New Jersey has launched an updated Energy Master Plan targeting 100% clean electricity by 2035 and significant reductions in climate pollution, building on previous initiatives.
I'm a trader who runs a couple of profitable strategies. You can generate alpha by implementing quantitative (or discretionary) strategies as long as you adhere to the basic principles of profitable trading with a strong emphasis on risk management. There are a million possible trading strategies, which of these will suit your personality/risk tolerance/system design is a matter of personal choice.
Sure. A trade can be decomposed into entry and exit criteria.
Only trade when you have an edge, i.e your model suggests that there is a higher probability of an outcome in your favor rather than a pure coin toss - either in entry or in exit.
Even coin toss entries can make money if you have an edge in exits and vice versa.
All in all, you can be right less than 50% of the time per trade, and still have alpha if your winning trade is 2 times your losing trade. Standard expected value stuff. Heck, I know traders who bat 30 or 35% and make colossal amounts of dollars.
I think he is referring to the start up he was working for.
>During my work on the start-up, I developed techniques that allow me to collect and cross-reference a lot of personal data including data from LinkedIn.
> MBA ideas of an economic moat - lock-in, stickiness, etc - are "dark patterns".
Dramatic statement. I am an SWE and an MBA. There are merits to thinking about every aspect of the business. Tech/Product is just one - an important one in a Saas company, but still just one.
> But there are "light patterns": you can stay ahead in a technological race if you keep running;
This is another way of saying "build it and they will come". You have to combine good business/economic sense with great products.
Apple didn't just get to be Apple by staying ahead in a technological race. Arguably, they are behind a lot of other phone makers in specs. But they have a lot of people thinking about ecosystems, lock-in, marketing and other "MBA" concepts.
> There are merits to thinking about every aspect of the business.
This isn't a refutation of the parent - all you've said is that sometimes those dark patterns are worth exploiting. I'm rarely one for defending an absolute, so I think it would be far more interesting to say why it is worth using a 'dark pattern'. So far, it just feels like you're deflecting through masking the issue.
Just the deflationary nature of a currency isn't enough to destabilize cycles. Cycles run on credit-worthiness, or how likely is someone to return x% return in the future on an investment made today.
Compared to the Fed, which makes arbitrary (non-cyclical) adjustments to the "cost of money", Bitcoin's more predictable deflationary attributes might lead to more predictability in financial cycles.
This is of course, assuming the hundreds of other problems with Bitcoin as a currency, or credit-instrument have been solved.
> Just the deflationary nature of a currency isn't enough to destabilize cycles.
No need for cycles: a deflationary currency means that you're better off holding it than investing it.
This is disastrous for the economy.
> Compared to the Fed, which makes arbitrary (non-cyclical) adjustments to the "cost of money", Bitcoin's more predictable deflationary attributes might lead to more predictability in financial cycles.
Quite the opposite. The money supply wouldn't adapt dynamically to the demand for money, leading to harsher crises.
This is FUD. The US experienced deflation through much of the 19th century, yet saw higher growth rates then than in the 20th century. For instance, from
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040715/were-there-a... (don't have time to find a more formal source): "The period between 1873 and 1879 saw prices drop by nearly 3% per year, yet real national product growth was almost 7% during the same time." And overall "the price level (the average of current prices across the entire spectrum of goods and services produced in the economy) was actually 50% higher in 1800 than it was in 1900." So clearly it's possible to have strong economic growth during deflationary times.
So in some segment of the 1800s economic growth was larger than deflationary pressures which might have been linked to increasing economic efficiency... Seems pretty narrow.
Unfortunately I don't see how bitcoin would be likely to maintain a deflationary rate anywhere near balanced with economic growth if it were used as a primary currency considering its hard capped at 21 million BTC, and an unknown number of coins are pretty much permanently lost. I think it'd have an effect of making primary interest rates have to exceed the rate of Bitcoin's deflation which sounds like a death spiral to me.
> a deflationary currency means that you're better off holding it than investing it.
It is ridiculous to assume that any artificially designed deflationary digital asset will produce long term returns greater than an index like SPY, which is intrinsically tied to human productivity in the economy.
An average, semi-rational investor will always have the incentive to lend to a credit worthy person/business/asset, regardless of how much artificial deflation you can induce in your asset.
I think the analogy with FB might be interesting, but intrinsically inaccurate.
The value people get from FB is related to the value of other people being on the network, but there is an intrinsic value drived from the different use cases on the platform - photos, messaging, likes, fomo and what not. Which has directly been monetized using advertising.
The value you get from other people using Bitcoin is that the price goes up, without any other intrinsic value aside from "Maybe my investment grows" - in effect following the 'greater fool' theory (Buffett), or the 'castle in the air' theory (Malkiel et al).
The "currency" use-case has not proliferated or reached adoption at a scale (by any measure) that would make it a worthy medium of exchange, which fundamentally is the definition of a currency.
