Viewing profile — dsacco

That's a good comparison. In general, closer to Dropout.

At the highest level there are broad approaches which are kept secret in the financial industry, but the reason that's peculiar is because their efficacy is inherently antagonistic…

> These guys averaged a ~9% return over the last few years. Who are "these guys"? The funds discussed in the article have average annual returns well above 9%.

> Could somebody explain why so much effort is being put into quant strategies, when it seems that real-world information gathering would be a much easier way to gain an edge over …

1. I don't have proof I can share publicly, 2. It's not just my opinion, and 3. I didn't say they're "well ahead" unilaterally. This isn't unique to finance; industry labs in tech …

This is precisely the kind of question for which you won’t find any meaningful, public answer. I’d be thoroughly shocked if you could find someone in the know to give you an answer…

This has been the case for a long time in applied mathematics and computer science (not so much pure mathematics). There are hedge funds using work that is not only unpublished, bu…

I should clarify: I don't mind "unfocused" writing like this. I can definitely appreciate a creative take on exposition. But I think the introduction of an article is not the most …

Offtopic, but I have a really difficult time reading articles like this. I don’t know if this reflects a problem with the style or my ability to focus, but I find it really annoyin…

Sure, I agree with those two points.

> If there are a dozen investors willing to buy stock at $x it’s worth $x. This is not a correct representation of liquidity, and thinking about it under this definition can be ver…

Can you clarify how terms of changed, or direct me to further reading about that? Otherwise I think point about the $80B not being liquid is a good one. It's not a dishonest figure…

An aquihire is not always a positive exit. More generally, not all liquidity events are positive outcomes for all parties involved, including investors. Many exits are agreed to by…

I think the fact that they're phenomenal is pretty clear, but I think a more important question is how reliable the returns are. They might be reliable, but that doesn't seem obvio…

I think you should clarify what liquidity means in your anecdote, because liquidity is a function of time and volume. Definitionally speaking, shares in a private company are not a…

But even if the metrics are not the same, they can still be positively correlated with each other.

I really don't think you can declare that any success of the process is due to chance or "other factors." That particular point is completely unsubstantiated. The process is ineffi…

> Actually, that result would be precisely what you would expect from a process that fails to disprove the null hypothesis, and is therefore meaningless. You'd see them hiring esse…

That still seems like a pretty strong claim. Inefficient? Sure. Misaligned incentives? Definitely. But actually meaningless? If a company turns away many developers who would be ex…

Are you saying there's no such thing as developers significantly better than the norm, or rather that it's infeasible to identify them? I don't think your point about precisely qua…

> There is no free money in finance. There can be free money in the sense that a strategy can beat the market at a similar or lower level of risk. The "cost" for this is in personn…

> This is one thing most people don't understand. If someone is selling you a financial instrument with >6-7% annual returns, it's as ridiculous as someone selling you a time machi…

> Is it true that the encrytion algorithms still aren't the weakest link for highly sensitive classified information (e.g. in the government)? (Or in similar high-secrecy situation…

No one is saying high quality random numbers are not important for cryptography. We are saying true randomness is unimportant and undesirable, given the comparatively enormous comp…

All else isn't equal. The better randomness that might be provided by quantum computers comes at a significant complexity cost. This is the same reason we don't use one time pads, …