Waamax

I know accidents can be fatal. Especially when they are in interstate/highway and the speed is above 65 mph and if it involves 5 cars. That’s what happened to me while going east on I66 on July 22.

But you know what’s the worst part? The aftermath. Dealing with the insurance. Hundreds of phone calls and voice messages. Waiting for them to come get my car and get the whole thing fixed. Ughhh.

[The accident scene]

All the finance and economic classes that I have taken over the last 2 years focused on one really important concept – “The efficient market”. What that means is, given sufficient time (in fact not that much) any two different strategies you take in any position will yield you the exact result. To make it clear let’s imagine that I run a business that sells baseball bats. And I sell each of those for $1. One day I somehow figured it out that I can purchase baseball bats from Mexico (just for a change – we are so used to say China for all those outsourced products) for 1 peso (let’s suppose that 1 dollar = 2 pesos – exchange rate). Now I can take a dollar to Mexico, get 2 bats and sell them and enjoy the difference. Well my neighbour found about my smart idea and decided to do the same. Shortly many followed. Then there was huge demand for bats in Mexico and it was no longer available for a peso. It now cost me 2 pesos. Now it didn’t matter where I buy those bats because it would cost the same. This is how efficient market works.

I saw similar activity in the traffic pattern near my residence here in Centreville. One side of the double lane road is up for construction for a while now. So that reduce the road capacity to half. And add to that the traffic merging from the right of other incoming road. Result – the timeframe from 4PM to 6PM where everyone is coming back from office to home, it takes almost 30 minutes to travel the 1.5 miles of my commute. Well that explains my reason for leaving work early. And it’s hard to convince my gang who commute everyday from Maryland (more than 30 miles) for my early departure. So it has been a case for a while now until last week I was too bored to wait 5 mins to move an inch. I then tried something different. I took an early exit and tried to find a random short (hopefully) way to home. To my surprise there were already handful of cars taking the exact same route. And to my even bigger surprise all those cars were heading to residence really close to mine. Great. The time was greatly reduced to now – 30 minutes to almost 7 mins. Life was good for a week. Then I see more and more cars taking the same route. Yesterday it took me almost 20 minutes to get home following my so called “short cut” route. With the cars being diverted through two routes now, I pretty much expected the time following the original route to be almost the same. I gave it a try today and it was pretty close.

Well this is an efficient world.

Remembering 32 fallen Hokies, Apr 16, 2007.