apart," he said. "We don't really have a good hypothesis for it."

Cory calls it the "weight of a fingerprint," but I wouldn't dismiss it so quickly. "Arbitrage" in finance is the art of identifying and capitalizing on market mispricing. Given the competitive nature of the game, these opportunities are hard to find, and if you are going to make any money at all, you usually have to do it on volume.

But do the numbers here. A microgram is one one-thousandth of a gram. Unless I've dropped a zero somewhere, that means 20 million "fingerprints" in a gram. At a penny a fingerprint, that translates into $200,000 a gram. GE trading volume yesterday was a little under 20 million shares...

Honestly, it just amazing that I am not rich. But don't kid yourself. Somewhere on this planet, there is an 85-pound kid with a brain the size of a suitcase, hunkered down over his computer screen, doing just this same kind of calculation and getting it right.