Econ

Jan 24, 2021

Oranges, Lemons, Limes make a near ideal use case for perfect interchangeability of production supply preferences to demand preferences. The cost of opportunity to make any one of those citrus fruits is nearly identical, thus their production is largely governed by tastes on the demand site. #citrus 

May 21, 2009

Currently reading Mandelbrot. The best financial thinker in the last 25 years in my opinion.

April 16, 2009

Ways to speculate on the size of M3. if you like economics reverse engineering/conjecturing. read on. calculating the invisible M3 in the economy.

M3 which isn’t reported anymore by governments can be calculated, by the envelope of the flight to liquidity, across the various investment classes (like shaking a bowl to see how much water is in it).

looking at the run on the banks, which can be found most easily by looking at the appreciation of the usd. The effect of the run on cash, gives a strong indicator of m3, under what is predicted by behavioural finance, (this is so – because, behaviours are usually the same over given conditions over a large data set – and will be bell curved and gaussian).

the shape of the run, laid over private sector’s new money to old money, shows the exposure in a time series of the late adopters of the event, which, if trying to generalize and draw speculative conclusions, can be considered, perhaps middle investors. perhaps what is referred to as middle america (if they own most of the paper capital in say the us market).

this presumes a large correlation between, the slow money, and the late adapters role in a panic. (note that the whole larger point is predicated on the truth of this one point in some ways. There is fast money, which also pulled out late in the ‘panic state’).

The fact that this moved so quickly, broadly indicates that the overall system (notably m3) was cranked up very high (you can tell by how much the usd swung). this would be in my opinion a niche way of seeing what m3 holds.

May 30th , 2008

Will we run into an Art Library Problem,, ?? .. where content creators will be competing against an ever-growing catalogue of items from the past. For eg. when one listens to music, they can choose a classic say “beatles”, or listening to the most recent thing. As recorded history goes on, the modern day has to compete with more and more content from the past. It happens already in things such as textbook material. Will this decelerate the production of content when the libraries get so large?

Dec 3rd, 2007

Very much enjoying reading Alan Greenspan’s autobiography right now tooo.

Here’s some loose ideas on art and the prisoner’s dilemna forya:
one view of art may be as the bedbug of society. in altering social expectations. invisible but essential. as implicit norms of society; we assume that cars at a red light will stop for us, pieces of paper can be changed for things etc. etc. and one only needs to experience culture shock to see how those social norms work when they are turned around.

one role of the artist then might be seen as either functioning as a model of humanity, among many models, or as a sacrificial lamb, the virtuous glue to it. This is important because, if one were to purely look at human behaviour on its own terms, self-interested behaviour is at work in many things. that is an ugly truth, certainly not in everything but i would assume in many things.

the problem then is why act outside of that agenda if others are not going to do the same? best seen in the prisoner’s dilemna – the positive sum game, where the best single move for each party is to defect, to not cooperate. That is the expectation in many places in the world – all of which being not-so- hot tourist destinations making the nightly news.

It is only when expectations change, for eg. when it is a repeated game that expectations change, and a higher level of utility can be reached. Loans and mortgages are made, people open doors for one another, parents leave kids at school, people entrust the institutions around them. Thus the key to a healthy society is the management of the civil expectations of that society, and the utopian function of art can be seen as a fuel in propping/managing that expectation.

April 30th, 2007

– A Pareto Efficient improvment is one in which no parties lose,, it is a win-win. It seems that could increase public spending through public acts and not necessarily through taxation, if high visibility awards are given for such acts and recognized by the press and government. Recognition fuels the donor/act-giver and is the visible fuel of many things like music and science (the nobel is monetary but largely symbolic more than anything else). The government and the press can create recognition mechanisms ‘out of thin air’, it seems the most economical way of receiving private donations above tax breaks purposes. Good examples is the JFK Profiles in Courage award, given to public servants at any level, who’ve acted in the public interest, despite personal consequences. It’s a reward for such deeds, and is Pareto efficient.

 

September 28th, 2006

-All this blabbing garnered an invite to join as a blogger on www.hedgestop.com, though thinking about dropping it, as people are looking for answers and stock tips, and feeling that ppl are not understanding what i am writing, but persist..

–Ok,,, and now for the Financial Engineering stuff that everyone has eagerly been waiting for!!:

ZZzzzzz….It has occurred to me, that the store of information that can be transferred from EE. in particular signal processing to Financial Technical Analysis is vast.

ZZzzzzz….I believe the future of technical analysis to be in here somewhere:

 

For eg. If market action represents the aggregate action of bids and asks, can Fourier Spectral Analysis of the wave reveal harmonic frequencies, and magnitudes, which may shed light on the market players involved, particularly if the order book entries are all anonymous. ZZzzzzz….In 1966, the physicists Mark Kac posed the question – can you hear the shape of a drum? and what about multivariate modelling; Minkowski space, Topology; other tools of spectral analysis; meteorology; Argand plane; quantum computing; string theory, can any of it be used to this end?ZZzzzzz….This I believe is the future of technical analysis. I have to think about it more — but already neural networks have been used successfully in trading systems.

-MMMMatters of the physical world: relished likely last chocolate croissant at Kollwitzplatz Park today…. what a croissant mmm …. i am writing about it, it was that goood.

Bye for now’

July 24th, 2006

-Someone has to ask… so I might as well…
When you/your uncle/the rest of the world pledge money “for cancer”. Where and how is that money really spent??
I imagine Cancer Research as a cause gets more money than most… Is it required that non-profits disclose their budget to anyone, and how/what and under what scrutiny?

So often public scrutiny ends there? Are there fat cats sitting behind them. When we throw a dollar into a jar that says cancer research (or anything), what really happens. Seeing how much Africa money has really made it to Africa is disheartening… no idea about cancer.

If public disclosure is required by NPOrganizations, no average donor in their right mind would wade through the data to find it, but yet public donation makes a significant portion of contributions to these places.

Thus: a market for rating agencies is created through the public. In finance where investors must also wade through “it”, a market for rating services is created, such as moody’s or standard and poor’s. Other examples are equifax (personal credit) or Maclean’s magazine (Universities), People (50 most beautiful ppl), MTV (500 most influential videos of all-time) etc…. The government and society would best be served to foster such a rating.. a one-stop shop to find out how effective your charity is at what it is doing. This would create market pressures for charities to work better.

-reading today about cancer. The embryonic fluid of a baby, has properties which can revert/repair (unknown as yet) cancerous activity.

-if you take 2 mice and chop off their sides in half and sew them back together to create a siamese twin mice, and then if you chop off 1/3 the liver of one of the mice, it regenerates (as in humans too). If the mice by virtue of the previous operation share the same blood supply with each other, the healthy and untouched mouse’s liver will also grow by about the same amount. This experiment was performed by Nancy Bucher.

 

June 22, 2006-food for though that humanity has on hand very detailed taxation records which extend in time beyond all the current major religions.
-Bayesian Filtering
-Minimax and Maximini Saddle point strategies.
-Bernoulli Utility Theory – answered my previous rationalization for risk adverse behaviour.
-Bounded Rationality and Kahneman

Reading “The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici”. Especially about Cosimo Medici. A Humanist and a Philosopher King in the truest sense.

It is interesting to ponder that the Renaissance may have come about because he wanted the eastern orthodox Pope’s banking business.
Trying to cause a merger and acquisition of the branches of christianity, bringing many fluently Greek scholars to Florence in the process. Italic and Roman script occurred at this time as a clear and easy way to copy out and translate texts. Recommended to anyone who is ever curious about much of our current civilization.

My personal thought is that specialization is detrimental to one form of knowledge, while benefitting of practice in others. It seems that specialization should thus always be put at the end of any course of education as it represents only division of labour. To apply optimization to the ratio of general to specialist knowledge might be good. Reading about the Renaissance has taught me that.
Institutional education can surely be made more efficient, and is a far cry from its origins in Plato’s Academy and the casual dialogue among interested observers.

May 10th, 2006

 

Fibonacci Ratios Retracement is a concept taken from technical analysis of financial markets used to predict trends in charts. I didn’t believe it at first, but the concept ‘magically’ holds some water because of the aggregative nature of markets (Fibonacci’s number represents the rate at rabbits will reproduce in a year). It would be an interesting thought experiment to chart and look for Fibonacci Retracement levels in elements of history. For example. the popularity of Communism over time; approval rating of the English Monarchy or use of Cubism in the early 20th Century etc… I believe that this predictor would shed light on a lot of “chartable” sociological phenomenom hitherto only examined through qualitative analysis. ie. using words.April 24th, 2006

-One of many ways to enstate a new mp3 paradigm:
Make all file sharing legal.
Allow downloads, which each time you play (or through polls) sends a cookie to an internic server.
All License ‘taxes’ collected from the sale of hard drives, ipods etc. is divided according to these polls.

,,,know that they do something like this now, but to make p2p legal, would allow a fairer distribution according to popularity…. This is essentially the same thing as how roads and school/property taxes work already.

-Digital democracy is essentially the same thing too, we could instantaneously login to a government server, Vote! along with (in U.S.) Executive Branch and Senate. Maybe in a 33% split in power. We could vote on a bill as simply as we check our email….
*to put full control in a population-at-large is dangerous probably for the reasons that Plato highlighted in the Republic.

Both of these things diffuse the control of the interested powers [governments and record labels],,, hence not undertaken right?

April 19th, 2006

Usually most creative in nightime still. Thoughts for the day:
-My book proposal, new directions
-Mulling on the idea of what really happens, and what history writes.
-Took a walk. Envisioned percussion track made of glasses, pots, whisks sampled. It would work.
-Chewing the cud of assymetric positions in markets: the well-documented and considered irrational risk/loss aversion in behavioural finance makes full sense when it is seen and combined with the utility theory and payouts.