“The future ain’t what it used to be.” –Yogi Berra Almost surely (“a.s.”), you have heard of, or even watched, the tv-series Breaking Bad (BB). Almost as surely (“in probability”), you know many matters do not always go the way you expect. Laws matter in BB, as they do in quantitative trading, too: with […]
Read more "Better Call SLLN: Black Matter Lives"“If you know the enemy and yourself, you will win a hundred battles out of a hundred.” 知己知彼,百战百胜 –Sun Tzu In Breaking Bad (BB), the highly acclaimed 5-season-long tv-series with IMDB rating of 9.4, Heisenberg, the series’ main character, run methamphetamine laboratories that produced “blue” of exquisite 97 % purity leaving their dope […]
Read more "Beaten by a Machine: But Revenge is Human"Introduction. Welcome to Part IV of my (that is, 7/.V) “In the Hands of a Few”(ITHOAF) article series. Here I show how we get “fooled by randomness” – with a slight abuse of Nassim N. Taleb’s terminology. If you search the Internet for “4,448,419” you will find the U.S. patent “Electronic Gaming Device Utilizing a Random Number Generator for Selecting the […]
Read more "Distributed Slot Machines: Control of Ware in the Hands of a Few"Introduction. This is Part III in my (7/.V) article series “In the Hands of a Few” (ITHOAF) with a touch of Tokyo Drift of the action movie series “The Fast and The Furious” (F&F). Too much drift can be deadly: Saleen Automotive Inc. – an American manufacturer of specialty high-performance sports cars with the slogan “Power in the Hands of a Few” – […]
Read more "2 Fast 2 Furious Need 4 Speed (High-Frequency Trading) Antidote"Introduction. This article is essentially the second chapter in the series “In the Hands of a Few.” It is recommended, but not mandatory, to have first read the chapter on “Big Data Brother” to appreciate the terminology and examples. I also share some terminology with the previous blog post by 8RD+ (@ http://versustakes.co) although my topic is much different from it. And […]
Read more "Imperialistic Democracy of Bitcoin: Power of Money in the Hands of a Few"It has been a good while since my last post. The time is ripe for something a bit different. Having worked in things related to automated and/or high-frequency trading for a number of lucky years (7+), the essay below reflects ideas that are long overdue from my perspective; “nothing is exactly as it seems and reality is hidden […]
Read more "Big Data Brother: Power of Trading in the Hands of a Few"In “The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean,” author Susan Casey describes the who’s and why’s of surfing tsunami-size waves. These killer waves have become more frequent and they hit with more punch than registered before. They do not only attract big-wave surfers, such as Laird Hamilton, or wannabe surfers […]
Read more "In the rougher seas of water: Hamilton, Hamilton, and… Hamilton."This unadulterated episode of 8RD+ Versustakes features the Dutch-based EUR 53.3 billion revenue conglomerate Unilever in the world of FATTY ACIDS. As a theoretical framework we are probing the subjects of asymmetric information, impression management, planned obsolescence, and of course my favorite term FRAGILITY. In laymen terms, we are talking about who controls the markets […]
Read more "Big Fat Unilever and the Diet Heart Hypothesis"The time is due for another 8RD+ lecture, and of course FRAGILITY is one of the topics here. But more than anything, I am trying to unveil the secrets of the forgotten links between BEVERAGE industry, SUGAR industry, PLASTIC industry, and PETROLEUM industry. Companies like DuPont (NYSE: DD) and Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO) have both their […]
Read more "Will DuPont Change the Monkey Business in the Beverage Business?"This time is different – this is a start that the reader might think Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff could begin with – and yes, this time the reader really faces a new writer instead of the Ultra High-Frequency Trading oriented academic behind the pen name 7/.V. In due arithmetic progression, let’s call me 8RD+, […]
Read more "Rock Steady but Fragile: Will Biohacking Sting Big Pharma to Death?"
2 AUTHORS VERSUS 1 STAKE 