anyway Kurz is full of it. exponential increase in technology doesn't get you anywhere if your population is increasing exponentially as well. and once population stops increasing exponentially technological "progress" won't increase exponentially either.
being able to feed and cloth 3,000 people to build a stealth bomber is only possible when there are 3,000 (or whatever number, i'm not making claim of an exact linear relationship) people in Africa, ferrying their 3% annual food growth abroad in the form of debt.
Kurzweil is a looney. he follows in the footsteps of the other millions of people who have been preaching the technological religion ever since agriculture was invented. according to them, we were supposed to be in "utopia" centuries ago...
There is no gumstix connection that can handle output to a LCD or CRT. I'm not sure what the connection is between the stix and the display, but the gumstix board is definatly custom board that eInk requested from gumstix; they mention this on the corporate gumstix site.
Yeah that's the impression I got too. They seem to imply though that (given enough money and enough sales volume) they could put it on a nice, flexible backboard.
Interesting stuff. I want a cube. Or a sphere. Or a nude model you could display clothes on.
right. but theres still that much money floating around. you're not changing anything by spliting the stock, just changing the accounting. in any case, the stock is still overvalued.
APT fails to take into account liquidity risk, which is exactly the problem.
liquidity risk is not really measurable. when the shit hits the fan, liquidity goes right out the window because people are usually scared out of their wits and not being the slightest bit rational. those are the extreme events that are going to doom your forecasting and your profits.
you say "if they bet, there will be further incentives for more informed users to bet even more against them", but if they can't bet, or can't bet accurately (i.e., have to hit the ask or fade the bid), then you model loses all power.
um. the internet bubble was the greatest bubble since the great depression.
there are many markets in the world. when you consider them all, speculative bubbles happen quite frequently, and they are always nasty.
Warren Buffet is the greatest investor on the planet with a 30 year track record. and the companies that he buys, and that run under Berkshire, ALL pay dividends. (also, Berkshire is non-inflation adjusted non-split price for their premium shares)
Google is a 3 or 5 year startup that has just gone public. They have no serious track record and their market is based on one thing: advertising revenue.
Microsoft has a 20 year track record. Buffet regularly says Gates is the best businessman he knows.
GOOG is at, what, infinity P/E? or, to be fair, its about 83 times. 83 is insane. nothing keeps at 83 for long. the only way to keep the stock up that high would be for share price to double again in the next year. $600 share price? you gotta be kidding me.
i never said i had read it. but i knew what your point was. it's a rehash of the economic effiencicy, random-walk, nonsense from that Chicago economic department. anyway the main proponents of those theories all went on to work in finance in the mid-to-late 90s, when that theory was in vogue. needless to say, i think they nearly all lost money.
the market is never optimal. specific parts at specific times, sure. but not in general. plenty of people beat the market very consistently. it just happens to only be about 5-1% of all those participating. everyone else makes less than the market. you know, like the food pyramid.
True, if you're not using it mathematically. Using it as a hunch of mass manias might tell you something, assuming your non-math interpretation of it was correct.
I agree with your interpretation. As the saying goes, if you get a stock tip from your cab driver to buy something, it's best you sell it damn quick;) (and what was that study that shorted everything that appeared on the cover of Time or Business Week? i believe the housing market made front-cover this summer...)
one of the guys who invented Black-Scholes went on to work for LTCM, which managed to loose 4.6 billion in a couple months because the market _wasn't_ normal.
economic theory is basically bullshit. at best case, knowing that will make you rich, and in worst case, it'll keep you from at least not loosing money:)
yes, LTCM got fucked proper, didn't they;) "the market can remain irrational far longer than you can remain solvent." -keynes
hehe.
heh.
yeah, i was making that up about about the CLT. last time i studied calc was in high school. but the idea that the markets are not normal, and events in them unknowingly independent, was the real point, and makes applying math quite dubious. and there are data problems: what exactly are you measuring? prices? volume? what about the companies that went under and are no longer in the indexes? what about freak events like WWIII or a comet hitting manhattan? what about discontinuity? what about taxes? commissions? fees? slippage? (from hitting ask and buying bid) etc etc.
i know enough math to know that math is powerful (i'm at a top-notch grad school for math, but i'm a terrible student. i'm a drug-addled mathematican who doesn't bother with proofs. my profs think i'm a fucking moron. which is fine with me. hehe.), but not enough to know that its not to be trusted. when someone proves the halting problem i'll take it more seriously;)
you'll notice that the market has tanked this week following the fed rate raise.
what's happening, i think, is that the Fed propped up the housing market to offset the bubble crash. now they are in the position of having to raise rates quite a bit more still, while the economy is still not much better than after the crash. housing prices will fall eventually and then we'll start to really see some interesting things. the U.K. had a housing bubble and it's already started to prick. peeople in the US were hoping they'd get a bit of free money from the fed this month, but the fed is in serious serious trouble and they know it.
the government is going to spend $200 billion on Katrina? where they hell are they going to get that? foreigners are buying less bonds, so the Fed will have to substitute. result: inflation.
as far as when the crash will be? hard to say. remember the stock bubble? in '97 and '98 alot of pros lost money shorting the market. they couldn't imagine that it would take a couple more years of mania before people regained their senses. but eventually, what goes up must come down.
and you're right, you can tell the speculative binge is back with all the crazy mortages. people must be insane to be doing interest-only mortages! even ARMs are a stupid, terrible idea. and they don't even know it! it's quite amazing, especially considering the amount of money involved. people are running around, buying houses that they can't afford. once rates go up, they are s-c-r-e-w-e-d.
for some reason, people think they can make money investing without effort, without years of study and hard work. how silly.
there is a funny method of making money: short whatever comes out on the cover of Time or Business Week. the idea is that by the time one is receiving investment tips from ones barber or cab driver or tabloid (which is what Time really is), its time to get out of the market in a hurry. i think Time had its first housing market cover in like June of this summer. you'll also notice that it's a commonly accepted fact that inflation will remain at this ridiculously low level forever. bah humbug.
good luck renting. if the market collapses, you'll be saving money by renting, nevermind saving on the huge opportunity cost of owning a home. at some point, people will regain their senses, and you'll be richer than ever. just tell your wife how wise you're being buy not being a financial fool;)
P.S. you might like "Reminesces (sp) of a Stock Operator". it's superb.
P.P.S. i graduated in 2001, started a job at beginning of 2002. good salary, and I missed the housing buy opportunity too. i was annoyed (i also missed the stock bubble) but no biggie. renters have gotten the shaft for 13 years--our time is quite due.
and i'll read mackay. but i doubt it applies to financial markets. i imagine that the crowd is the best bet when your distribution is normal, but financial markets are not normal, and believing otherwise will just leave you broke and pissed off.
your sample has to be normal in the first place for this to work. financial markets are not normal, they are "fat-tailed": extreme events happen with regularity. this is why traders don't bother with MBA classes. they're too busy fleecing the ignorant.
Its "well documented" that financial markets are not normal. They are "fat-tailed"--extreme events happen with regularity. This attempt has been tried thousands of times by people with far more at stake than google. They also had more money, more PhDs, etc. And they failed. They always fail at some time or another. There is no algorithm for the financial markets.
Those who doubt had best read the story of Long Term Capital Management.
wikipedia link
What Google is doing is interesting, but it's no magic bullet. And I'm not even sure I'd use this system to place money on the markets. Fads come, fads go. Neural Networks. Genetic Algorithms. Fibonacci numbers. Eliiot Waves. what-have you. They're all nonsense. The big ol boys still make their money the old fashioned way: graft, theft, and deceipt.
Anyone honestly think Google knows something that the trillion dollar financial industry doesn't? They have far more at stake that Google. They have their fair share of MIT PhDs, economic nobel prize winners, sparc computers, access to nearly every price in the world at any time. And they still make the majority of their cash through commission.
Call me a cynic, but the math says this can't work. And I'll trust the math before I trust a company that doesn't even pay dividends any day.
Neural networks don't tell you crap for the same reasons that that other fad, genetic algorithms, don't either. There are well-defined mathematical reasons that "the crowd" can't predict the future or any of that nonsense--the problem is mathematically unsolvable. (read "The No Free Lunch Theorem"... its a refrasing of the Halting Problem)
DO NOT FORGET: The larger size of your data leading to better predictions ONLY HAPPENS WHEN YOUR DISTRIBUTION IS NORMAL.
It's well documented that markets are "fat-tailed", that is, not even close to normal distribution.
Long Term Capital made this same mistake. Hired a bunch of PhDs, bought a shitton of Sparcs, and assumed the distribution was normal. They made a ton of money for 3 years then in about 1 or 2 months lost every last cent. Billions of dollars.
The crowds are not to be trusted. Remmeber the bubble before the Depression? the '87 crash? the '00-'01 crash? the silver market crash of 81? the mania of 1900? 1869? 1879? 1889?
Please apply this knowledge to making money on the stock market. I guarantee you will be broke rather quickly. Most of the foundation of finance is on taking advantage of the mania of crowds, which barely know what they're investing in nevermind the value of it. This is why brokers make all their money on getting you to trade, not on getting you to trade successfully.
Slashdot Mirror
i guess you haven't seen the statistics on the steady decline of the U.S. middle class since the 1970s?
...
laugh, it's funny.
anyway Kurz is full of it. exponential increase in technology doesn't get you anywhere if your population is increasing exponentially as well. and once population stops increasing exponentially technological "progress" won't increase exponentially either.
being able to feed and cloth 3,000 people to build a stealth bomber is only possible when there are 3,000 (or whatever number, i'm not making claim of an exact linear relationship) people in Africa, ferrying their 3% annual food growth abroad in the form of debt.
Kurzweil is a looney. he follows in the footsteps of the other millions of people who have been preaching the technological religion ever since agriculture was invented. according to them, we were supposed to be in "utopia" centuries ago...
in terms of deflation.
last time there was deflation or even anything remotely close to it was Great Depression.
I think the Gumstix is not "off-the-shelf."
There is no gumstix connection that can handle output to a LCD or CRT. I'm not sure what the connection is between the stix and the display, but the gumstix board is definatly custom board that eInk requested from gumstix; they mention this on the corporate gumstix site.
Yeah that's the impression I got too. They seem to imply though that (given enough money and enough sales volume) they could put it on a nice, flexible backboard.
Interesting stuff. I want a cube. Or a sphere. Or a nude model you could display clothes on.
Does anyone know how flexible this eInk active-matrix display is?
The development kit looks mounted on a firm electronic board. What I am looking for is this exact development kit, but one that I can roll up.
Anyone know? Or know of any other development kits coming/already out that are basically just like this eInk product, but flexible?
Thanks!
so "DIY" now means, buy a pre-built $3,000 development kit from a corporation?
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id =755824
right. but theres still that much money floating around. you're not changing anything by spliting the stock, just changing the accounting. in any case, the stock is still overvalued.
APT fails to take into account liquidity risk, which is exactly the problem.
liquidity risk is not really measurable. when the shit hits the fan, liquidity goes right out the window because people are usually scared out of their wits and not being the slightest bit rational. those are the extreme events that are going to doom your forecasting and your profits.
you say "if they bet, there will be further incentives for more informed users to bet even more against them", but if they can't bet, or can't bet accurately (i.e., have to hit the ask or fade the bid), then you model loses all power.
APT assumes liquidity is normal. it isn't.
um. the internet bubble was the greatest bubble since the great depression. there are many markets in the world. when you consider them all, speculative bubbles happen quite frequently, and they are always nasty.
i love monkies. there is a regular column in the WSJ the keeps ongoing track of the mega rich monkey.
Warren Buffet is the greatest investor on the planet with a 30 year track record. and the companies that he buys, and that run under Berkshire, ALL pay dividends. (also, Berkshire is non-inflation adjusted non-split price for their premium shares)
Google is a 3 or 5 year startup that has just gone public. They have no serious track record and their market is based on one thing: advertising revenue.
Microsoft has a 20 year track record. Buffet regularly says Gates is the best businessman he knows.
GOOG is at, what, infinity P/E? or, to be fair, its about 83 times. 83 is insane. nothing keeps at 83 for long. the only way to keep the stock up that high would be for share price to double again in the next year. $600 share price? you gotta be kidding me.
i never said i had read it. but i knew what your point was. it's a rehash of the economic effiencicy, random-walk, nonsense from that Chicago economic department. anyway the main proponents of those theories all went on to work in finance in the mid-to-late 90s, when that theory was in vogue. needless to say, i think they nearly all lost money.
the market is never optimal. specific parts at specific times, sure. but not in general. plenty of people beat the market very consistently. it just happens to only be about 5-1% of all those participating. everyone else makes less than the market. you know, like the food pyramid.
True, if you're not using it mathematically. Using it as a hunch of mass manias might tell you something, assuming your non-math interpretation of it was correct.
;) (and what was that study that shorted everything that appeared on the cover of Time or Business Week? i believe the housing market made front-cover this summer...)
I agree with your interpretation. As the saying goes, if you get a stock tip from your cab driver to buy something, it's best you sell it damn quick
one of the guys who invented Black-Scholes went on to work for LTCM, which managed to loose 4.6 billion in a couple months because the market _wasn't_ normal.
:)
economic theory is basically bullshit. at best case, knowing that will make you rich, and in worst case, it'll keep you from at least not loosing money
yes, LTCM got fucked proper, didn't they ;) "the market can remain irrational far longer than you can remain solvent." -keynes
;)
hehe.
heh.
yeah, i was making that up about about the CLT. last time i studied calc was in high school. but the idea that the markets are not normal, and events in them unknowingly independent, was the real point, and makes applying math quite dubious. and there are data problems: what exactly are you measuring? prices? volume? what about the companies that went under and are no longer in the indexes? what about freak events like WWIII or a comet hitting manhattan? what about discontinuity? what about taxes? commissions? fees? slippage? (from hitting ask and buying bid) etc etc.
i know enough math to know that math is powerful (i'm at a top-notch grad school for math, but i'm a terrible student. i'm a drug-addled mathematican who doesn't bother with proofs. my profs think i'm a fucking moron. which is fine with me. hehe.), but not enough to know that its not to be trusted. when someone proves the halting problem i'll take it more seriously
but anyway i'm just blabbering nonsense now.
i completely agree.
;)
you'll notice that the market has tanked this week following the fed rate raise.
what's happening, i think, is that the Fed propped up the housing market to offset the bubble crash. now they are in the position of having to raise rates quite a bit more still, while the economy is still not much better than after the crash. housing prices will fall eventually and then we'll start to really see some interesting things. the U.K. had a housing bubble and it's already started to prick. peeople in the US were hoping they'd get a bit of free money from the fed this month, but the fed is in serious serious trouble and they know it.
the government is going to spend $200 billion on Katrina? where they hell are they going to get that? foreigners are buying less bonds, so the Fed will have to substitute. result: inflation.
as far as when the crash will be? hard to say. remember the stock bubble? in '97 and '98 alot of pros lost money shorting the market. they couldn't imagine that it would take a couple more years of mania before people regained their senses. but eventually, what goes up must come down.
and you're right, you can tell the speculative binge is back with all the crazy mortages. people must be insane to be doing interest-only mortages! even ARMs are a stupid, terrible idea. and they don't even know it! it's quite amazing, especially considering the amount of money involved. people are running around, buying houses that they can't afford. once rates go up, they are s-c-r-e-w-e-d.
for some reason, people think they can make money investing without effort, without years of study and hard work. how silly.
there is a funny method of making money: short whatever comes out on the cover of Time or Business Week. the idea is that by the time one is receiving investment tips from ones barber or cab driver or tabloid (which is what Time really is), its time to get out of the market in a hurry. i think Time had its first housing market cover in like June of this summer. you'll also notice that it's a commonly accepted fact that inflation will remain at this ridiculously low level forever. bah humbug.
good luck renting. if the market collapses, you'll be saving money by renting, nevermind saving on the huge opportunity cost of owning a home. at some point, people will regain their senses, and you'll be richer than ever. just tell your wife how wise you're being buy not being a financial fool
P.S. you might like "Reminesces (sp) of a Stock Operator". it's superb.
P.P.S. i graduated in 2001, started a job at beginning of 2002. good salary, and I missed the housing buy opportunity too. i was annoyed (i also missed the stock bubble) but no biggie. renters have gotten the shaft for 13 years--our time is quite due.
and i'll read mackay. but i doubt it applies to financial markets. i imagine that the crowd is the best bet when your distribution is normal, but financial markets are not normal, and believing otherwise will just leave you broke and pissed off.
"the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." -keynes
your sample has to be normal in the first place for this to work. financial markets are not normal, they are "fat-tailed": extreme events happen with regularity. this is why traders don't bother with MBA classes. they're too busy fleecing the ignorant.
the crowds don't know shit when it comes to financial markets.
Its "well documented" that financial markets are not normal. They are "fat-tailed"--extreme events happen with regularity. This attempt has been tried thousands of times by people with far more at stake than google. They also had more money, more PhDs, etc. And they failed. They always fail at some time or another. There is no algorithm for the financial markets.
Those who doubt had best read the story of Long Term Capital Management. wikipedia link
What Google is doing is interesting, but it's no magic bullet. And I'm not even sure I'd use this system to place money on the markets. Fads come, fads go. Neural Networks. Genetic Algorithms. Fibonacci numbers. Eliiot Waves. what-have you. They're all nonsense. The big ol boys still make their money the old fashioned way: graft, theft, and deceipt.
Anyone honestly think Google knows something that the trillion dollar financial industry doesn't? They have far more at stake that Google. They have their fair share of MIT PhDs, economic nobel prize winners, sparc computers, access to nearly every price in the world at any time. And they still make the majority of their cash through commission.
Call me a cynic, but the math says this can't work. And I'll trust the math before I trust a company that doesn't even pay dividends any day.
Neural networks don't tell you crap for the same reasons that that other fad, genetic algorithms, don't either. There are well-defined mathematical reasons that "the crowd" can't predict the future or any of that nonsense--the problem is mathematically unsolvable. (read "The No Free Lunch Theorem"... its a refrasing of the Halting Problem)
DO NOT FORGET: The larger size of your data leading to better predictions ONLY HAPPENS WHEN YOUR DISTRIBUTION IS NORMAL.
It's well documented that markets are "fat-tailed", that is, not even close to normal distribution.
Long Term Capital made this same mistake. Hired a bunch of PhDs, bought a shitton of Sparcs, and assumed the distribution was normal. They made a ton of money for 3 years then in about 1 or 2 months lost every last cent. Billions of dollars.
The crowds are not to be trusted. Remmeber the bubble before the Depression? the '87 crash? the '00-'01 crash? the silver market crash of 81? the mania of 1900? 1869? 1879? 1889?