As a Harper's and Lapham's Quarterly subscriber, I have been a huge fan of his quirky editorial style.
Specifically, I'd like to call out his podcast ("The World In Time"). Its past episodes remain treasure troves of wisdom, with LL's resonant voice asking the kind of engaging questions that are a rarity these days. Highly recommended.
> in Oshiro, i had met a guardian of time, a man who, year after year, preserved a slice of japan's essence, ensuring that even in the heart of its busiest city, the song of the bush warbler would never fade away.
There was a lump in my throat as I read your comment out loud to my wife. Thank you for sharing this beautiful vignette!
Of course, that's far from saying that they're the worst, or even headed that way. Just not the best (those would be a couple of fully opensource models, including those of the Instructor family, which we use at my workplace).
A few months ago, I wrote a post [0] talking about my experiences designing and building an ML-powered stock picking engine for my startup - the post went viral on HN, and it led to many fascinating conversations, valuable connections, opportunities to speak, and job offers (tech/ML, tradfi, and crypto). In fact, it quite directly led to my new job, as a team reached out with an opportunity that ticked off all the boxes I was looking for.
Finally, thanks to my blog, I have made many new friends who I hope to engage with productively[1] going forward, and I feel more firmly embedded in the intellectual milieu of the Bay Area than I ever did. As a consequence, I am much more relaxed now and feel in control of the overall direction of my life.
1. I would fiercely recommend reading “An Engine, Not A Camera” (Donald MacKenzie). Formally, it reads as a sociological study of the practice of finance - how financial markets shape society instead of simply capturing its needs and desires at large. More importantly, however, it made me think deeper on questions about fields of study that are (were?) distant and to question assumptions: a lot of ideas that we take for granted as absolute truths are simply consensus-derived and have no objective reality.
2. On a similar theme, “The Lady Tasting Tea” (David Salsburg) was a wonderful history of the development of statistics as a mathematical discipline. I found it absolutely fascinating to map out how individual personalities were buffeted and shaped by larger historical events and movements (e.g. eugenics in the late 19th century, WW2, the rise of the Soviet Union, etc.) into asking questions of data that propelled statistics forward. Disciplines we think of as being “hard” (math, CS, statistics, physics) have been shaped by social forces in a non-linear non-Hegelian fashion, in fits and starts, quite contrary to the way they are presented in a pedagogical setting.
>FTX's books don't so much have red flags as that they are printed on red flags, with ink derived from red flags, a custom-made red cover made out of more red flags, and each page, when opened, has pop-up red flags along with a little electronic speaker that plays Red Flag by Antigoni.
I focused on 10-Qs for the EDGAR filings module as you rightly pointed out - it seemed to be a good balance between implicit information and usefulness of the data. TBH I didn't actually investigate the other (many) patterns.
Having said that, I have really enjoyed Kai Wu's research from Sparkline Capital (https://www.sparklinecapital.com/), especially his extraction of the innovation factor from EDGAR filing texts. He's appeared in numerous podcasts, and they have all been super useful to listen to.
Maybe someday when I re-investigate EDGAR filings and go further, I might target these signals you talk about here.
Thank you, and ha! An emphatic yes to all the points you raised! It's especially daunting when there are multiple vendors with incompatible point-in-time hygiene setups, a situation I faced at the beginning of setting up Didact.
Also, this was really my first time with equities - my professional trading career was derivatives-focused - both listed (CME) and OTC (FX forwards/swaps). I think I lost the first few months simply trying to reorient my style of thinking.