Monday, August 12, 2019

"Argentine Stock Market Slumps 38 Percent on Local Primary Results"

This is a good opportunity to point out one of the odder phenomena in science (and apparently other areas). I headlined one of our earlier Argentina posts "Equities: And There Goes Argentina".
A while later I thought "the FT's Colby Smith has been reporting on Argentina, I wonder what she thinks?" and hit her Twitter feed to see:

Now I'm not accusing Mr. Sternberg of lifting the line (our timestamp preceded both Colby's story in the paper and that of her tweet), in fact I'd bet money if he's ever been by to visit it's because of an FT Alphaville link, it's just an oddity of people thinking alike when observing an event.
More after the jump.
From Sputnik, the headline story:
Argentina's peso currency crashed Monday, closing 15,27 percent weaker at 53.5 per US dollar after slumping some 30 percent to a record low of 65 to a dollar earlier in the day after Argentinian President Mauricio Macri suffered a loss in a primary election, Reuters reported.
Meanwhile, the Buenos Aires stock exchange tumbled by almost 38 percent on Monday as markets reacted following Mauricio Macri's defeat in the party primaries over the weekend, AP reported.
The Merval index plunged to 27,530.80 points, a drop of 37.93 percent, as some major stocks lost up to 50 percent, AP said.

According to local media reports, Frente de Todos (Front for Everyone) party, led by former Prime Minister Alberto Fernandez, is in the lead with 47.7 percent of votes, followed by President Mauricio Macri’s coalition Juntos por el cambio (Together for Change).

The possible election of Fernandez would reportedly mean a switch to left-of-centre policies that are popular with the majority of voters, but also risk exacerbating what is already record high inflation....
...MORE

We've had a dozen posts on simultaneous discovery over the years, here are a couple examples:
November 2013 
Too Funny: "There's An Electronic Currency That Could Save The Economy — And It's Not Bitcoin"
There is a phenomena is science known as simultaneous discovery or simultaneous invention. The two most famous examples are probably calculus and evolution but there are dozens if not hundreds of cases.
Here's another one.
As I'm free-associating my way through the intro to "As TIPS Tumble, Maybe We Won't Have to Go To Electronic Money to Enforce Negative Rates!" someone over at Business insider is putting together the headline story....
September 2017
Let Me Be Clear: I Have No Inside Information On Who Will Win The Man-Booker Prize Next Month (hedge funds, AI and simultaneous discovery)
Over the years we've mentioned one of the oddest phenomena in science, the simultaneous discovery or invention of something or other, the discovery/invention of the calculus by Newton and Leibniz is one famous example (although both may actually have themselves been preceded) but there are dozens if not hundreds of cases. Here's a related phenomena.

On Saturday September 23,  6:28 AM PDT we posted "Cracking Open the Black Box of Deep Learning" with this introduction:
One of the spookiest features of black box artificial intelligence is that, when it is working correctly, the AI is making connections and casting probabilities that are difficult-to-impossible for human beings to intuit.
Try explaining that to your outside investors.

You start to sound, to their ears anyway, like a loony who is saying "Etaoin shrdlu, give me your money, gizzlefab, blythfornik, trust me."

See also the famous Gary Larson cartoons on how various animals hear and comprehend:...
Today Bloomberg View's Matt Levine commends to our attention a story about one of the world's biggest hedge funds and prize-putter-upper of what's probably the most prestigious honor in  literature, short of the Nobel, the Man Booker Award.

On Tuesday September 26, 2017, 11:00 PM CDT Bloomberg posted:
The Massive Hedge Fund Betting on AI

The second paragraph of the story:
...Man Group, which has about $96 billion under management, typically takes its most promising ideas from testing to trading real money within weeks. In the fast-moving world of modern finance, an edge today can be gone tomorrow. The catch here was that, even as the new software produced encouraging returns in simulations, the engineers couldn’t explain why the AI was executing the trades it was making. The creation was such a black box that even its creators didn’t fully understand how it worked. That gave Ellis pause. He’s not an engineer and wasn’t intimately involved in the technology’s creation, but he instinctively knew that one explanation—“I can’t tell you why …”—would never fly with big clients looking for answers when Man inevitably lost some of their money... 
Now that is just, to reuse the phrase, spooky. Do read both the Bloomberg Markets and the Bloomberg View pieces but I'll note right now it's only with Levine you get:
"I imagine a leather-clad dominatrix standing over the computer, ready to administer punishment as necessary."
The Man Booker Award winner will be announced  October 17th.
I have no foreknowledge of the decision.
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