"Hack a Shaq"

Nowadays, the NBA is having their Playoffs, an incredible show. Millions of viewers look every match of the series during the month that last the playoffs. Series with full of emotional shots, buzzer-beaters… (For those that don’t know what is a buzzer-beater is when someone makes the shot to win the game just before the buzzer point the end).

Can something destroy this show, and take away all that emotions and feelings? Can something mess these matches?

The answer is Yes, we are seeing a practice during these playoffs called “Hack-a-Shaq” originally. This practice consist in making faults to the worst free-throw shooter of the other team to make them fail and try to recover some disadvantage in the next attack.

This technique was initially introduced in the NBA by the former head coach of the Dallas Mavericks, Don Nelson, versus the Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls and the player that receives the faults was Dennis Rodman the former Center of this team.

The technique was better known when it was executed in order to stop one of the greatest and most dominant centers in NBA history, Shaquille O’Neal that was extremely bad at the free-throw line.

At these early stages of the playoffs, we have seen several coaches using this technique when his team falls behind in the scoreboard, some days ago Deandre Jordan the center of Los Angeles Clippers broke a record of free-throw attempts with 34 times at the line. The situation derives in larger and larger matches and lower audiences so it’s becoming to be a problem for the NBA.

These days the General Managers of the NBA teams have had several meeting talking about this issue that concerns the entire basketball world, but it don’t seems that they find a solution. What do you think about this issue in the NBA? How can they solve it? Right your possible solutions at the comments to give some ideas to Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA.

Thanks for reading!

Sergi Susín Calle

El Mercat del Trasto

Did you ever go to your room and see something that you are not using anymore but it still works, something that other person can take some profit of… Everyone has had this sensation before isn’t it?

This sensation, this lack of usage, this kind of asymmetric information (someone needs something that you don’t use but you don’t know it) is what “El Mercat del Trasto” tries to solve.

“El Mercat del Trasto”, an organization association  that I preside, is a street market in the historical center of my born town Torelló where everyone can sell new or second hand objects and stuff that he actually don’t use anymore to someone that is going to use it. With the exception of food and animals that are forbidden.

This street market has more than 35 years of history but it maintains the same essence trying to leave the people free to negotiate prices of the objects by themselves.

The market starts at 6 am at the morning by selling the places to the sellers to put their stands and closes at 14 pm. During these hours the streets of my town fill with more than 700 stands and plenty of people buying stuff that they probably need or they think that can be useful for them.

It’s so interesting to see the people negotiating free prices in the street market, it is a bargaining duel, the one that wants more the object probably is going to get it at any price since for another with less interest in the object maybe the price will go down for him and he will buy it despite the fact that is less valuable for him than is for the first guy. This give a lot of bargaining power to the sellers, since they can negotiate the price with freedom between all the possible buyers and almost for sure, end up selling a good that they don’t need anymore and it’s only taking space at home.

So maybe we can consider the market a win-win situation. The seller gets some money for objects that probably have spend lots of time in the storage room or somewhere else in the house without being used. And the buyer gets objects that he is pretty sure that they can be useful for him at a negotiated price, so normally less than their object value for them.

What do you think about these kind of street markets, are they useful? Did you consider that they solve the asymmetric information between the buyer and the seller?

Please write your opinions on the comments.

See you soon!

Sergi Susín Calle

About me, myself and I

Hi! Welcome everyone to my webpage.

I'm a 22 years old student at University Pompeu Fabra from Torelló (Vic, Barcelona) that is actually living in Barcelona and in the final course of my degree in Economics.

Actually, I'm presiding two associations in my born town.

 The first one is about the creation of float for the Carnival of my town, consider by the touristic portal Skyscanner one of the 15^th most important Carnivals on the world.

The second organization manages a street market in Torelló with more than 1000 different sellers around the historical center of the town.

In the future, I would like to be a trader/analyst in the stock market.

This is a world that fascinates me since I was 17 years old and I did my research project about the technical analysis strategies that are commonly used to trade. In the research project I program an excel where you enter the actual value of the stock and he follows the programmed strategy telling you the buying/selling orders following the strategy.

 Using the programed strategies, in a recession period, I get positive yields in every stock that I choose but one out of 10.

Since that moment I have continue improving my trading knowledge by reading books, trading in online brokers and spending lots of hours looking at stock markets graphs. 

Most of my knowledge comes from self-learning but I have also assist to some on-site classes and online courses but not systematically.

Changing completely the subject I would like to talk about my hobbies. I have several ones the most important are Basketball, strategy, travelling, cooking and reading.

Maybe the strangest hobby that I have is strategy; I always work with a plan in mind. Generally random work end up with random outcomes, I don’t like this sensation of having no goal to achieve in the future and I definitely don’t like random outcomes (they can be so bad). So when I start something, like this webpage, I try to put myself an objective and work to achieve it putting all my effort in.

Now that you know me a bit better you can enjoy my webpage where I will talk about my associations, stock markets stuff and my personal hobbies sometimes.

Please write any suggestions at the comments.

I hope you will have a great time here. Thank you!

Sergi Susín Calle