Capitalogix

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - January 26th, 2020

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

 

Lighter Links:

• 8 AI Trends We're Watching in 2020. (O)
• Navigation Apps Changed the Politics of Traffic. (CityLab)
• There's No 'Going Dark:' Always-On Surveillance Posing Risks to US Covert Operations. (TD)
• 6 Predictions About Data in 2020 and the Coming Decade. (Forbes)
• Data is Only the Beginning. Connecting the Dots Creates Knowledge. However, It is Wisdom Which Translates Insights into Impactful Decisions. (LinkedIn)

 

Trading Links:

• How 5 Big Tech Companies Really Make Money. (Infographic)
• Capitalism Draws Fire, Despite Strong Global Economy. (Wall Street Journal)
• Immune Discovery 'May Treat All Cancer'. (BBC)
• How to Raise a Billionaire: Maye Musk on Where Elon Gets His Drive. (Forbes)
• Toyota Invests $394 Million in Electric Air Taxi Company Joby Aviation. (Forbes)

 

 

Super Bowl 2020

A friend has two tickets for the 2020 SUPER BOWL — both box seats. He paid $2,500 for each ticket, but didn't realize last year when he bought them that it was going to be on the same day as his wedding. If you are interested, he is looking for someone to take his place — it’s at St. Dominic's Church in San Francisco at 3pm. Her name is Melissa . She's 5'7 about 140 lbs. She's a good cook, too. She'll be the one in the white dress.

 

As for the Super Bowl, it seems like this will be a good matchup. The KC Chiefs are in it for the first time in 50 years (and have an amazing offense), while the 49ers are coming off a series of tough seasons (but have an amazing defense). It will also be a Super Bowl without Bill Belichick's scowl gracing our screens. 

It's not just the fans that are excited about the matchup, it's also the bookies. Two years ago, gamblers set a record by placing $158.6 million in Super Bowl bets. Expect more of the same with gambling now legalized in an additional 13 states beyond Nevada. 

 

If you're still looking for a bet – there's another wishful thinking approach you could take to find one ... it is called the "Super Bowl Indicator."

 

 

The theory is that a Super Bowl win for a team from the AFC foretells a decline in the stock market and a win for the NFC means the stock market will rise in the coming year. So, if you're hoping for a strong S&P you'd be rooting for 49ers. 

There's one big caveat ... it counts the Pittsburgh Steelers as NFC because that's where they got their start (or as a data scientist would caution ... they did that to fit the data better). 

With that "adjustment," at one point the SBI was "right" 33 years out of 41 - an 80% success rate. Sounds good, right?

Come on ... you know better. It's been wrong four of the last four years ... another sign of spurious correlation if you weren't sure. 

Here are some other "fun" stock market fallacies:

• January Indicator
• Aspirin Count Theory
• Hemline Indicator
• Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Indicator
• Men's Underwear Index

 

Back to Reality

Rationally, we understand that football and the stock market have little in common, and we probably intuitively understand that correlation ≠ causation. Yet, we crave order and look for signs that make markets seem a little bit more predictable.

The problem with randomness is that it can appear meaningful. 

Wall Street is, unfortunately, inundated with theories that attempt to predict the performance of the stock market and the economy. The only difference between this and other theories is that we openly recognize the ridiculousness of this indicator. More people than you would hope, or guess,  attempt to forecast the market based on gut, ancient wisdom, and prayers.

While hope and prayer are good things ... they aren’t good trading strategies.

As goofy as it sounds, some of these "far-fetched" theories perform better than professional money managers with immense capital, research teams, and decades of experience...

I have a thought experiment I sometimes ask people. 

What percentage of active managers beat the S&P 500 any given year?

... Now, what percentage beat the S&P 500 over 15 years?

Recently, the answer is about 5% (and that's in a predominantly bull market).  For the record, that's significantly worse than chance. Perhaps that means something they're doing is hurting, not helping. 

 

 via Gaping Void

There's simply too much information out there for us to digest, process, rank, and use appropriately.

Every second you spend looking at a market is a second wasted.

There are people beating the markets — not by using the Super Bowl Indicator ... they're doing it with more algorithms and better technology. 

There will never be less data or slower markets. A good reminder that if you don't know what your edge is ... you don't have one!

Onwards.

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - January 19th, 2020

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

Lighter Links:

• Artificial Intelligence: How to Measure the I' in AI. (TheNextWeb)
• Samsung Sheds Light on Its 'Artificial Human' Project. (EnGadget)
• Secrets from a Former FBI Negotiator on How to Get What You Want. (TheLadders)
• Here's the Advice Mark Cuban Would Give His 20-Year-old Self. (CNBC)
• Want to Grow 10X? Here are 17 Books about Business and Life You Should Read in 2020. (TheLadders)

 

Trading Links:

• The Decade of the "Young Old" Begins. (WorldIn)
• 2019 A Year to Forget for Hedge Funds. (Benzinga)
• Fortnite Made $1.8 Billion in 2019. (CNN)
• Amazon Partners with Lamborghini, Rivian to Offer Alexa Voice Assistant in Vehicles. (CNBC)
• Apple Made Investors Half a Trillion Dollars Last Year. Time to Hedge Your Bets. (Barrons)

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - September 1st, 2019

 

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

Lighter Links:

• Google and Amazon Use Smart Speakers for 'Surveillance,' Top Tech Investor Says. (Finance)
• Streaming TV is about to Get Very Expensive Here's Why. (TheGuardian)
• Professional Video Game Player Signs Deal with Adidas. (CNW)
• Giant Virus Has Evolved Its Own Kind of CRISPR to Destroy Invaders. (NewScientist)
• Pole-Dancing Robot Strippers' to Perform Next to Human Dancers on Stage at Nightclub. (TheSun)

 

Trading Links:

• Surprise, Surprise, Warren Buffet Was Right: Machine-Managed Investment is a Better Bet. (Forbes)
• How ETFs Swallowed the Stock Market. (Wall Street Journal)
• Do We Really Want a Microsoft of Marijuana? (New York Times)
• Businesses Can Now Claim Their Trademark Blockchain Domains, Before It's Too Late. (Finance)
• Ray Dalio Warns of 'Serious Problems' and a Bond 'Blow-off' as a Repeat of the Late 1930S Looms. (CNBC)

 

 

Arnold Schwarzenegger Still Has It

Recently, Arnold Schwarzenegger was dropkicked by a stranger at an event he was attending in South Africa. 

I'm just now seeing it. In case you haven't, I thought I'd share. 

For some of the most successful people I know ... It is less about what happens, and more about what they choose to focus on, what they make it mean, and what they do.

 

For context, he's 72 - and this is his response to the attack:

Crazy. 

Happy Mother's Day

 To those of you with young children, here's a peek into your future.

After years of hard work and your best efforts (OK, mostly your best efforts) ...
I predict that your adorable bundles of joy will someday wish they could send you this card.

So, take a moment to think about your Mom ... and remember that she was very young when she did those things to you ...

... and what you make them mean is up to you.

Here's a funny clip from SNL in honor of Mother's Day.

 

 

The Pale Blue Dot: Life, Mankind, and the Universe

In 1977, the Voyager 1 launched into space.   Just over a dozen years later, the Voyager 1 spacecraft had traveled farther than any spacecraft/probe/human-made anything had gone before.  It was approximately 6 billion kilometers away from earth.  At that point, the Voyager 1 was "told" by Carl Sagan to turn around and take one last photo of the Earth ... a pale blue dot. 

The resulting photo is impressive precisely because it shows so little in so much.

 

"Every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."  – Carl Sagan

Earth is in the far right sunbeam –  a little below halfway down the image. This image (and the ability to send it back to earth) was the culmination of years of effort, the advancement of technology, and the dreams of mankind.

The resulting speech from Carl Sagan is still profound, moving, and worth a listen. 

 

Carl Sagan via YouTube
 

Here's the transcript:

 

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

 

Today, we have people living in space, posting videos from the ISS, and high-resolution images of space and galaxies near and far. 

We take for granted the immense phase shift in technology. You have more computing power in your pocket than we first used to go to the moon. 

As humans, we're wired to think locally and linearly. We evolved to live our lives in small groups, to fear outsiders, and to stay in a general region until we die. We're not wired to think about the billions and billions of individuals on our planet, or the rate of technological growth - or the minuteness of that all in regard to the expanse of space.  

However, today's reality necessitates we think about the world, our impact, and what's now possible for us.

We created better and faster ways to travel, we've created instantaneous communication networks across vast distances, and we've created megacities. Our tribes have gotten much bigger - and with that, our ability to enact massive change has grown as well. 

Space was the first bastion of today's innovation, but today we can look toward A.I., medicine, epigenetics, and more. 

It's hard to comprehend the scale of the universe and the scale of our potential ... but that's what makes it worth exploring!

Onwards!

Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - June 24th, 2018

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

Lighter Links

• Why Blockchain Isn't a Revolution. (Knowledge)
• Daniel Kahneman: Four Keys to Better Decision Making.(CFAInstitute)
• Mr. Rogers Had a Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Children. (The Atlantic)
• Rise of the Machines: Has Technology Evolved beyond Our Control? (The Guardian)
• Leader Schedules; 72% Meeting Time; 43% Priority Time; 3% Customer Time; ExO Course next Week. (Verne Harnish)

 

 

Trading Links

• 4 Horsemen of the Recession and Stock Market Apocalypse. (SeekingAlpha)
• Blockchain beyond the Hype: What is the Strategic Business Value? (McKinsey)
• Cryptocurrency Will Become a $20 Trillion Market: Billionaire Bull Mike Novogratz. (Finance)
• Top Banking Takeaways from the 2018 Internet Trends Report. (TheFinancialBrand)
• How Amazon Became One of Washington's Most Powerful Players. (Wall Street Journal)

Hiring the Right People: Revenge of the Nerds

Capitalogix was on the news this week.  They did a story about finding tech talent.

I'm proud of our team.

The robots aren't coming for our jobs.  We're creating the robots, the AI, and the automation. 

The secret to great AI is that it still has a heartbeat. 

Here's the article. You can watch the video below. 

via NBC DFW

We are always hiring.

It's not enough to invest in the right ideas or technologies. You have to invest in the right people as well. 

"Standing still is moving backward ... so you don't only need new technology, you need a new level of data scientists –  a new level of professional that can think about what's possible, rather than how to do what we want to do right now."

Even though we've got an incredible edge now. I recognize that edges decay faster than ever. The trick is to stay ahead.  

I can predict that the future is bright ... And I know that the best way to predict the future is to create it.

Onwards!

Trading Eyeballs... What Comes After "As Seen On TV!" with Shark Tank's Kevin Harrington

It's a lot easier to manage something you measure. 

Here at Capitalogix, we measure the expectancy score of trading systems.

Former "Shark" Kevin Harrington does something similar with eyeballs. 

For years he killed it on TV with products like Ginsu Knives, the George Foreman Grill, etc. 

But TV viewership has dropped over 50% ... and that's not a sustainable model anymore.

Luckily, like a true "Shark" he realized something that many people don't...

You have to be committed to your goals, not the tools you use to accomplish that goal. 

I shot a video with Kevin where we talk about that ... and more. Check it out

 

If you have been doing the same thing for 18 months (or longer), chances are the practical realities of time, technology, and a changing competitive landscape implies that you should be doing something different (or at least differently).

What are you doing to stay relevant in your space?