2
Oct
2019
Ergodicity
I first came across the word ergodicity in a book about information theory, which I was reading because I was interested in the (unicycle riding, flame throwing trumpet playing mathematician) Claude Shannon.* Then I discovered NN Taleb and Ole Peters talking about ergodicity in a totally different context. Put simply: the concept is about calculating... Read More
12
Sep
2019
A banking paradox
I try to avoid writing blog posts on banks. I spent over a decade publishing research on banks – see here, and got well paid for my knowledge. If I’m going to write about banks, then I’d like someone to write me a (rather large) cheque to do it. But just this once, I’ve found... Read More
12
Jul
2019
Cluster One
Last year I was playing around with Euclidean Distance, https://brucepackard.com/wood-from-the-trees/ taking a sample of companies from 5 years ago, and seeing if the best performing companies used similar words with similar frequency. The technique comes from Mathew Jocker’s book, and has been used in the past for authorship attribution for documents where authorship is disputed.... Read More
25
Jun
2019
Jeux sans frontiers
I’ve been meaning to publish something on Games Workshop since it has become my largest position. According to Bloomberg the shares are up 1000% in 3 years (best BREXIT performing stock). It’s rather nice when a medium conviction idea (ie third largest position by cost) becomes a ten bagger. Sadly my higher conviction ideas (Bank... Read More