probanker ramblings

The moral, after all the noise and fine print, of bank management class, including the ProBanker (probanker.com) game, seems to be that banking, at least in the USA, is regulated into a very specific set of niche activities, and is rapidly losing market share to more efficient non-bank entities, such as credit unions, but there are still lots of opportunities within the "banking" niche, so there isn't a problem.

Communication technology improving as it has in recent centuries, the market imprefections that have meant big opportunities for banks are dissolving. No longer is it possible to offer long term certificates of deposits with low rates to simpletons who can't figure out how to invest their funds in exactly the same things that a bank might invest them in, if banks were allowed to invest, which they aren't -- they are only allowed to loan. Which means they can invest in bonds.

I successfully wrote a www::mechanize program that logs in to the probanker web site and runs simulations for me, in order to test hypotheses and fine tune our rates for the supply and demand curves provided in the simulated situation. The semester is ending soon and I have been wondering how much sense it would make to offer use of that tool as a yet another odd niche product under the david nicol consulting / tipjar LLC banner. I don't know how much interest there would be in it; getting the word out about its existence would be tricky without the cooperation of Flannery and Flood. If they were opposed to it it would be trivial to alter the probanker web service to require that it be reengineered. The defense measures they could take, if they deemed its existence hostile, are limited only by human creativity.

So, I'm not offering my probanker logger-in-and-runner as a product at this time; rather, I am offering it, but as a custom tool available as needed. If you are in a class using probanker and would like to use a mechanized method of running a series of simulations over a range of variables, and would like to put a little of your beer money towards software developed by a world-class computer programmer and wannabe tycoon, please drop me a line in the comment form below.

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