cameronfen

What value does this add? Unless you have skin in the game this type of post spams the board that includes incredible analysis by Midas, Luke, Chris, etc. No disrespect, but 4th quarter dunking adds nothing to the group. What? Are only bulls allowed to post here? I was clear about the fact that I don’t know anything, but had an opinion on politics. I thought that acknowledgement would be a positive seeing as the goal is to make money and I’m revealing what you should trust (and not trust) me on. I can see how this post can seem like taunting if everyone recognized that Trump is likely not going to do anything, but the post right before mine was someone tweeting about how something would happen in the next 14 days. I’m not trying to dunk on anyone, I just follow this thread occasionally and can’t understand why people are still so optimistic after all this. I’m trying to add some information so we can all make money which was why I disclosed that I didn’t understand the stock situation so well. In fact I was even long the prefs for some time so it’s not like I have a bias opposed to the prefs paying out. You don’t have to listen to me, I’m just trying to push back on, in my opinion, unfounded optimism based on past political events and save everyone some money. I didn’t understand the need from you and SnarkyPuppy for the frankly ridiculously defensive responses.

I don’t really follow FNMA and FMCC, but with the attempted coup/riots in the Capitol building, I doubt SM or anyone else in the Trump administration would do anything policy-wise to make the news. Just my thought, I could be wrong.

I'm about 15-20%. Don't know exactly as I have a few special situations that fidelity still counts as a loss until they pay out. Altogether a good year. I'm too busy to check my portfolio too often so I can't do all the trading stuff, special situations that require paying attention like what @gregmal, @writser etc. suggest. I've tried and usually I get too busy to pay attention so I end up losing money because I forget some deadline or don't act on some news :-X . Alternatively you can get higher returns by buying the bubble. Although I buy quite a bit of tech, I'm not discussing that...

Yea but theoretically you you can always build more vertical which we clearly aren't close to saturatating. The question of why this doesn't result in a stable equilibrium where prices don't seem to ever go down, I don't know.

Scott Sumner = NGDP I know that much :). Although it’s that’s definitely not totally orthodox in economics. Can you tell I don’t know what I’m talking about...

I’m with you muscleman and I’m a PhD student in economics. For what it’s worth I think Jim is expressing the conventional agreed upon wisdom. Is it right? I don’t know as this isn’t my thing.

So just looking at Twitter, I don’t think the protein folding problem is solved as a lot of the hyperbole is due to the good marketing teams at google. Could this win a Nobel prize? Potentially. However it didn’t outperformamong all the CASP subcategories (according to a Twitter person) so other models which are still mediocre outperformed in some cases. As far as this, afaik if you have a folded protein finding protein protein interaction is easier because it’s more of a geometric problem rather than a physics thermodynamics energy problem. If you know protein A binds with something and you can protein fold, you just build peptide chains until you get a peptide chain that looks like the shape of A in the activation site. We often know the shape of A and what A binds to so afaik this stuff is hugely useful in designing molecules. Again keep in mind, alphafold is trained on the shape of protein in biological systems, so even if they would fold differently in different systems, how they fold in biological systems are what medical researchers care about. Not an expert here but this is what I gathered from reading about it.

I don't know the company well, but, having worked as a tech person in an insurance-related company, insurers often don't seem to have the culture to adopt market-changing technological solutions. I agree that something like this that seems to be the obvious strategy for tradition insurers. But it isn't necessarily something that those traditional insurers can actually execute. Traditional insurances had AI/ML for decades. They called it statistics. I haven't seen anything revolutionary (e.g., Tesla was the only EV for a while) out of Lemonade and they aren't price competitive if I have a car + rent/own. Throw in challenges with renters in big cities, at minimum there will be turbulence in the next few quarters as older policies start to roll off. Just my 2 cents and I was wrong on LMND stock before. I’m not really interested in Lemonade, but fairly interested in AI. I agree that traditional ML is basically rebranded statistics. All the methods from KNN to kernel SVM and even maybe XGBoost could be found in Elements of Statistical Learning or some updated similar text. However, I think AI really evokes deep learning. I don’t know if lemonade uses NLP, computer vision or Reinforcement Learning or even more exotic things like Graph Neural Networks—I kind of doubt they do very much (even though they could benefit from all the above except maybe RL because control theory techniques are still often better irl) and I bet much of what they say is marketing. But there has been a bit of a divergence between AI and statistics in the last 8 years and basically it’s been deep learning. Statisticians use deep learning sometimes, but not to the extent that it’s used in AI which is almost in entirety and almost all the cutting edge research here is done by CS people and not statisticians. Just my 2 cents.

AFAIK, the cloud gaming is not only about computing, but is also has a different revenue model. You pay $20 a month for example and can play any game on their servers. This revenue model has been around for ages. Stadia Pro does not allow to play "any game on their servers". It allows you to play a selection of games. Xbox Games With Gold, Xbox Game Pass, Playstation Now, EA Access all offer the same. With differing selection of games of course. I’ve never used Stadia or any of these, but I assumed any game they have a license for you can play. Can you also install games you own on the cloud? It would make sense. Idk maybe this won’t take off I’m mainly thinking out loud on this thread, but at some point if these becomes the dominant way to play video games, it seems to me to be a way to eat into margins. I don’t think stadia stealing share is my main issue as I assume all the video game makers see what Netflix is doing to traditional media companies, but being forced to adopt this buffet style subscription model, would be problematic.

AFAIK, the cloud gaming is not only about computing, but is also has a different revenue model. You pay $20 a month for example and can play any game on their servers.

I saw the second one on his blog, but not the first. Thanks. Reading the first article intrigued me because he sees so much potential in cloud based gaming, but he doesn’t discuss any of the threat’s even if to just debunk them. He does make a good case that video gaming hasn’t saturated the market. But thinking about the downside, after you include hardware costs I think it’s easy to make an argument that margins will likely be lower at 20 a month, versus your own computer and 60 dollars a game for people that play enough to sign up for stadia etc. On AWS, a single GPUs costs 75 to 90 cents an hour. Not hard to see most gamers playing 20 to 30 hours a month with Stadia, which doesn’t leave any margin even for the content producers. But as Castanza pointed out the latency issue is also still a problem. Regardless it was interesting analysis as to be expected from Ball. Thanks for posting this!

Input latency is a big issue that has not been solved yet. Anything over 60ms basically renders any competitive game useless. Not saying they wont figure it out, but you're going to have a hard time getting people to switch from physical local hardware allowing them to play games in 4k to a cloud based system when you're hearing things like "Stadia works better on a smaller screen." edit: This is especially important to streamers. In competitive gaming you have to have basically zero latency to be "good." Well being good affects your social status. Ninja would not be Ninja if he was playing it on Stadia (not actually available on Stadia). Thanks ya that’s something I didn’t know.

Just spitballing, but I wonder if what Netflix and the like is currently doing to media especially in the area of lowering ARPUs, Stadia and other subscription cloud gaming services will do to these big title video game titles. I have been somewhat negative on video game companies for some time (and wrong although not short), I don't see why something like Stadia doesn't become the default way to play video games and how big titles escape being goods on a platform. As far as Netflix goes, it was the content companies that lost out allowing Netflix to do what they did, and even when they entered in the SVOD players, the ARPU that business generates is significantly less (although for many TV companies they have the benefit of globally exporting the content with SVOD, something that video game makers already do). Games with monthly subscriptions like MMOs probably escape this as you can't access with another platform (but how many games other than WoW is that?), as do freemium model games. However big titles like Starcraft or COD don't. I think this takes 5+ years to happen at least, but you look at all the media companies and they trading at 5x FCF because of SVOD. I don't plan on being long or short so I don't really care investment-wise, but the thought occurred to me so I thought I'd bring it up.

One month after Brexit, would you expect GBP to continue trading at a premium to the Euro?, as it does now, Or is it more likely that GBP trades at a discount to the Euro? - to promote badly needed trade, and the jobs that go with them. The current premium is approximately 9%. If it swings to an equal but opposite discount, it implies an 18% devaluation in GBP Devaluations typically occur over time, the populace often doesn't realize the significance, and 18% is relatively mild. If you have the ability, they should be taken advantage of. About once/decade the CAD/US FX rate becomes < 1.0000, versus the more 'normal' 1.3200 -1.3500 range; routine periodic trade based appreciation/devaluation of roughly 32-35%. Just a different POV. SD I don’t think premium or discount is the right thing to look at. What you really want is PPP adjusted premium or discount. For example I can always add or subtract 3 zeros on or off the British Pound and change UK prices by the same amount and nothing would change but the UK/Euro would swing to a premium or discount. Not sure what your analysis would be if you adjusted for PPP though...

Using Renessainces 13-f to explain what they are doing has limited value. They hold probably are running their algorithm on every liquid stock in the market and hold for a couple days before selling. To some extent it just so happened those stocks had higher positioning due to favorable momentum factors.

I don’t think it’s AI driving down value investor returns. A majority of AI investing is trend following. That’s basically momentum investing and swing trading on a computer ie mostly short term growth investing. It could be interest rates and it could be as the market has gotten more liquid people are better at providing correct valuations on value stocks than growth stocks.

Sure that could have been the stated reason, but I think they could have raised the ceiling if they wanted to. IMO and maybe it’s not valid for Fannie Mae, but for the US government to nationalize a business is basically a third rail in 2007. That’s likely why they didn’t bother. But if any private entity would have bailed out banks or Fannie Mae they would have required share holder approval and/or go through a bankruptcy process where bond holders, perf holders and equity would have had some say in the outcome. Where you alive during the Great Recession? (Jk) Bondholders would have accepted massive haircuts would have happily accepted a expedited bankruptcy process and equity holders would surely have no say (and wiped clean) in the bankruptcy of banks nor Fannie and Freddie. No way anyone would have argued with a white knight as people thought like the world was ending. Instead bondholders were made whole and equity holders still maintained some ownership share.

my lord, what were the ethical issues? I talked about this on the Fannie Mae thread before but everyone yelled at me lol, but I’ll try again. I see the trade an opportunistic way for a bunch of hedge funds to steal money from US taxpayers. While investors may or may not have the letter of the law on there side, I see this as clearly violating the spirit of the law. Government bailed out the two companies when no one else would. When you bail out a company that no one else wants to bail out you own the company and even if you make a profit, it’s still your company. In fact if we made it so the government couldn’t make a profit on the companies it was forced to nationalize that seems like a huge kneecapping of the federal government especially after this action helped save a lot of wall street’s ass. Again the funds that are investing in Fannie Mae may not be the same wall street people, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when the government saves your ass in the Great Recession and then you turn around and try to extract as much money from the government as possible. I suppose on some level this is consistent with what I wrote above - people who have only spent maybe 1-2 hours on this come away significantly misinformed. You must not be invested in any of the large banks for similar reasons? And you must also feel that all of the large bank shareholders should be wiped today, despite paying back the governments loan including interest? Yes that has been a consideration. The idea is not so much that they paid back the loan, insomuch as if any private entity bailed out the banks or Fannie Mae they would have taken ownership of the company outright, but because it was the government, shareholders got a better deal because a) Wall Street is a rich constituent for pols, b.) nationalization of some industry would have made free market types freak out for no reason. The banks it’s not as bad, because you don’t have the active biting the hand that feeds you for your own profit. Fannie Mae investments is more like buying stock in like Hank Greenberg which would be worse than buying BAC. Edits: I guess I should enphasize, because it was the government they granted old preferred holders and shareholders some protection when they didn’t need to. Like I said any private entity would have had no competition if they wanted to bail out Fannie and Freddie and would have owned the company outright. And then you take advantage of the protection government offers you when it really didn’t have to to profit at its expense. In my mind it’s Wall Street at its worse. Notice my argument is not legal in any way so citing what the contract states would not change my view. If you could find somewhere that the government signed the contract and negotiated as tough as a private company and not a entity which is trying to win an election, and even through fierce negotiation would have granted former holders those rights, I could be convinced. But if you say, the contract says this and the government is violating that, I’m just going to respond with of course the government gave existing shareholders some protections, they didn’t have to but if they didn’t the same Wall Street conservatives would flood the airwaves saying the government is nationalizing businesses and meddling with free markets. I would also refer you to the Estate of Lehman vs Barclays case.

Ya not saying I know much about the stock but those were my impressions reading the news. The position in it was a starter to incentivize diligence.

my lord, what were the ethical issues? I talked about this on the Fannie Mae thread before but everyone yelled at me lol, but I’ll try again. I see the trade an opportunistic way for a bunch of hedge funds to steal money from US taxpayers. While investors may or may not have the letter of the law on there side, I see this as clearly violating the spirit of the law. Government bailed out the two companies when no one else would. When you bail out a company that no one else wants to bail out you own the company and even if you make a profit, it’s still your company. In fact if we made it so the government couldn’t make a profit on the companies it was forced to nationalize that seems like a huge kneecapping of the federal government especially after this action helped save a lot of wall street’s ass. Again the funds that are investing in Fannie Mae may not be the same wall street people, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth when the government saves your ass in the Great Recession and then you turn around and try to extract as much money from the government as possible.

Ya I had some ethical issues with investing in it. But I ultimately made the plunge some time ago. However I just think there are so many other people that are better at handicapping legal and political ramifications, I felt like even if I felt strongly that it was undervalued, if anything changes, I would likely be the patsy at the table. So I ultimately exited with no real gain/loss.

No I wasn’t criticizing the thread, just thought it was interesting there were some people that just came to CoBF to post there and people like me who after a brief dalliance don’t look at that thread at all.

His research at least as of 2019 is predominately neural network based. Transformers, LSTMs with attention that like what is hot now and what was hot 3 years ago in language models with neural networks. He has some other stuff but I am sure his work is mainly Neural Network based. I bet by now there is no way Rentech are not using transformers to forecast these time series based on his expertise and what works. It is likely he ran a giant transformer with like maybe 1billion+ parameters on the time series of every single financial asset and with maybe slight modification is running the same transformer to predict movement in those given assets. If I had to guess you can copy the structure of the largest transformer, megaton-ln, from here: https://blog.exxactcorp.com/megatron-lm-unleashed-nvidias-transformer-megatraon-lm-is-the-nlp-model-ever-trained/ , steal the transformer base architecture from here: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensor2tensor and with little coding knowledge but 2 or 3 million dollars to spend on AWS you can likely replicate 50% of there returns just by training it on every possible asset class time series. My guess is that’s the core of the model and all the ml smarts in the world gets only somewhat marginal improvements from there. Oh interesting. Strange both are in NLP. Also maybe should have checked because I was surprised a 70 year old is both recently a CEO as well as publishing papers as well as running a Koch style political funding arm. Either way before I think 90% prob base model is Transformer. Now probably 80%. None of his stuff has anything to do with neural networks from a cursory look, which is unsurprising as ANN only got hot 2015. Still, I’d be surprised if anything could outperform a core transformer model (megatron-ln) trained on basically every asset time series.

His research at least as of 2019 is predominately neural network based. Transformers, LSTMs with attention that like what is hot now and what was hot 3 years ago in language models with neural networks. He has some other stuff but I am sure his work is mainly Neural Network based. I bet by now there is no way Rentech are not using transformers to forecast these time series based on his expertise and what works. It is likely he ran a giant transformer with like maybe 1billion+ parameters on the time series of every single financial asset and with maybe slight modification is running the same transformer to predict movement in those given assets. If I had to guess you can copy the structure of the largest transformer, megaton-ln, from here: https://blog.exxactcorp.com/megatron-lm-unleashed-nvidias-transformer-megatraon-lm-is-the-nlp-model-ever-trained/ , steal the transformer base architecture from here: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensor2tensor and with little coding knowledge but 2 or 3 million dollars to spend on AWS you can likely replicate 50% of there returns just by training it on every possible asset class time series. My guess is that’s the core of the model and all the ml smarts in the world gets only somewhat marginal improvements from there.

There is the regular CoBF forum with investment ideas, strategy and even politics, and then there is the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac 10 bagger thread and I think most people keep to either the Fannie thread or the Rest of CoBF and don’t really co-mingle. Sorry this is spam, but just my observation.