All Epsilon Theory Content
Everything we have published at Epsilon Theory since 2013, an archive of more than 1,000 evergreen notes.
In today’s episode, it’s all about BITFD and the almost hilarious extremes to which The Long Now has infected our financial world. Don’t forget to…
Some of us are uncomfortable with BITFD, and that’s OK. Small-c conservatives should be uncomfortable. Small-l liberals should be uncomfortable.
They should also get on board.
This is a series about why.
It’s been a full year since I wrote my last Mailbag note, which is kinda pathetic.
Well, better late than never. Reader comments and emails following our publication of Lucifer’s Hammer have been amazing, and it would be a disservice to the Pack if I didn’t collect some of them here. Enjoy!
I’m not saying that we all have to become volatility traders to survive in the market jungle today, any more than we all have to become game theorists to avoid being the sucker at the Fed’s communication policy table.
But if you’re a traditional investor whose sandbox includes big markets like the S&P 500, then you’re only disadvantaging yourself by ignoring this stuff.
We don’t need more minimally viable products.
We need more maximally viable organizations attacking big problems with a tinkerer’s mindset and a capitalist’s goals.
Guest post by Luis Perez-Breva, faculty director at MIT Innovation Teams.
Recent price action in Tesla is the Common Knowledge Game in action.
It is the power of the crowd watching the crowd. It is the power of – not what you think is true, and not what you think the crowd thinks is true – but of what the crowd thinks the crowd thinks is true.
Seeing cartoons made from data doesn’t give us license to ignore the underlying feature of the world being measured – it gives us a duty to cut through the abstractions obscuring that feature of the world.
There’s a comet speeding our way, a comet of endemic urban violence.
And for so many people – especially young men with the voice of Ego now shouting in their heads as the whispers are turned up to 11 by the amps of political party and social media – they think that post-apocalyptic world sounds just dandy.
In a world awash with cheesing, being lawful good doesn’t mean being lawful stupid.
But for God’s sake, don’t lose your soul in the process.
Doug Parker, American Airlines CEO and Chairman of the Board, wrote a letter to his employees today that pretty much defines high-functioning sociopathy.
I’m going to reprint excerpts from that letter – which is couched in the saccharine vocabulary of modern team-speak, but is in truth a shakedown letter to employees and a ransom note to the US government – and then I’m going to tell you a few things about Doug.
Citizens must be capable of holding multiple ideas in their heads at once.
We can believe that the aims and intents of political powers are not equal while also focusing explicitly on the misuse of the tools of Narrative to manipulative the populace by BOTH.
More than any other company, Facebook is undermining our democracy and our most integral political rights.
More than any other company, Facebook has bought and paid for political cover at the highest levels of American, Indian and European government, political cover that prevents any of the actions we might take as a society to rid ourselves of this cancer.
Facebook delenda est.
There are many institutional gatekeepers. There are many powerful guilds and socially embedded practices that seek to limit our voices and ideas. Are academic journals the worst of these? Not by a long shot. But they ARE one of these.
This is how we change the world. This is how we unleash our voices and ideas. Not by attacking these institutional gatekeepers from the top-down with yet another institutional gatekeeper, but by making the institutional gatekeeper irrelevant through our bottom-up, decentralized actions.
Hoffstein, Faber and Braun construct long-only indices that provide exposures to popular U.S. equity factors (value, size, momentum, quality, and low volatility) and vary their rebalance schedules to isolate the effects of “rebalance timing luck.”
Their results suggest substantial problems for analyzing any investment when the strategy, its peer group, or its benchmark is susceptible to performance impacts driven by the choice of rebalance schedule.
In the age of capital markets as carny show, we are told by barkers like Cramer that this is what a smart investor or management team does … they should look to the grift du jour for their edge.
No, I don’t think there’s a bubble. No, I don’t think a crash is coming. But when Mark Cuban says this reminds him of 1999 and 2000, he’s right.
And the reason worries me more than either of those things.
I don’t think I have the words to communicate just how screwed up our PPE distribution system is in this country, or what a profound betrayal it is for our government to support this perverse system of personal greed and corporate ambivalence in exchange for campaign soundbites and photo ops.
But I’m gonna try.
It’s the August 11th…I mean, August 13th edition of Office Hours, an interactive livestream in which Ben and Rusty discuss all things narrative in the world today.
There is nothing wrong with wanting the US to bring back certain critical manufacturing industries to its shores.
But don’t buy the narrative that a crazy scheme like the Kodak grift is the only way to make it happen.
Is murder bad? Hmm, I dunno. What are the chances I will be caught and what price will I pay if that happens? If the odds are high enough and the price steep enough, then yeah, I guess THAT would be bad. But the act of murder itself? I mean, I’m sure whoever I murdered – if I were to murder someone, that is, because I really don’t think you can prove that I did – was getting in the way of something that was very important to me. When you really think about it, they were doing the bad thing! Why do you ask?
Welcome to the world of commodity trade finance.