End of the Hedge Funds

A Deutsche Bank study shows that  hedge funds have generated no alpha (or beta for that matter) over the past 4 years. 

Bloomberg says that automated trading, with plenty of data, has reduced the weight of hedge funds. Stock picking is no fun anymore. 

Pythagorean Secret Cult: Democratic or Dictatorial

That Pythagoras founded an utopic, elitist, puritanical cult is proved by the fact that his communes were burned by the pitchfork peasantry of Ancient Greece, and that he was persecuted. He is on my mind as I am re-reading "The end of Sparta" by Victor Davis Hanson, a novel where the revolutionary democratic ideas of Pythagoras fuel the Boiotians' onslaught on Sparta - to free the Messenian helots and spread democracy. Hanson's central thesis hits me as paradoxical because in the original history, it was the democratic party of Croton that persecuted Pythagoras for teaching tyranny. Yet his followers lived in closed, secret communes, everything in common, that is, they were the first Communists. Hanson knows of Greece more than I do, yet something seems wrong. 

We know that Pythagoras  invented the metempsychosis, or the "transmigration of souls", which holds that the soul is immortal and, upon death, enters into a new body. They believed that numbers - the numerability - was the underlying principle of the universe, which seems to be so. The sect followed bizarre customs, such as taking a wow of silence, putting on the right sandal before the left one, not wearing wool textiles, vegetarianism except eating beans, erecting tombstones in life and so. Pythagoras was a math and music genius, he invented an equation that I understood only at age six. 

Saloniki Jews Old Age Home

Superurgent job: to map the compound's water and sewage system. The Ministry of Health demands this document and I promised it. Slept badly, woke up with fear in my guts.

P.S.: After a hellish 48 hour workday, I finished and submitted the drawing and report. The Min.of Health answered me immediately, and it transpires that they were interested only in the hot water system, if the water was hot enough to prevent Legionnaria sp. survival. The elderly have no resistance against this bacteria.  I always work too much.

Anecdote: The staff kept mentioning the Saudi residents in the old age home, the plumbing issues in the Saudi wing and so. I wondered - do they have Saudi Arabians here? Then I understood, "סיעוד" in Hebrew (and probably in Arabic) means nursing and it is pronounced almost the same. And most of staff is Arabic. Maybe it was a private joke of theirs.  

Bad Year on TASE

I am worth 20% less on the TASE than on January 1st. The sheqel devaluated from 3.4 to 3.7 per dollar, and the portfolio itself lost about 10%. My worst investment was Nvidia and Tower. I should have avoided the NASDAQ and areas I am not familiar with. I was seduced by the hi tech bubble and lost, and it is not the first time.

Rosa Schwartzburg: Occupy Hungary

Article in the New York Times front page: "Occupy Hungary", written by a Jewish sounding student of the CEU (Soros) University in Budapest. The idea follows the "Occupy Wall Street" protest movement, that failed miserably. Rosa's intention is to protest the Hungarian Government's deadline to close down Soros's private liberal institution.

But to write Occupy Hungary is not the same as Occupy Wall Street, specially not for the paranoid, anti-Semitic, nationalist Hungarians, that have experienced bitter foreign occupations in their lifetime. It is not joke for them. They are taking it literally.  No good.

Central European University - Master of Laws in Human Rights (LL.M)

Central European University (CEU) is a graduate-level, English-language University accredited both in the U.S. and Hungary. The Department of Legal Studies provides high quality advanced legal education and education in human rights, comparative constitutional law, and international business law. Its programmes are among the finest in Europe, enabling students to obtain a solid grounding in fundamental legal concepts in civil law and common law systems and to develop unique skills in comparative analysis.

Does music impede studying and thinking?

Studies conclude that it does, and the best working condition is silence. 

Was the Flint Water Contamination a National Disaster?

President Obama declared the incident a National Disaster and channeled very large funds to the City of Flint. For all the scandal and accusations of systematic racism, and the jailing of eight EPA professionals, I am still wondering what was the real damage if any of the whole media carnival. From a professional magazine's comments column:


Dear Ms Jerome, It is not true that hundreds of children had high blood levels/ Please stop repeating that myth and falsehood. Read the CDC and other reports of thousands of blood leads taken before during and after the switch back. About 2 % were temporally raised by about 2 ug/dl. There were no "brain damaged "children! 

The magazine refers to a study that found 5 ug/dl - I am not qualified to evaluate the difference, but seems to me that the differential damage must have been minimal as no follow up studies have been published. According to the Wiki, one in forty American children have more than 5 ug/dl, which makes me think that Flint's lead levels were "normal" in the American context. The fact is that I am not alone in suspecting that the whole thing was made up for political reasons. May be I am wrong.