closed gold trade today at close. Great trade. Profit plus some portfolio balance.
Trade update 8/2/17
Long 10y bonds again. Yes, system is whipping us around. That’s the price of trading in really efficient markets. There is lots of confusion, cross-currents, bond markets disagreeing with stock markets. Current position, including commodities:
- Long nq (ndx)
- Long zn (10y bonds)
- short qm (oil)
- short he (lean hogs)
- very small short volatility position
neuro-lance cometh…
Neuroprostheses show promise in the treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease, epilepsy, traumatic brain injury and for the creation of brain-machine interfaces such as the neural lace, but a major stumbling block for researchers has been the propensity of these implants to induce an immune response, inflammation and scaring in the brain, severely limiting their potential use.
The Harvard team’s new neuromorphic mesh is delivered to specific brain regions via syringe injection and overcomes the problem of immune response in the brain. Their observations of the brain’s of the injected mice showed little to no immune response and they found the neuromorphic mesh had merged with the brain tissue.
Trade update 8/1/17
Closed 10y long position this morning. Still long ndx and gold. #gold
Well, Ndx looked at 6000, panicked, and ran back for known territory. I added my 10y long bond hedge back on late on 7/27/17. I do not think it will make $ as a trade. But it may counter some volatility by having it as a sea-anchor.
Trade update… 7/27/17
Hey guys, system closed 10y bond poisition at 9:01 am on Monday the 26th. I could not update because of travel. Apologies…
still long ndx futures and gold
AI must read… waitbutwhy?
And here’s where we get to an intense concept: recursive self-improvement. It works like this—
An AI system at a certain level—let’s say human village idiot—is programmed with the goal of improving its own intelligence. Once it does, it’s smarter—maybe at this point it’s at Einstein’s level—so now when it works to improve its intelligence, with an Einstein-level intellect, it has an easier time and it can make bigger leaps. These leaps make it much smarter than any human, allowing it to make even bigger leaps. As the leaps grow larger and happen more rapidly, the AGI soars upwards in intelligence and soon reaches the superintelligent level of an ASI system. This is called an Intelligence Explosion,11 and it’s the ultimate example of The Law of Accelerating Returns.
There is some debate about how soon AI will reach human-level general intelligence. The median year on a survey of hundreds of scientists about when they believed we’d be more likely than not to have reached AGI was 204012—that’s only 25 years from now, which doesn’t sound that huge until you consider that many of the thinkers in this field think it’s likely that the progression from AGI to ASI happens very quickly. Like—this could happen:
It takes decades for the first AI system to reach low-level general intelligence, but it finally happens. A computer is able to understand the world around it as well as a human four-year-old. Suddenly, within an hour of hitting that milestone, the system pumps out the grand theory of physics that unifies general relativity and quantum mechanics, something no human has been able to definitively do. 90 minutes after that, the AI has become an ASI, 170,000 times more intelligent than a human.
Superintelligence of that magnitude is not something we can remotely grasp, any more than a bumblebee can wrap its head around Keynesian Economics. In our world, smart means a 130 IQ and stupid means an 85 IQ—we don’t have a word for an IQ of 12,952.
What we do know is that humans’ utter dominance on this Earth suggests a clear rule: with intelligence comes power. Which means an ASI, when we create it, will be the most powerful being in the history of life on Earth, and all living things, including humans, will be entirely at its whim—and this might happen in the next few decades.
If our meager brains were able to invent wifi, then something 100 or 1,000 or 1 billion times smarter than we are should have no problem controlling the positioning of each and every atom in the world in any way it likes, at any time—everything we consider magic, every power we imagine a supreme God to have will be as mundane an activity for the ASI as flipping on a light switch is for us. Creating the technology to reverse human aging, curing disease and hunger and even mortality, reprogramming the weather to protect the future of life on Earth—all suddenly possible. Also possible is the immediate end of all life on Earth. As far as we’re concerned, if an ASI comes to being, there is now an omnipotent God on Earth—and the all-important question for us is: Will it be a nice God?
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html
Trade position update 7/23/17
Gentle readers, do not think I have abandoned you to the cold indifferent of the HFT algorithms. I am simply holding tight with my systems. Still long nasdaq, long gold, long 10y bonds. When my systems change I will inform you. We should all of us expect a 1 or 2% sell-off (or more) at any moment. That’s living with markets. Currently, I suspect that there are so many institutions that have missed this post-election market surge, their desire to get long will stop serious sell-offs. But that is just my thoughts. I do not trade on my thoughts or opinions. I’m a systems trader. And every time I read some trader raging on twitter because he or she believes the central banks are rigging the markets, I just smile. I used to be you. I could not admit that I just sucked as a trader and was too often on the wrong side of asymmetrical information. So I invented or imagined or descried a Conspiracy!!! Ah, human nature.
Let me share two signs of my current impudence, so you might use my folly to identify market tops! After listening to A16z podcast, and being reminded of the value of tracking what nerds do for fun, I’ve started mining crypto-currency! Yes! Shocking. I have no desire to trade it. But I want to understand where this is all going. So I’m learning. Reading. Thinking. Modeling. Secondly, I’m trading volatility again, at very small size. Yes, it is a tough market. But I believe it is the most sensitive of all the markets. I think it flinches first. It is my canary…
Happy trading. And the market is probably going to punch us soon. So don’t act surprised. Look at your brokerage amount. That is not your money. That is the market’s money. It will fluctuate.
Ps. I am traveling this week. So fewer posts.
Seeding organs… watch this space…
this is one of the most exciting stories of the past few days. Although it is not close to clinical applications yet, it represents a tremendous research direction. The most fascinating element of it to me is how the body knows how to build a liver. We just need to learn to harness the wisdom that is already in the body…
To grow a liver, researchers led by MIT engineer Sangeeta Bhatia started by carefully designing a cellular scaffold for the organ to grow on. They first got human liver cells (hepatocytes) and connective tissue cells (fibroblasts) to grow together in clumps. Then they used a micro-tissue molding to create ropes endothelial cells, which make up the lining of blood and lymphatic vessels. Last, they carefully assembled rows of the cell clumps in between strands of endothelial chords and held the structure together with a biodegradable hydrogel.
In all, they called the organ starter kit SEED, for “In Situ Expansion of Engineered Devices.”
To test out the SEEDs, the researchers implanted them into the belly fat of healthy mice and mice with a genetic disorder that causes liver damage. In the healthy mice, the liver seeds didn’t grow very much. But in the rodents with liver damage—which were circulating liver-regenerating growth factors and other molecular signals to repair their damaged liver—the organ SEEDs sprouted.
Eighty days after implantation, there was a 50-fold cellular expansion along the SEED’s scaffold. The liver organoid formed precursor bile ducts and contained clusters of red blood cells, suggesting vasculature formation. The organoid also pumped out standard human liver proteins, including albumin and transferrin.
There’s a lot more work to go before researchers have a human-sized, functional liver, but the team is optimistic. “We believe that this work sets the stage for using SEEDs as an alternative strategy for scale-up of engineered organs, one that uses native developmental, injury, or regenerative signals to expand prefabricated constructs in situ,” they conclude.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/07/mice-grow-their-own-miniature-human-livers-with-organ-starter-kit/
9 things CRISPR has given us lately (revolution isn’t too strong a word)
…someday a book will be written about what it felt like to have lived in a scientific revolution like the one we are all of us living in right now. Do not let the freak show off our current politics blind you to history…
There’s a good reason why the powerful CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing tool has earned the moniker of being ‘revolutionary’.
The relatively easy technique for cutting and pasting genes has exploded onto the scientific scene, and over the past years there’s been no shortage of spectacular results delivered thanks to this amazing tool. Just this year alone, researchers have made advances in fighting diseases, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, mosquitoes and much more.
1. For the first time, scientists have used gene editing to successfully remove HIV from a living organism, and they did this in three different animal models. Using CRISPR, the team got rid of the virus DNA and cleared up both acute and latent infections.
2. The first ever semi-synthetic organisms have been developed by breeding E. coli bacteria with an unusual six-letter genetic code instead of the typical one with just four bases. The researchers used gene editing to make sure bacteria would not register the new DNA molecules as invaders.
3. CRISPR has been used to successfully target the ‘command centre’ of cancer – the hybrid fusion genes that often trigger abnormal tumour growths. By cutting and pasting, researchers created a cancer-busting gene that actually shrunk tumours in mice carrying human prostate and liver cancer cells.
4. With the help of CRISPR, scientists also recently managed to slow the growth of cancer cells. They targeted a protein called Tudor-SN that helps cell division, and think this technique could help inhibit fast-growing cancer cells.
5. Gene editing has been used to make viruses force superbugs to kill themselves. By arming bacteriophage viruses with genetic sequences that contain antibiotic resistance genes, researchers have been able to trigger self-destructing mechanisms in bacteria that naturally try to protect themselves from phages.
6. Mosquito-borne diseases could become a thing of the past thanks to gene editing. Scientists have found a new way to limit the spread of mosquitoes by hacking their fertility genes, and they attribute the success to the efficient way CRISPR can make several genetic code changes at once.
7. Researchers have managed to edit out Huntington’s disease genes in mice, efficiently reversing signs of the fatal condition. It’s entirely likely that this brilliant technique could one day be used on humans as well, after demonstrating this promising first step.
8. Apart from medical breakthroughs, CRISPR could also give us the gift of more abundant, sustainable biofuels. Scientists recently used a combination of gene editing tools to engineer algae that produce twice as much biofuel material as their wild counterparts.
9. If you’ve watched the first-ever movie encoded in DNA code, you have CRISPR to thank for this advance, too. Just recently, scientists finally managed to turn cells into a ‘molecular recorder’ as they used gene editing to embed sequences of information into the genome of E. coli.
As all amazing technology, CRISPR has also sparked concerns, especially as we’re getting ever-so closer to routinely using it in humans. But scientists have also discovered an ‘off switch’ for the process, which allows to stop the mechanism in its tracks.
And if you’ve heard that CRISPR can cause hundreds of unwanted mutations, that study was probably wrong anyway. We can’t wait to see what incredible advances this tool will bring next.