In this piece, we review machine learning methods for classification. Then we apply classification to the classic value/momentum factors (spoiler: the results are a bit too good).

This is a tutorial on running Jupyter Notebook on an Amazon EC2 instance. It is based on a tutorial by Chris Albon, which did not work for me immediately (itself based on a tutorial by Piyush Agarwal). But I tweaked a few things and got it working.

Wall Street never changes, the pockets change, the suckers change, the stocks change, but Wall Street never changes, because human nature never changes. _ Jesse Livermore

About once a year I’ll post the top Twitter accounts to follow. It’s a fun piece of social media analytics, and I’ll try to do it again later this year, after seeing if I can sidestep Twitter’s efforts to cut me off.

We explore the paper “Dynamic Return Dependencies Across Industries: A Machine Learning Approach”, by David Rapach, Jack Strauss, Jun Tu and Guofu Zhou, and then try to improve the results with more sophisticated machine learning approaches.

I suggest a new strategy, R2. Let the Wookiee win._ _ C3PO

There are a number of hard problems in investing, for instance: 1) Finding alpha. 2) Finding clients and assets — especially if you can’t 1) consistently find alpha. 3) Finding an awesome name for your fund. The investing blogosphere is all over the first two. Now, for something completely different, we help you with the last one!

Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamura closely monitors the launch of Bitcoin futures (photo via @vexmark)

Here’s a Sunday rant on guns.

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor. - Albert Einstein

This anti-diversity manifesto has been making the rounds, with calls to avoid “socially engineering” diversity in response to “veiled left ideology”, to “de-moralize diversity”, to “de-emphasize empathy”, to “prioritize intention”, and to “be open about the science of human nature” which is claimed to confirm a lot of right-wing priors and stereotypes.

People sometimes ask me what I think about Universal Basic Income (UBI).

I posted earlier about some of the trends in the financial Twittersphere. It’s been a year since we posted our last list of people to follow on Twitter for financial news. Time for an update!

I was recently listening to Fred Wilson and Howard Lindzon talk about, among others, news sources and curation, which is a topic dear to my heart. (Which I wrote about before here and here).

If we’d been born where they were born and taught what they were taught, we would believe what they believe. _ attributed to Abraham Lincoln. A digressive rant on the rot in the financial Twittersphere in the Trump era.

Belated end-of-year roundup.

A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom. _ Bob Dylan

First come the innovators…Then come the imitators…And then come the idiots — Warren Buffett

Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness. - George Washington.

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken. - Oliver Cromwell