(Not intended to be investment advice)

What a week. The ebullient markets of just a week or two ago now seem like a distant memory. The stock market is volatile and scary again and everything seems to be going down.

But it’s also important to keep things in perspective — despite all the turbulence, markets are just a bit off their all-time highs.

A big part of machine learning is classification — we want to know what class (a.k.a. group) an observation belongs to. The ability to precisely classify observations is extremely valuable for various business applications like predicting whether a particular user will buy a product or forecasting whether a given loan will default or not.

Data science provides a plethora of classification algorithms such as logistic regression, support vector machine, naive Bayes classifier, and decision trees. …

(Not intended to be investment advice. Opinions are my own.)

Yesterday, the latest CPI (Consumer Price Index) data came out. CPI refers to the price level of a basket of goods and services that is used to measure cost of living. I’ve written about it in the past:

The Fed typically tries to keep CPI around 2% give or take a few bps. So yesterday’s 4.2% print was shocking. …

(Not intended to be investment advice. No position in any of the ARK funds.)

There’s been a decent amount of Cathie Wood bashing of late. She and her ARK ETFs (Ms. Wood managers several technology and innovation focused ETFs) were darlings on the way up, especially last year when the tech rally went parabolic. But as of late, the enthusiasm for tech stocks have dampened and the haters have come out of hiding — including the following take from the WSJ:

“So many investors piled in relatively recently, though, that her actual wealth-creation record is unimpressive. Analysts at Bespoke Investment…

(Not intended to be investment advice. Opinions are my own.)

First, I’d like to say I am embarrassed that my fellow Alpha Beta Blog editor, Kareem Kudus, finished reading The Deficit Myth before I did. I’ve been pretty scatterbrained in terms of reading lately jumping from book to book (lately I’ve also been reading Will and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of History as well as Ray Dalio’s writings on LinkedIn).

Whether you are fan of MMT or not, I do think it’s critical to understand its intricacies as MMT-like thinking will become a bigger and bigger part of monetary and…

(Not intended to be investment advice. Opinions are my own. Full disclosure — I am long gold.)

I was reading Holger Grueneberg’s article (link below) about crypto and it made me ponder the question:

Does An Asset Have To Produce Cashflows To Have Value?

Productive Assets

Productive assets have cashflows attached to them and include stocks, real estate, and bonds. When you invest in productive assets, you are making various bets about the future paths of these cashflows:

• Stocks: you are betting that the company will grow its sales and earnings over time making each share of the business worth more. In…

Medium gave out an extra $500 bonus on top of its usual payments this past month. It was definitely a nice surprise and the first time I’ve gotten something like this from them.

When I first started writing on the platform (back during the days when we were paid according to claps as opposed to read time), I read about other writers getting one-off bonuses for “writing with a differentiated voice”. My guess at the time was that that was Medium’s way of encouraging promising new writers to keep at it (while their views and earnings were still low).

This…