Aceticon

Yeah, Gold doesn't go up, rather it's currencies that go down in value so you need more tokens of a currency to buy the same amount of Gold.

It's mainly a protection against large economic upheaval, which is why I called it a "savings protection strategy". Gold bought at the 1980 peak (the worst possible point since the end of the Gold Standard) is right now worth 8x more nominally in USD, though only about 2x if you discount inflation (as 1$ from 1980 is $3.93 in today's money).

I suspect that what you thing is "long term" is not the same as what I think as "long term".

More broadly, Gold's long term ROI depends on which currency you're comparing it with - it tends to be amazing in currencies like the Rupee because India's policies are shit and the currency devaluates a lot, less so in currencies like the US Dollar or the Deutsche Mark/Euro. This is why it tends to be a traditional strategy in poorer countries which traditionally had more unstable economies, like India and China.

I myself bough gold near the local maximum in 2012 only to see its value stagnate for almost a decade (see graphic), so I just sat on it and now it's worth almost 4.5x as much in nominal terms in the currency I bought it with (British Pounds) because, IMHO, the structural problems of the Economy and Financial system that led to the 2008 Crash were never actually solved by Central Banks and Governments in the West, plus there are a whole lot of related Social and Societal problems making the societies themselves less stable (which is why, Britain had Brexit and the US has Trump).

Gold is a punt on the instability of the current Economic and Financial structures in the West and on the ineptitude and even corruption of its politicians, as well as the expected upheavals from the transition from the Era Of America to the Era Of China, and it's one I'm doing with an horizon of decades.

It can easilly be beaten by active trading strategies, but so far for me has worked fine as just a way to park my savings, kinda like in the old days - from the 40s to to maybe the 80s - buying stocks from large well established companies (say, GE) and getting a stead income from it in the form of dividends was a good way to park savings.

Personally I went into Gold for long term ROI (though that's pretty much a bet on in the long term there being crisis with the currencies themselves) since even ETFs and other spread investment stock strategies are still affected by Market manias and their aftermaths which can be triggered by HFTs (which at times create positive-feedback loops that turn into market runs).

That said, I was in the Industries that got hit hardest in the latest 2 major crashes (Tech in 2000, Finance in 2008) - to the point of being with Lehman Brothers in 2008 when they went bankrupt - as well as in Britain when they voted to Brexit (which tanked the pound, something which, by the way, this strategy protected me against), plus being in the Finance Industry is a bit like working in a sausage-making factory (once you see how sausages are made, you never want to eat one again) so I have a good excuse for having a "trust nothing" ultra-conservative savings protection strategy 🤪

Makes sense.

I left the Finance Industry at about the time when ML in machine trading was just starting to be thought about and never got involved in it (or even Machine Trading) so I wasn't sure it was happening, but knowing what I know of the industry it makes total sense that they would at least try it out since they have tons of in-house developers and can afford to pay a lot for domain-relavant expertise.

PS: Also for example things like Neural Networks have been in used since the 90s in other domains and Finance seems to take around a decade or decade and a half to catch up to Tech in terms of Software.

Yeah, thanks for pointing that out.

I kind approached it in another post I made here about this when I mentioned that "all the human perceived patterns have already been spotted and arbitraged away" as part of explaining why NNs would end up with convoluted opaque strategies, but only thought about "and existing NNs operating on the Market probably do the same for NN-level strategies" without actually writing it.

By the way, my post isn't meant to support people making NNs to trade, it's just a bit of blue sky thinking from somebody with some expertise in both worlds and barely begins to dig into the problems of it, thus not covering things - such as you pointed out - like how safe and reliable market strategies (human-powered or NN-powered) sooner or later get arbitraged away.

Fuck, maybe they went down in quality again 😬

In my own experience, the original QCs were great tech for the time, the QC 2.5 (or maybe I had a QC 2?) had issues and lasted much less and then the QC 3.5 were again great (the battery lasts way longer, build quality is nice and the user interface is decent with no such problems as your reported "easy to switch off" button).

Also I never used the manufacturer's app, and it's not really needed even with with the wireless 3.5 model (I don't even know if there's a mfg app for those), certainly not with the previous ones which are wired.

(As a general rule I avoid mfg apps since they're almost always overbloated shit and instead always chose devices which do not require an app).

The QC 3.5 was launched almost a decade ago, so plenty of time for later models to have been enshittified.

Institutional Investors (such as Pension Funds) and Retail are the ones getting properly fleeced in present day markets.

Retail might have started to get wise on it (frankly I don't know for sure if that's the case, as Retail tend to be either naive amateurs or deluded fools, so I'm just trusting what you said on this), but when it comes to Pension Funds people only figure out they've been fucked decades later when they try and cash their pensions and it's a lot more difficult to tease away how it happened when all the money is pretty much in an investment black-box than it is from watching a handful of stocks and ETFs one has invested directly in.

You don’t need an advanced AI for this. You just need to be able to see orders and make trades faster than anyone else in the market.

Which they do by literally having their server machines physically in the same building as the Exchanges.

The system is rigged and has been rigged like this (not counting all the other ways it's rigged, such as the tons of insider trading) for over 2 decades.

PS: The book "Flash Boys" is a great read about HFT.

Even then, and as I wrote in another post, a custom trading NN might be working a strategy which is fine under normal market conditions whilst leading to massive losses if those conditions change (i.e. "picking nickels in front of a steamroller") and because of the black-box nature of how Neural Networks work and their tendency to end up with the outputs being very convoluted derivations of the inputs (I expect even more so in Markets, were the obvious strategies that humans can easilly spot have long been arbitraged away, so any patterns such an NN spots during training will be so convoluted as to not be detectable by most humans), nobody will spot the risky nature of that strategy until getting splattered.

Neural Networks working in predicting market movements are, unlike a predictive text keyboard or even an automated train driver, not operating in a straightforward mainly non-adversarial enviroment.

In all fairness, it would be some kind of custom Neural Network designed to try and predict market movements (having been trained with past market data as well as things like counts of specific words in news articles and social media posts within a certain time frame) rather than an LLM.

Neural Networks are pretty good at spotting patterns in masses of data which people can't easilly spot.

Of course, there must be a pattern there which doesn't change much over time of certain things happening with more probability after certain other combinations of things, for it to actually beat the market, plus it also massivelly depends on the inputs it's formatted to take (which a human is deciding rather than the NN itself, though maybe the technique used in LLMs of having huge dimensionality in terms of inputs and internal layers might work well there so that it can take "everything but the kitchen sink" as inputs).

And then, there is of course the "small" risk that it might work fine for months/years under normal market conditions at doing what is essentially "picking nickles in front of a steamroller" - i.e. making low value gains in a nice reliable away for as long as normal market conditions are happening, but when conditions change getting totally splattered - whilst because of the whole black-box nature of NNs the humans don't recognize the convoluted technique it has converge to use through training, as that kind of risky strategy.

That said, unlike an LLM at least a custom NN wouldn't come up with a "you're so right" excuse when the human tells it of the massive losses it incurred.

This is the American version of Kremlinology: just like then all manner of non-political actions of members of the Soviet elites were studied to try to predict the direction of the Soviet Union, now all manner of non-political actions of members of the American elites are studied to try to predict the direction of the United States.

The reason for that kind of thing is that in systems were almost all of the real thinking, motivations and even politically revelevant actions of the elites controlling those nations are hidden or disguised, the only way to try and deduce what's going on is to look at those things which by need or because they're deemed to unimportant aren't hidden or disguised.

Peter Tiel's bulk stock sales and purchases are one of such non-political data points that might be important in predicting the short- and mid-term future of the US, at least Economically, which in turn has Political implications and more broadly for the future of American and Americans.

Sadly what American elites do in the Stockmarkets tells us a lot more about were they see the country going to than what they say, which itself already tells us way more than what Politicians say.

This is totally different from my experience.

I use headphones, which cover the full ear so I don't get any "tired ears" from those. Maybe you're using a totally different model (no idea if BOSE have earphones and if they're any good - I avoid any earphones exactly because of getting "tired ears" with them).

If you're using headphones, maybe you have the QC 3 (which are widelly seen as shit)?!

I have had over the years the original QC, QC 2.5 and QC 3.5 and still use the QC and QC 3.5 with none of those problems (funnilly enough, the oldest, an original QC, uses a single removable AAA battery, and I use rechargeable ones and even that will last around 3 - 4 days, whilst the built-in LiPo in the QC 3.5 lasts even more than that when using bluetooth, and even more when using an audio wire).

My own experience of being, within a large transnational company, technical lead of a small team based in India for a cross-border software development project, is that their own management structures over there were spectacularly incompetent (and I come from a country - Portugal - were management practices are, IMHO, shit compared to the rest of Europe).

Amongst other things, they still had ancient management practices such as "managers must always earn more than technical personnel" which meant that even a junior manager earned more than a senior developer, in turn directly leading to bright young developers moving to management (were they were invariably shit) within maybe 5 years purelly because it was the only way to earn more money, so as a result the broader team (so, not just my project) there had no good senior developers - it was either "senior" in the sense of lots of years working there rather than senior-level expertise or a handful of junior and mid-level devs who were good at that level and could turn into competente senior techies, but were bound to transition to management as even a junior manager earned more than a senior techie.

Other "funny" things were how nobody there would never, ever, ever admit not to have fully understood something or needing more clarification during an open call about the project next-steps with the rest of the team, so I had to do "special handling" for my remote team of talking to each one individually and carefully tease away their questions with some kind of "it's on me" excuse, for example, saying that "I want to make sure I explained things correctly and didn't miss anything important". Notice that my Indian colleagues who were not based in India but rather sat with the rest in London, did not have that peculiar behaviour.

Unsurprisingly, that outsourced team which existed as part of an outsourcing division the senior management of the company had decided to set up in India to cut development costs, didn't actually add significant value because of the overhead of dealing with them and the need to check and correct their work, mean that the vastly more senior - and costly, as half of us were contractors - team in London (of which I was part) ended up losing almost as much time dealing with them and the side-effects of the low quality of their work as was gained from having that India-based team doing part of the development work.