Capitalogix

Let My People Go!

It's a special weekend. 

For Jews, it's Passover - the holiday honoring our exodus from Egypt. 

For Christians, it's Easter - the holiday honoring Jesus's resurrection. 

The overlap can be seen in DaVinci's Last Supper, a Passover Seder, and Jesus's last meal before his crucifixion.  

For both, it's a holy and family-centric time. A reminder to appreciate what we have, and how we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. 

One of the memorable phrases from Exodus is when Moses says "Let my people go!"  For generations, people assumed he was talking to the Pharoh about his people's freedom. After a week of eating clogging matzoh, matzoh balls, and even fried matzoh ... for many Jews "Let my people go" takes on a different meaning.

Hope you celebrated with family, food, and a reverence for all the blessings around you. 

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - April 7th, 2019

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links:

• Scientists Plead to Stop Creation of Killer Robots: We're at 'The Brink of a New Arms Race'. (FoxNews)
• Moratorium on Human Genome Editing: Time to Get It Right. (HastingsCenter)
• 'Those Who Obeyed the Rules Were Favored by Evolution'.(Spiegel)
• Meet the World's Oldest Confirmed Person, 116-Year-Old Kane Tanaka. (TwistedSifter)
• Why Democrats Want to Abolish the Electoral College and Republicans Want to Keep It. (Fortune)

Trading Links:

• Why Companies that Wait to Adopt AI May Never Catch Up.(HBR)
• Iranian Hackers Have Hit Hundreds of Companies in past Two Years. (Wall Street Journal)
• What is an Inverted Yield Curve and What Does It Really Mean? (TheStreet)
• S&P 500 Posts Best First Quarter in 21 Years. (FoxBusiness)
• Bill Gates is Back in the $100 Billion Club, and Not All Thanks to Microsoft. (CNW)

 

 

Believe Nothing and Trust No One ... April Fools!

April Fools is a good chance for some much-needed levity, but it's also an opportunity for tone-deaf companies to try and resonate with their younger clientele. You get some fantastic pranks and funny jokes, but you also get some cringe. 

 

 

via Google

The Good

• Google claimed to have a physical screen cleaner feature on their phones that would also create a long-lasting non-stick shield.  
• Spotify replaced Discover Weekly playlists with Discocover Weekly playlists, including actual disco cover songs from artists you listen to. 

The Bad

• Logitech said it was rebranding its wireless mice as "hamsters" since they don't have tails. 
• U.K. Based Libert Games created a "Trump V Kim Nuclear Foosball Table" which comes with latex masks of Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un  so you can truly embody the roleplay. 

The Ugly 

• HyperX and Nissin Cup Noodles combined to create a pair of headphones with Cup Noodles as the earpads and a fork instead of a microphone ... so you can slurp your noodles while gaming. Efficiency at it's finest. 
• Elon Musk released an auto-tuned rap song called "RIP Harambe" about the Cincinatti Zoo Gorilla who was unceremoniously killed in 2016

 

Yet, some of the best April Fools pranks came ages ago: 

 

The Best of All Time

• In 1957, the BBC ran a segment on the Swiss growing pasta on trees. The story was on television, and back then, the television wouldn't lie to you ... right?!
• In 1974, a local Sitka, Alaska prankster Oliver Bickar flew 70 old tires into Mt. Edgecumbe - a volcano that had been dormant for 400 years -  and set them on fire. It was such a good prank that the Associated Press ran with it, Alaska Airlines used it in ads, and the admiral of the Coast Gaurd called the prank a "classic."
• In 1996, Taco Bell announced it had purchased the Liberty Bell and named it the "Taco Liberty Bell" in an effort to help the national debt. 

 

What's the best prank you've played?  Here's mine.

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - March 31st, 2019

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links:

 

• 7 Odd Traits Geniuses, Masters and Entrepreneurs All Have in Common.(Forbes)
• Nest Founder: I Wake up in Cold Sweats Thinking, What Did We Bring to the World?. (FastCompany)
• Bill Gates: AI is like Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear Energy in Danger and Promise. (Vox)
• Artificial Intelligence and Ethics. (HarvardMagazine)
• These are All the World's Major Religions in One Map. (WEForum)

 

Trading Links:

• Just Because You're Paranoid, Doesn't Mean the Algorithms Aren't out to Get You. (TimHarford)
• Here are the Top Risks on Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon's Radar.(Finance)
• UBS CEO Says this is One of the Worst First-quarter Environments in History. (CNBC)
• Apple Sold 35 Million AirPods in 2018, Currently Most Popular 'Hearable' Brand. (AppleInsider)
• Facebook, Google and Other Big Tech Giants are about to Face a Reckoning, State Attorneys General Warn. (Washington Post)

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - March 24th, 2019

via KDNuggets

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links:

• Jeff Bezos Predictions from 20 Years Ago that Were Right on the Money. (BusinessInsider)
• Imagining the Smart Cities of 2050. (SingularityHub)
• Secrets of the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. (CNN)
• How Designers Engineer Luck into Video Games. (Nautilus)
• CRISPR Gene Editing: Why We Need Slow Science. (The Conversation)

 

Trading Links:

• Why Companies like Lyft and Uber are Going Public without Having Profits. (Re/code)
• Are Animal Spirits Making a Comeback? (Bloomberg)
• This is What the Average American Spends in a Day. (Fool)
• The AI-Art Gold Rush is Here. (The Atlantic)
• Who Wants to See a Movie about High-Frequency Trading? High-Frequency Traders. (Wall Street Journal)

 

 

March Madness: The Quest For The Holy Grail

March Madness is in full swing and will have the world's attention for a few more days. As you could guess - most brackets have already busted. Louisville lost, UC Irvine won, and Duke barely weathered UCF's onslaught. 

 

via FanSided

Lots of skill, lots of adrenaline and lots of natural talents (including amazing physical talents).  Here is a picture of 7'6 Tacko Fall. Tacko still looks taller than his opponents even when kneeling. 

via UCF Basketball

The allure of March Madness is the same as gambling or trading.  These are all fertile grounds for emotion, biases, and statistics. 

The holy grail is mighty elusive in March Madness (as in most things)  ... For example, the odds of getting the perfect bracket is 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (2.4 trillion based on a Duke Mathematician's formula that takes into account rank).  It's easier to win back-to-back lotteries than picking a perfect bracket. Nonetheless, I bet you felt pretty good when you filled out your bracket.

Here's some more crazy March Madness Stats: 

• 60 million tournament brackets were completed
• Companies expect $4 Billion of corporate losses due to employees tracking games
• The highest paid NCAA coach, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, makes a salary of $8,982,325
• It's expected to create $10 Billion in gambling (twice as much as the Super Bowl)

 

via Duke University

Feeding the Madness

"Not only is there more to life than basketball, there's a lot more to basketball than basketball." - Phil Jackson

 

In 2017, I highlighted 3 people that were (semi) successful at predicting March Madness. A 13-year-old who used a mix of guesswork and preferences, a 47-year-old English woman who used algorithms and data science (despite not knowing the game), and a 70-year-old bookie who had his finger on the pulse of the betting world.  None of them had the same success even a year later.

Finding an edge is hard - maintaining an edge is even harder.

That's not to say there aren't edges to be found. 

Bracket-choosing mimics the way investors pick trades or allocate assets. Some people use gut feel, some base their decisions current and historical performance, and some use predictive models. You've got different inputs, weights, and miscellaneous factors influencing your decision. That makes you feel powerful. But knowing the history, their ranks, etc. can be helpful in making an educated guess and they can also lead you astray. 

The allure of March Madness is the same as gambling or trading. As sports fans, it's easy to believe we know something the layman doesn't. We want the bragging rights of that sleeper pick, of our alma mater winning, of the big upset. 

You'd think an NCAA analyst might have a better shot at a perfect bracket than your grandma or your musical loving co-worker.

In reality, several of the highest-ranked brackets every year are guesses. 

The commonality in all decisions is that we are biased. Bias is inherent to the process because there isn't a clear cut answer. We don't have the answers to "who will win" and we don't have the answer to "what makes a perfect prediction". 

Think about it from a market efficiency standpoint. People make decisions on many factors - sometimes irrational ones - and that creates inefficiencies & complexities. It can be hard to find those inefficiencies and capitalize on them - but they're there to be found. 

In trading, that's where AI and advanced math come in - taking away our biases and identifying inefficiencies humans miss.

Can machine learning also help in March Madness?

“The greater the uncertainty, the bigger the gap between what you can measure and what matters, the more you should watch out for overfitting - that is, the more you should prefer simplicity” - Tom Griffiths

The data is there. Over 100,000 NCAA regular season games were played over the last 25+ years, and we generally have plenty of statistics about the teams for each season. There are plenty of questions to be asked on that data that may add an extra edge. 

That being said, people have tried before with mediocre success. It's hard to overcome the intangibles of sports - hustle, the crowd, momentum - and it's hard to overcome 1 in 9.2 quintillion odds. 

Two lessons can be learned from this:

1. People aren't as good at prediction as they predict they are.
2. Machine Learning isn't a one-size-fits-all answer to all your problems

 

Something to think about. 

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - March 17th, 2019

The US grounded the Boeing 737 Max after similarities between two crashes. It's good they did, safety first, but it definitely caused some headaches coming back from Saskatchewan.  There's an interesting thought experiment here to understand the complexities that the airlines had to solve.

Imagine a 737 holds 200 people and does 4 or 5 flights a day. American has 24 737s in its fleet. That means each day ~24,000 people are displaced on American Airlines alone. They're replacing those planes with smaller regional jets – meaning more flights, more small airports, and more delays. The logistical/supply chain dynamics are a nightmare. 

 

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

Lighter Links:

• DARPA's New AI, Machine Learning 'Breakthrough'. (Realcleardefense)
• Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk: Life inside Tesla's Production Hell. (Wired)
• The Psychology behind Costco's Free Samples. (The Atlantic)
• The Fall of Rome and the Lessons for America. (Time)
• How Timeboxing Works and Why It Will Make You More Productive. (HBR)

 

 

Trading Links:

• Despite Store Closings, There's Still One Blockbuster Store Left in the World. (USAToday)
• Oracle's Larry Ellison Has a $1 Billion Stake in Tesla. (TheStreet)
• Mansa Musa: the Richest Man Who Ever Lived. (BBC)
• Amazon Go Cashierless Stores are Coming to Airports. (VentureBeat)
• Millions of Japanese Homes are Abandoned, and Owners are Giving Them Away for Free. (BusinessInsider)

Avoiding Death By Snowmobile: Part II

Last year, I recounted my humbling via snowmobile. 

I traveled to Saskatchewan, Canada and "sledded" with people who had been doing it since birth. 

When I got there, everyone was in great spirits. Apparently, this is a sport done with day drinking, lots of laughter, and semi-reckless abandon.

We split into groups: Insane, Merely Crazy, and the Turtles. I figured I was relatively safe with the Turtles ... I was wrong. 

 

 

The machines are capable of gliding over the snow at speeds exceeding 120 miles per hour.  I wasn't going nearly that fast ... but the beasts were harder to tame than I expected. 

Despite crashing numerous times, totaling a sled, and being sore for weeks ... I had so much fun on year one that I brought my son with me on year two. 

 

 

Last year, I recognized 2 things: 

1. Humans are deletion creatures. That means they can hold seven things (plus or minus two) in their memory. While they were focused on fun, I was focused on how to stay on the sled
2. You're supposed to stay on the sled, and leaning into the turn helps you do that ... who'd've thunk it? 

This year I learned a couple more: 

1. People don't forget. Everyone remembered my less than skillful sledding. 
2. Youth is wasted on the young. My son picked it up fast and was speeding as if he'd been on a sled his whole life (despite falls that would cause people with skulls that no longer have soft spots to proceed with caution). 
3. When you find the right group of people, the fun gets more fun, and struggles seem less challenging. 

 

While sledding is fun, it's the people that make the trip. 

Likewise, it's the people you take with you through life that makes it so worth it. 

Oh, and I did suck less this time ... Progress!

 

The Oxford Comma: Still Important, Even If Oxford Doesn't Think So

Grammar isn't everyone's cup of tea ... but it's something I spend a lot of time thinking about. 

Should I use an ellipsis here or a dash? Is this an unnecessary parenthetical?

Because of that,  the serial comma (commonly known as the Oxford comma) is surprisingly important to me. 

If you don't know what an Oxford comma is, it is the comma before the word "and" at the end of a list. 

I love it (and use it). I think it adds clarity in most situations, and while some lists make sense without it, it is helpful if not necessary in many lists.

Like below: 

 

Who wants that?

Use the Oxford Comma ...  Save yourselves the imagery. 

If you need a guide of when to use it, Check out this infographic ... Click it to see the whole thing. 

 

via PRDaily

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - February 17th, 2019

NASA's Mars Opportunity Rover has officially lost contact with earth after a fierce dust storm. Its last message was "My battery is getting low and it's getting dark." The rover's original mission was scheduled for 90 days ... it lasted 14 years. 

 

via XKCD

 

Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.

 

Lighter Links

• A Quantum Future Awaits. (Science)
• Can We Make Artificial Intelligence Ethical? (Washington Post)
• Life's Secret Ingredient: A Radical Theory of What Makes Things Alive. (NewScientist)
• What Does "Dead" Mean? the Debate Continues Some 50 Years after Harvard Defined Death. (Forbes)
• Scientists Have Built a Real Star Trek 'Replicator' that Builds Objects with Light. (ScienceAlert)

 

Trading Links

• Warning: Stocks Have Only Been Stretched this Thin Once in the past 150 Years. (MarketWatch)
• From the Year When Nothing Worked in the Financial Markets to the Month When Everything Did. (CNBC)
• Mark Zuckerberg Adds $6.2 Billion in a Day, Vaulting to No. 5 Richest in World. (OCRegister)
• American Billionaire Hedge Fund Manager Has Spent $700M on Personal Real Estate in Five Years. (CNW)
• There's a New Movie Coming out about High-speed Trading on Wall Street, and It Looks Bonkers. (BizInsider)