A day in the Court

Yesterday I was called as an expert witness in a dispute. One side: an elderly cancer stricken widow. On the other side: two violent looking "plumbers". The woman's home had a small blot of humidity. They came and they broke the walls in order to change the whole pipelines. They took 2000 dollars from the widow and did not finish the job. There is TV program in Israel that tricks plumbers, electricians, etc. to come to repair inexistent failures (like the refrigerator making noise) and to catch them charging for unnecessary work. The plumbers in question were caught by the program, but the judge rejected the submittal because TV programs are not evidence.

The plumbers argument was that today, iron pipes are being replaced by plastic ones, even if they are perfectly serviceable. It is true, but they were called to stop a minuscule inconvenience, normally costing 70 dollars a call. I adopted a grandfatherly tone, praising their professional competence and that I understand their need to maximize the income from each job.

When the leading plumber realized that he was losing, he asked the judge to erase the names of his partners, as he was the boss and the others, his subordinates. That is the law of the criminal underworld. The boss takes the responsibility for the failure. He did not wish to be the next victim of the wave of executions going on in the Israeli criminal underworld. 

Fulfilling my Religious Duties

I am advising a large food company with wastewater issues, and at every observation of regulator, I promise to write down a detailed follow up schedule. I never did so they called the manager to a meeting and demanded to have this control program. Now have another project that never ends.

Walking back I stopped at a jewelry store and asked for the price of gold. 20 dollar per gram plus workmanship. It is a good investment for uncertain times. The religious Russian salesman reminded me of my duty as a Jewish male to give gold presents to my women - three times a year. The Bible expressly says gold. Pessach is coming so I had no choice that buy a gold chain for my third daughter. 

Dramatic Turnaround in Tel Aviv Stock Exchange

All the important stock exchanges are closed this Christmas, except of course the TASE that follows the Jewish calendar. While all are predicting the deepening of the bear market into 2019, the Tel Aviv market thinks that the crash was a panic episode and with the discovery of the existence of an adult in the American government, Stephen Mnuchin, who took charge when every else had lost his head, all is well. Pic. Checking his pockets after a meeting with bankers. 

Dramatic Crash in Tel Aviv Stock Exchange

Perrigo -30%, TEVA -10% and so. The structure of financial properties is collapsing. Also the most solid real estate companies like Ashtrom are sinking. Companies with heavy debt burden, like TEVA, may collapse under higher interest rates. The panic may draw the whole world into a recession. It was the American FED that started the avalanche and not Trump. The world watches with unease the lack of coordination within the American government. It will take months to regain confidence in financial instruments and America. Pic.: Tent City, Santa Ana, Calif. 2018

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.