Cixiu Liu

I am reading and rereading Cixiu Liu's trilogy of Death's End etc. Funny that he totally destroys the universe and near the end, only Chinese people remain. May be not even they.

Iran Bad Bad

Netaniyahu is a master in getting through his message. Simplify, simplify! is the motto.

He is a maestro.

Lactating in Ariel University of Samaria

The campus has been enriched with a Lactating Room for students with babies. I have worked years in TAU (Tel Aviv) and never heard about this facility. Ariel is different, in the student body there are many married religious women, with their turbans and long skirts. The management is very PC conscious and the image shows  a dark skinned mother and baby. The university website also shows many Africans, and truly, one finds many in the campus.

Iran's Nice Side

The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran is actively promoting art. Two new works of Iranian veteran artist, Mahmoud Farshchian (right), called Sham-e-Ghariban (The night of the dispossessed) and Aseman-e-Chaharom (The fourth heaven), were unveiled in a ceremony attended by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif (left, in a typical gesture) and his wife. There was a time when we had excellent relations with Iran.

Darwin Award Candidate from Palestinian "March of Return" Riots

Interestingly, the Israeli left did not organize counter-protest demanding the border be opened and the Arabs let in. Imagine those thousands of angry, violent youth on the streets of Tel Aviv. We would suffer the fate of the Yazidis.

What was the Islamic State? It was the rebellion of the Sunni Muslims of Syria and Iraq to escape the rule of their Shi'ite masters. In the stress of the war, the Assad dynasty was revealed as a tribal Alawite dictatorship over the Sunni majority. The Alawites, while barely Muslim, allied themselves with Iran, the Shi'a patron of the Middle East. ISIS was strangely silent about Israel and never anti-Jewish, possibly exposing the underlying structure of the Middle East conflict: The Sunni peoples vs. isolated Shi'a pockets.

The Sunni are the Palestinians, Syrians, Jordan, Western Iraq, Saudia, the Gulf. The Shi'a are Iran, South Lebanon, the Alawite pocket, the Houthis in Yemen. Paradoxically, the Sunni seem to consider Israel as a not acknowledged ally, and semi-legitimate owner of Palestine. We shall overcome.

Gravitational waves

Humanity has detected the real existence of gravitational waves. The universe described in The Dark Forest seems to be real. Now we have to discover the splitting of dimensions, but what is a dimension?

The usefulness of hedge funds

Reflections on investing.

What is hedging in investment? You buy something that tends to rise AND something that tends to sink. You are betting for the best horse AND hedging your bet with a slow nag. That kind of hedging makes no sense.

You can hedge against an expected catastrophe, like inflation or deflation. You can hedge against expected market changes or new regulation. 

It has been demonstrated that almost none of the hundreds of hedge funds existing generates alpha. Why are they prospering? Because there are pension funds, wealth funds and so that need management, and the services of a professional "safe" management. It is not really expensive, about 2% per year.

If they maintain their value is enough of an achievement and justifies the fund manager's salary. Eventual alpha is only a bonus, not really expected.

Therefore, if a managed fund produces AT LEAST the same as an index fund, then it is worthwhile. If it does so by investing in lower risk bets (if there really exist such a thing) then it is the best thing available.