The Grand Prophet 12

The John Stennis being taunted by Iranian "The Great Prophet 12" exercise in the Hormuz Straits. The pic is from Associated Press, from the air.

It looks the Iranians lost their fear from America. No good. 

The machines have taken over

Mnuchin says the market is overreacting because of algo trading reacting to the Fed comments and the Volcker Rule. Meaning the machines have taken over Wall Street and we cannot do a thing to stop them. He thinks the market (that is, all the algo machines working simultaneously like and ecological system) will rebalance itself.
May be.  I think it will oscillate like stock exchanges in the nineteen century: panics followed by euphoria.

How this machine trading work?

Start with the essential elements such as evaluating datasets, accessing data APIs using Python, using Quandl to access financial data, and managing prediction errors. You’ll then cover various machine learning techniques and algorithms that can be used to build and train algorithmic models using pandas, Seaborn, StatsModels, and scikit-learn. You will build, estimate, and interpret AR(p), MA(q), and ARIMA(p, d, q) models using StatsModels. You will apply Bayesian prior, evidence, and posterior concepts to distinguish uncertainty using PyMC3. You’ll then utilize Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), scikit-learn, and spaCy to assign sentiment scores to financial news and classify documents to extract trading signals. As you make your way through the chapters, you’ll design, build, tune, and evaluate feed-forward neural networks, recurrent neural networks, and convolutional neural networks (FFNNs, RNNs, and CNNs) using Keras to design sophisticated algorithms. You’ll also apply transfer learning to satellite image data to predict economic activity. Then you’ll apply reinforcement learning for optimal trading results.

Searching for a guru

At old age, I got to realize that all my life I was searching for a guru, a teacher, a leader. In seventy plus + plus years I met only a few and only for a short time. The most memorable is Chaim Ben Ezra, my boss on TAHAL, a miracle-worker who won the economic planning function in a number of Central American States, to the point that once said I own … (a country) and it was true. He was the person who paid me MORE than I thought was worth. Another one is … Buzaglo (he hebraized his name) who - metaphorically - took my trembling hand in difficult meetings with regulators and led me to victory, and paid well for my loyalty and dedication. In the last years, with wider contacts in the Israeli entrepreneur environment, I met others, but typically they are too busy to dedicate their time to me or I am so overworked with my urgent projects that I fail to them. On the other hand, many of my students and friends have identified ME as their guru, but I am too egoist to help the too much, and then, they feel (correctly) that I despise them. My life is done, so that is it. I am not trying to change anymore. 

The assault against Judaism

Scandinavian countries have forbidden circumcision, considering it a bloody attack against a powerless individual. Other countries forbid schita, the Jewish slaughter of animals without sedation. Britain had problems with Jewish schools, whose racial composition did not reflect the general population. Now we have the State of New York that intends to force the schools to change their curriculums to prepare the graduates to find good jobs. 

Jews are the most successful and wealthiest ethnic group in the New York State, if not the world, but clearly, some New York officials believe that Orthodox Jews need to do better. Although New York City public schools are not exactly an unbridled success story, the city contends it must intervene in order to ensure the yeshivas better prepare students for the workforce. 

Israel is no different. Every State desires an uniform and obedient population, serving in the army and working at "productive" sectors. Judaism has been under assault forever. 

NASDAQ smells recession

In the NASDAQ we are already in bear territory. The Fed killed all hope with its crazy policy of cooling down the American and world economy. I suffered cruel losses, I may not be anymore a Hanukkah-geld multimillioner…

Long Term Loans Erosion

I found this expression in a Singapur text. What does it mean? Economic dictionaries have profit erosion, due to a number of events but this is different. Long term fixed interest loans get eroded because of inflation. Or they lose its worth by annual bank maintenance expenses.

Maybe the creditworthiness of the debtor changes with the time, gets worse. Maybe the difficulty of recouping the money increases with time? Who knows?

Tunnel War with the Hizballah

We are having a tridimensional war with the Hizballah religious party of Lebanon. In fact, we founded that Muslim organization, thinking that it will focus in humanitarian and social work in South Lebanon. You know, highly educated and intelligent people - in positions of power - tht were convinced that Lebanon's hostility was founded in poverty and destitution, so if we improve their life, they will love us. Hizballah IS basically a welfare organization but it has also organized an army focused on our destruction. They had fired missiles to our Northern cities, and we have built a tall prefab cement blocks wall. So they went underground and bored several tunnels to surprise us. They planned to send through the tunnels fighters on motorcycles, with mission of causing chaos. We have discovered three tunnels, we don't know how many are. The pic shows that these days they have erected a wall in the tunnel, to make difficult to Israeli soldiers to advance in it. Comparing this photo with the photos of Hamas tunnels, I think the Hamas's technique of prefab inverted U blocks is more effective. The Hizballah seems to have worse engineers, maybe because those in Gaza have worked and gathered experience in Israel.