6 Free Financial Modeling Lessons...and More.

”Look man, remember when there were no seatbelts? What happened then when you crashed?”

“My point is, life is like that car! Sometimes it throws you through the windshield, cracks your skull wide open, even breaks your heart! But you can’t let that stop you from getting back in there! Ride, Billy. RIDE!”

A first-year analyst at BofA is pulling an all-nighter. He's on his second Snickers bar and his third Monster Lo-Carb when he notices his VP's computer turning on. Which is strange, because his VP shut it down hours ago when he left for the night. So he strolls around the office for a few minutes and catches another offline computer booting up. This is weird. He goes back to his desk and the blood drains from his face when he sees the comps he's spent hours spreading have disappeared from his screen and been replaced by what appears to be Chinese characters. Then his screen goes blank. Chaos erupts among the analysts as all their screens go blank at the same moment.

On another floor, an overnight trader notices a huge spike in the Yen and a collapse in the Euro and dollar before his screen goes blank. He panics, knowing that he must be tripping stops right and left. He tries to reboot to no avail. His phone starts ringing, and it's his MD who clearly just woke up. "WTF is going on down there?" his MD screams, but the trader has no answers. His computer comes back online for a moment, but only long enough for him to see his P&L hemorrhaging red. Then everything goes blank.

If this sounds like something out of a spy novel, you'd better get ready to see it in real life. Because it's happening on June 28. Dubbed Quantum Dawn 2, Wall Street is going to come under simulated cyber attack to test the system readiness and response time in the event of a massive worldwide hacker attack. By scheduling it for June 28, they're hoping to take advantage of what should be a quiet summer Friday where (hopefully) it won't cause any real chaos.

For many of us in United States, the TI-83 Plus is the quintessential (pre-college) calculator. It was required for many classes (e.g. AP Calculus) and the $100+ price tag 10+ years ago did not do wonders for the wallet. Still, the multi-line interface, matrix operation capabilities and games such as snake made it a versatile instrument pre-iphone. 

Yet, as an electronic system in a highly competitive field, why is the same TI-83 Plus still almost as pricey as a decade ago?? Keep in mind that with the same money, one can buy a 4th gen ipod touch with a Color screen, gigabytes of ram and streaming video+wifi and that the same smartphones a year from now are probably worth far less (try selling the older motorola razr's now). This extends beyond phones to vcrs (remember those?), stereos etc.

Here you go:

I thought I'd take a break from finance related stuff today to give you guys the heads up that you should get your affairs in order because the human race doesn't have much time left in existence. As a species, we've had some really bad ideas, but I'm pretty sure this one's the one that's gonna do us all in.

Before I get into what's about to happen, let's cover some basic science/math real quick. The universe is estimated to be about 13.77 billion years old. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, and life emerged on Earth about 3.8 billion years ago. NASA estimates that there are 100 billion planets in our galaxy alone, 10 billion of which share Earth-like characteristics. I've heard the number of planets in the known universe to be estimated at a billion billion.

So from a strictly mathematical viewpoint, some form of intelligent extraterrestrial life somewhere in the universe is a near certainty. Given a long enough timeline, contact between us and some form of alien life is also highly probable. And whatever life we may encounter could conceivably have about a 10 billion year head start on the evolutionary race track and be quite a bit more advanced than us shaved apes. So it would behoove us as a species not to piss them off.