Blowing up – How Nassim Taleb turned the inevitability of disaster into an investment strategy.
“Taleb runs Empirica Capital out of an anonymous concrete office park in the woods on the outskirts of Greenwich, Connecticut…. Empirica follows a very particular investment strategy. It trades options, which is to say that it deals not in stocks and bonds but in the volatility of stocks and bonds… Nassim Taleb and his team […]
Marcellus: Does Spirituality Help Improve Clarity of Thought?
Published on: 11 Jan, 2019 Any activity which entails making a call on the future is as much about managing emotions as it is about rational analysis. Investing therefore is always and everywhere a dance between these two elements – reason & emotion. We find that spirituality (i.e. reducing clutter in our lives, increasing focus […]
Retreat from private infrastructure projects
20 years ago there was lots of discussion in India about how to attract more private sector investment in infrastructure. Then between 2004-11 India saw a boom in private sector investment in infrastructure. For a variety of reasons that did not go down well with the public and with the banking system. So now again, […]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE / MACHINE LEARNING – Powerful Predictors: Diagnosing Cancer in India Using AI
“In India, approximately 74,000 women die from cervical cancer every year, accounting for 1/3rd of the burden of cervical cancer deaths globally. Less than 10,000 pathologists must service a population of 1.3 billion people…Aindra Systems, a tech start-up from India, has developed an innovative workaround. Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to provide point-of-care cervical cancer detection, […]
Climate Change Drives Fish Into New Waters, Remaking an Industry
The fishing grounds are shifting northward as water temperatures rise, forcing crews to retool their boats and rework their businesses. This WSJ article says: “Aboard the Stanley K and the Oracle, two 58-foot vessels, Buck Laukitis and his crews chase halibut across the Bering Sea worth $5 a pound at the docks. As sea temperatures […]
Intellectual humility – the importance of knowing you might be wrong
A paradoxical attempt by Brian Resnick to bat for intellectual humility especially among social scientists backed by research from….social scientists/psychologists. “…We need more intellectual humility for two reasons. One is that our culture promotes and rewards overconfidence and arrogance (think Trump and Theranos, or the advice your career counselor gave you when going into job interviews). […]
Beyond the bottom line: should business put purpose before profit?
A fairly balanced and constructive debate around the need for ‘purposeful capitalism’, that can even carry the most ardent of Friedman’s followers. “Milton Friedman’s argument that for a company to pursue anything other than (legal) profit would be “pure and unadulterated socialism”” effectively underpinned the unbridled rise of capitalism over the last 50yrs. Of late though, criticisms […]
Too rich to jail
Maureen Dowd says that the rise of populist politicians like Trump is due to the failure of the American political system and Barack Obama to punish the Wall Street bankers who wrecked the economy and the lives of millions of people in 2008. She says, “We let the corrupt bankers who ravaged our economy roam free […]
How Competitive Advantage Drives Churn in the Stockmarket
Published on: 4 Jan, 2019 The extent of competitive advantage possessed by a firm can fluctuate as the sector in which the firm operates grows (from niche to nationwide). The aggregation of this phenomenon across the entire stockmarket results in the BSE500 demonstrating twice as much churn as the Sensex. In fact, no other […]
My life as an oracle
An introspective piece by Gideon Rachman, arguably one of the best commentators on geopolitics. The introspection brings about two key aspects which most commentators might relate to – first, how one or two key guiding ideas underpin most of your opinions as a commentator and second, how one tends to find more success in doomsday […]
Wedding excess has reached giddy new heights
John Gapper helps us understand why intelligent, rich people like Isha Ambani and Priyanka Chopra spend so much money on their marriage. For answers he looks at the customs of Native Indian tribes in Canada. These tribes would mark a wedding with something called “Potlatch”. “Their display is reminiscent of potlatch, the traditional ceremony of […]
People who exercise have different proteins moving through their bloodstreams than those who are generally sedentary
We know that people who exercise are healthier and live longer. What we don’t know is why is there a link between exercise and a longer life. “…for the new study, which was published in November in the Journal of Applied Physiology, researchers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, set out to look at various people’s […]
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