The business of the AI labs
I will soon be joining Anthropic, and so this is my last opportunity to write down some thoughts on the AI lab business model before I can be accused of spilling any inside information.
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A programming and finance blog by Max Bolingbroke.
Latest posts
US equity valuations
The outlook for the US stock market looks unusually poor.
How close is England to covid herd immunity?
I don’t have an answer to this question, but I’ve gathered a few related stats that helped to get my own thinking into order.
L1 regression solved six ways
The most fundamental technique in statistical learning is ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. If we have a vector of observations \(y\) and a matrix of features associated with each observation \(X\), then we assume the observations are a linear function of the features plus some (iid) random noise, \(\epsilon\):
Coronavirus lockdown: balanced on a knife edge
Countries around the world are going into more-or-less complete states of lockdown in an effort to stop the spread of novel coronavirus. The question I find myself asking is whether the obvious economic cost of this can possibly justify the benefits. I built a model to answer this question and I find that, contrary to my priors, lockdown is actually justifiable under reasonable assumptions.
Predicting international house prices
What factors influence house prices? This is a perennial topic of dinner party discussion, but the standard of the debate rarely rises above offering anecdotal evidence. Frustrated with the status quo, I decided to tackle the question with statistics. In this post I look at which macroeconomic factors are associated with future house price rises or falls.
Is Bitcoin a junk asset?
One reason to believe that Bitcoin is a poor investment is because it is a rather volatile asset. As a general rule, “lottery like” assets with high variance in their valuations are known to underperform low-risk equivalents:
Do children make you happy?
Do children make you happy? This is a question that anyone who is considering starting a family should be asking themselves. Among my peers there is a widespread assumption that children are a key ingredient in a happy middle age, but it’s never been clear to me that this is so.
Making money in cryptocurrency without price risk
Cryptocurrency trading is a high-risk business, with annualized volatility of many tokens exceeding 100%. While I think that every investor should hold some Bitcoin (as part of holding the CAPM market portfolio), it’s probably unwise to commit more than a few percentage points of your net worth.
Being concrete about the benefits of tax efficient index investment
In my last post I discussed the methods that a UK individual could use to make investments. There were plenty of different methods, all with their own unique tradeoffs.
Tax-efficient and financing-efficient UK individual investing
In my last post I gave an example of a situation where individual investors might want to borrow money for investment purposes. This post will give an overview of the methods that individuals can use to achieve that leverage efficiently. I will also cover tax considerations, some of which may be relevant even to unleveraged positions. Much of what I cover here will be UK specific, particularly…
The case for leverage in personal investing
The standard advice for personal investing that I see all around the web is to put your money into one or more low cost equity index tracking funds. Commentators also sometimes recommend an allocation to bonds (e.g. a 60/40 split between stocks and bonds), though the popularity of this advice seems to become less common with every passing month of the bull market.
Portfolio mean-variance optimisation in the browser
This is just to announce that I’ve written a small tool to visualise the risk/reward tradeoffs associated with investing in a diversified portfolio of risky assets.
Faster ordered maps for Java
Sorted maps are useful alternatives to standard unordered hashmaps. Not only do they tend to make your programs more deterministic, they also make some kinds of queries very efficient. For example, one thing we frequently want to do at work is find the most recent observation of a sparse timeseries as of a particular time. If the series is represented as an ordered mapping from time to value, then…
4 things you didn’t know you could do with Java
Java is often described as a simple programming language. While this is arguably true, it has still retained the ability to surprise me after using it full time for years.
A Cambridge Computer Science degree summarised in 58 crib sheets
From 2005 to 2008 I was an undergraduate studying Computer Science at Cambridge. My method of preparing for the exams was to summarise each lecture course into just a few sides of A4, which I’d then commit to memory in their entirety.
Datastructures for external memory
Something I recently became interested in is map data structures for external memory — i.e. ways of storing indexed data that are optimized for storage on disk.
Compression of floating point timeseries
I recently had cause to investigate fast methods of storing and transferring financial timeseries. Naively, timeseries can be represented in memory or on disk as simple dense arrays of floating point numbers. This is an attractive representation with many nice properties:
Easy publishing to Maven Central with Gradle
I recently released my first open source library for Java, MDBI. I learnt a lot about the Java open-source ecosystem as part of this process, and this blog summarises that in the hope that it will be useful to others. Specifically, the post will explain how to set up a project using the modern Gradle build system to build code and deploy it to the standard Maven Central repository from the command…
Max’s DataBase Interface
It became necessary to write a Java database access library, since the ones that were available were somehow unsatisfactory. It’s called MDBI, and I’ve written more about it on the Github page.