It is probably just as well that “Liberation Day” falls on April 2nd and not a day earlier, which would just add more confusion were it to share the occasion with April Fools’ Day. The past month has shown just how hard the markets have found it to work out who is fooling who, trying to figure out the impact of the raft of US tariff announcements (and stays of execution) emanating from the White House.
The Difficulty of Using Data to Make Healthy Investment Decisions in Health Care
Of all the investment sectors, health care is perhaps the most difficult one to remove emotionalism from clouding investor decision-making. Health is distinctly personally relevant, complex and is frequently couched in worry, fear and the ultimate certitude of our mortality. So, reconciling raw statistics with these feelings and fears can seem rather cold and brutal and uncaring. That said, however, the sophisticated investor should be able to step beyond the emotional and confused rationales, study the numbers and make better informed investment decisions from that standpoint.
A Bubble DeepSeeking a Pin?
One would think that those involved in innovation, above all walks of life should always be ready for… …innovation. However, shocking as it may seem, the tech giants at the forefront of AI development seemed to get blindsided by a Chinese minnow (DeepSeek) innovating a small scale, much more efficient, open source AI chatbot. Its metrics are impressive. It performed as well as, better, or close to on third-party tests of knowledge, reasoning, and particularly well on code and math, when compared to all the major AI tech companies.
Group-Unthink – Why Investors Need to Avoid Confused Analysis
Reading a recent CNBC article on how family offices investment decisions are changing with the transfer of wealth from older to younger generations1, it inadvertently touched on an issue which should be at the heart of all family office (and all sophisticated investors’) investment analysis, what we would term “Group-Unthink”.
Intel Outside™ – The Outlook for AI Chip Makers
In the world of US stocks, the past two years have been quite focused on AI. The excitement around this has been epitomized by the outsized success of NVDIA, which has seen its share price increase eight-fold over this period. During that time, we have seen NVDIA’s market capitalization increase to over $3.3 trillion as it jostles with Apple for the title of largest company in the US by market capitalization. November saw its inclusion in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Somewhat ironically, it replaced rival chip maker Intel in the index, surely something that should foretell a tale of caution!
The Long View Beyond the US Election
With less than a week to go to the US Presidential elections the race remains a dead heat. The broader US stock markets do not appear, at least on a surface level, too perturbed by the high degree of uncertainty in the electoral outcome. At time of writing, October 29, 2024, the NASDAQ is up +2.88%, the S&P 500 up +1.22% and the DJI trailing at -0.23% month to date.
AI Brings A New Approach for Managed Futures Investors
Artificial intelligence having captured the investment world’s imagination is facing a crunch moment to prove its worth. Does it do what it claims it does, faster, better, more accurately etc. This is not an unfamiliar issue for us at Plotinus. It is one thing to innovate and create a different way of gaining trading insights by using AI, but ultimately the only relevant question is, does it work. To this end we will look Plotinus’ area of focus, short-term directionality in the futures market and compare it with some established short-term Managed Futures programs.
How to Deal With Asset Management’s Data Future-Proofing Problem
As Investors become more aware of the potential that artificial intelligence has to offer the field of active asset management, they are also coming to recognize the problems that its use can bring.
Seeing the Trees from the Forest — Why Good Investment Decisions Depend on Understanding the Subjectivity of Data
The term “Data Science” can convey a certain glow of empirical purity, distilling understanding from observed facts. This is in many cases, unfortunately not the case. “Data Alchemy” on the other hand would sound much less convincing and would imply that those involved in such wizardry were potentially cooking up their results. The reality of data science though is that even when rigorous scientific analytic methods are applied to data, the data itself for the much part is much more subjective than it is assumed to be — not the objective recording of information one might initially think. From an investment perspective this issue poses a problem for all data-based decisions for the sophisticated investor.
Oh Lá Lá! The French Stock Market Feels the Sting of a Snap Election and What this Reveals About the Complexity of Data.
President Macron certainly put the ‘snap’ in the snap election with his announcement on June 9 of French parliamentary elections, following his centrist party’s hammering in the recent European Parliamentary elections. That snapping sound seemed to reverberate the loudest beyond the political realm, in the French stock market. It is somewhat rare to see such a direct impact of politics on a financial market. The CAC 40 (France’s leading market index), at time of writing, has lost -5% since the president’s announcement. There is a traditional cliché that stock markets do not like uncertainty—traders, however, know that with the injection of uncertainty comes opportunity and error depending on one’s reading of the data at hand.
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