Our Man has been surprisingly competent at
scheduling his time so far in 2018, creating a small sliver each week for
reading and “thinking”. A side product
of this newfound competence is a more frequent “Things from my Newsblur”. As usual, the more serious and the
finance-orientated things are nearer the end.
As someone who spends far too much time
thinking about investing, this story appealed to OM on multiple levels. A couple, who were approaching retirement, noticed a small
flaw in the lottery odds of a particular game.
They did what all good investors should do; realize that they have a
legal edge, show great discipline in waiting for the opportunity to manifest
itself, and then bet really really big to maximize it. What did really really big entail? A 25-person syndicate, hours (sometimes days)
filling in many thousands of lottery tickets on each of the 55 occasions they
played in 8 years, $27million in winnings and ~$8million in profits! Like most investment edges, it disappeared
(the state closed that particular lottery game down) and an attempt to
replicate the strategy in a different market (Massachusetts lottery) met with too
much competition alerting the press. (Jason
Fagone, Highline – Huffington Post)
With the rise of Uber, AirBnB, etc. the nature of
cities is changing, and with it so must their design. “Cities of the
industrial age looked mechanical, cities of the information age can look like
fractal networks — like nature.” Can we
build a city that’s truly modern and functional, but has the character of a
medieval town? (David Galbraith,
Medium)
With all the doom around Brexit, there is at least
one industry where Britain is the unquestioned world leader; the $10bn+
sandwich industry! The British sandwich
industry transformed how you eat lunch, then did the same thing for
breakfast. Sandwiches for dinner
next? OM hopes not! (Sam Knight, The Guardian)
While not strictly a read, if you’ve ever wondered
what the reality of being an Uber driver is, then this is an easy way to find
out. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t take long
to discover it sucks! (The Financial
Times)
Despite what you
might read on this blog in the upcoming weeks, Amazon is one of OM’s favorite
companies. This article talks about the
process that led to deep learning becoming a key driver that powers most of
Amazon, especially Alexa and Amazon Web Services. The process starts with an imagined, and
often technologically impossible product, and then working backwards giving it
the flexibility to include features that haven’t been invented yet. (Steven Levy, Wired)
A profile of Jim
Simons, an investing legend. The former
cryptographer built Renaissance Capital whose algorithms made him a billionaire. Now he’s using some of that money to fund his
Flatiron Institute, which is devoted to computational science and to developing
and applying algorithms to help scientists analyze enormous caches of
data. While Universities and scientists
have become skilled at collecting data (especially digital), they are not
coders and so often struggle to fully benefit from it. The institute hopes to help by providing top researchers with bespoke algorithms to analyze their
data. (DT Max, The New Yorker)
Anyone who’s spent
more than a cursory amount of time looking at cryptocurrencies and the blockchain will have heard
of Estonia. The country is so eager to
take on technological problems, and has had such foresight in its approach,
that it is close to building the first entirely digital country. What do I mean? Imagine a world where your financial records,
health records, employment history, and school grades were all on secure online
system where you owned all your data and could control who sees it. Yes, you…not Facebook or Equifax or Google,
etc! That’s the pathway that Estonia is
trail blazing! (Nathan Heller, The New Yorker)
Cryptocurrencies
have received a beating recently. If
you’re still interested in them and especially the underlying blockchain
technology, then you should absolutely read this article. Forewarning, it’s long and can be a bit
technical/complicated in spots so you might need to re-read it a few times (OM
did, and he’d still only claim to get the concepts rather than all of the
details)…but it will be worth your time! (Preethi Kasireddy, via Medium)
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