There are many ways that one can make money on the market, but there are several systematic ways have been exploited. By systematic, I mean there is no risk. Arbitrage opportunity is just one example.

As the black-box algorithm, neural networks, taking over image and natural language processing, the hype of near-human level AI is unprecedented. Driveless car, human-level chat robot, show suddenly the future of human history is approaching at a phenomenal speed. All the old school modeling techniques, such as mathematics and statistics are dead. Is it the end of modeling? Is it the end of human intellegence? As I study more and more about neural networks, especially through two projects Kaggle ARC and experiment of transformer for time series, it becomes clear to me that the hype is hoping too much ‘unrealistic fantasy’. Here are some of the reasons I learned from an experiment.

Taleb has some interesting ideas I strongly agree but I am definitely not a fun of his books which usually lack simplicity and clarity. One concern he raised is about concentration of business.

If westerner have free mind, then ads would not make sense to exist since ads are constantly intruding our mind and make money by constructing illusion in our head. Do you upgrade your electronics because you need to? Do you visit Disney world because you need to?

There is a popular trend of building machine learning teams in financial firms recently. The hope that the prosperity in image recognition community can be transplanted to financial industry by applying deep learning is too good to be true.

Tools developed in the financial industry are just approximations of the market. Some are useful approximations, such as Black-Scholes model, some are not.

When you look at the trade war between U.S. and the rest of the world, especially China, the most important question is how it is going to be resolved.

As current economic growth slowing down, we need to understand why this is happening and what are the causes.