Liberty

https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100

Have a good one everyone!

This is cool:

I remember seeing a video of this guy a few months ago being mega-bullish on BTC.. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-22/michael-novogratz-shelves-plans-to-start-crypto-hedge-fund

What's the exchange equivalent of a banana republic? https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/22/coinbase-one-of-the-biggest-bitcoin-marketplaces-says-buying-and-selling-temporarily-disabled-amid-price-rout.html

BTC hit 10,700 a few minutes ago.

https://electrek.co/2017/12/20/usa-cheapest-solar-austin-texas-2-5¢-kwh/

First off, a warning: This isn't about investing. I think there are lessons to be learned from this history that can be applied to investing and thinking in general, but this is on a second level reading. https://www.amazon.ca/Legacy-Ashes-History-Tim-Weiner/dp/0307389006 This book won the Pulitzer prize. Part of what was impressive about it was the depth of research. “The book is based on more than 50,000 documents, primarily from the archives of the CIA itself, and hundreds of interviews with CIA veterans, including ten Directors of Central Intelligence.” Unless you are already super familiar with the agency and it's declassified history, you're bound to learn a bunch of things, as it's very different from the common image that is portrayed in books and movies. I thought a lot in this book was fascinating and shocking. Recommended. I've also just learned that the same author has written a history of the FBI based on recently declassified materials, but I haven't read it yet (h/t Jamie Pastore): https://www.amazon.com/Enemies-History-FBI-Tim-Weiner/dp/0812979230

http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/how-do-machines-learn Good introduction for those not familiar with machine learning/neural networks.

https://towardsdatascience.com/napoleon-was-the-best-general-ever-and-the-math-proves-it-86efed303eeb H/t Tobias Carlisle

This is some Black Mirror shit...

Scary big brother stuff.

http://thereformedbroker.com/2017/12/14/a-twist/

Here's the 30-min video: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2017/12/13/watch-cnbcs-full-interview-with-legendary-investor-stanley-druckenmiller.html

https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Batteries-could-replace-three-California-power-12428238.php https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/battery-storage-is-threatening-natural-gas-peaker-plants

It's been going in and out the past few days. Hopefully they just leave it on in parallel with the new thing, and over time do some maintenance on it to keep it going (HTML5 charts would be the obvious thing to make it more future-proof).

Part 1 of a podcast interview with Diller: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-being-infinite-learner-helped-barry-diller-become-reid-hoffman/

If I have to I'll go to Excel, but I didn't have to so far because I don't do anything that Google Docs can't (couldn't) do. Pretty simple. Different people have different needs. So far I didn't need the bloated thing that is Excel.

My investing journal is in Pages, and I have some stuff in Numbers, but most of my spreadsheets are in Google Docs. I guess if they stop having Google Finance live updating in Google Docs I might switch over entirely to Numbers...

Simplicity + portability + free. It meets my needs. Excel's overkill for what I'm doing.

Thanks, sounds good. Have you found a guide on how to use it in a Google Docs spreadsheet? I've Googled around a bit and couldn't find much... I don't want to do anything too fancy with it, just get some stock prices to auto-update in a Google Sheet to track my portfolio...

Have you thought about using excel with the IB API? What does the IB api provide? It does lots of things. You can even trade from excel. But you can definitely set up stock lists and then pull prices and quotes from IB. That's very easy to do. If you're a coder I'm thinking that you can do many cool things above and beyond that. I have an IB account but I don't pay for the real-time data feeds. Is the API still available, or is it only for paying data customers? Thanks.

And this morning it's back... I don't know what's going on, but there's a possibility that when they turned it off yesterday they got some backlash and now they're looking at their options and turning it off in the meantime. In the event that this is what's going on, if you'd like to improve the odds of Google Finance staying around as a separate site (which are probably slim, but hey, doing nothing isn't helping at all), I suggest using the "send feedback" link at the bottom of Google Search pages and let them know what you think. There's ever only a very tiny fraction of users sending feedback about a specific product, so it can make a difference when you do. It's easier for en engineer to tell a boss "hey, we got huge volume of complaints about this" to then get a change of direction. Long shot, I know.