UPDATED 12 JULY 2024: Financial technology overview (for more info on how some or most or all of the algos work go to 63.tvhobo.com or 36.tvhobo.com for approximate sequence of discovery plus pretty pictures of theoretical profit graphs.)
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A 'blog' or 'web log' doesn't have to be in the formats you are used to, spread around by institutions and mass usage. This doc will run from here, 1st May 2024 down to there, at the bottom of the page, nearer to wherever you are now on the old spacetime continuum when you read 'this'.
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I'm going to have to show you that which Chomsky says almost every single one of you is (a) getting wrong and (b) prevented from any real progress, individually or collectively because of.
So start here, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l05YC9ITrsE (Noam Chomsky 'Language Use and Design conflicts and their significance')
(I will be watching it, as is my custom, many many times over, and ultimately transcribing much of it and then writing my statements about it after all of that, then being accused by lots of people either of talking about stuff without properly reading it - when that is all that THEY are doing - or of referring to someone whose evidence can be ignored because they say so).
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Then you are able to not necessarily interrupt and screw up your own ability to think and thus able to use that capacity (relatively) well. My latest use of it goes way beyond my impressive financial scientific feats so far. This one looks like "total financial god mode". The helplessness and stupidity of most humans is all self-enforced and self-inflicted - my experience would have me believe about you all - ie that you can do so so so much better, as Chomsky has shown by example, not just his scientific evidence presentation.
For now I'll just transcribe the entirety of that Chomsky lecture:
Well I'd like to discuss some questions about a topic that goes back to classical antiquity, has remained quite obscure in many ways and has many significant implications I think we shall try to bring out or at least indicate. The question is what is the fundamental nature of language? What's it for? What is it designed for. There's a simple classical formula, goes back to Aristotle, that language is sound with meaning. That raises three questions at once: what is sound? What is meaning? And what is 'with'? The most neglected and most crucial question.
There's been a good deal of discussion of sound over the past several millennia, a good bit is known. A lot of consideration of questions of meaning. How much is understood, one could debate. But virtually nothing about 'with'. Presumably because it was assumed to be trivial, simply by association. So a child sees a cow, somebody says 'cow', an association is set up between that thing over there and out of that spins the meaning. That doesn't survive much examination, but even if it did it wouldn't begin to touch the real question which has to do with the fact that the number of associations (if you want to call them associations) is unbounded so can't be set up by experience. That's the 'with' problem. It's very rarely been noticed in the whole history of thinking about language. Occasionally it has. Galileo was maybe the first to point out a pretty obvious fact: that our language capacity has infinite scope. He described the alphabet as the greatest invention that had ever been made because it enables us with 25 letters to express any thought that might come to our minds. Note that he's not accepting Aristotle's dictum exactly. That description of language is meaning with sound, which is not quite the same as sound with meaning. In fact it differs in interesting ways. It was picked up not long after by Descartes, and in fact for Descartes it is one of the foundations of his dualistic sciences: interesting and long story, also mostly ignored in the history of philosophy, but I think quite crucial.
After that it kind of languishes. It picks up again in the twentieth century, partly because the concept 'with' came to be understood in the 1930s and 1940s with the development of the theories of computability - Turing, Godel, Kleene, others. The notion of finite characterisation of an infinite class became well understood and that makes it possible to ask ourselves what would be the nature of the sound meaning relationship, whatever it is. Well the basic answer has to be that there's some kind of what's called generative procedure, finite computational procedure, that determines the structures and the interpretations for an infinite range of categories of expressions and the interpretations have to be dual - one for sound, one for meaning. Apart from that, for anyone who's not a "mystic", this capacity is internal to us - generally denied, but a lot of mystics around - but clearly it's something internal to us, mostly our brains, which means the capacity is effectively an organ of the body, in the rather loose sense of 'organ' that's used conventionally in biology - some subsystem of the organism that has enough internal integrity so it can be studied on its own and interacts with other such modules/subsystems in the functioning, in the life of the organism. So that should be uncontroversial, unfortunately it isn't but I'll put those controversies aside.
Well we've learned in recent years that the concept 'sound' is too narrow. The externalisation of language, the form in which it reaches the outside seems to be modality independent, so it can be visual, it can be sign, it can be touch, lot of interesting work on that, and so on, there seems to be some internal analytic capacity that's common to any form of external expression, so that already suggests to us that maybe Aristotle's dictum should be inverted, just as Galileo's observation does. Maybe it should be meaning with not 'sound' but some form of externalisation.
Well I'll keep it to sound here, just for simplicity, but I mean any form of externalisation. Well, it turns out that this distinction between whether language is sound with meaning or meaning with sound bears on many other questions. There is a debate over what's sometimes called the essential function of language. I'll come back to that notion in a minute. There's a traditional view, which in fact is Galileo's, that language is primarily an instrument of thought. The great 19th Century linguist William Dwight Whitney expressed the traditional conception this way: he said language is audible thinking, the spoken instrumentality of thought. Which means speech, sound, any other externalisation is kind of a secondary property of language. The fundamental property is the internal construction of indefinitely many thoughts by this generative procedure, we'd now say. That's different from a contemporary view, which is so widespread as to be virtually a dogma. Namely that the function of language is communication and it evolved out of communication systems. The matter hasn't been studied but I suspect that this modern view, which is in fact a dogma (you just can't question it - in Philosophy, Psychology, Linguistics) is probably a reflection of the grip of associationism and behaviourism - 20th century doctrines, which have a very tight grip - even those who reject them fundamentally accept them I think. It also relates to a highly oversimplified view of modern evolutionarily biology, which is totally different from what evolutionary biologists believe but is also widespread. Another interesting topic, another one I'll put aside.
Looking at the general question. The question of what an organ is for. What's its function. Is far from clear. So take any system you like. Say, take the spine. What's its function? Well its function is to hold the body up, to protect the nerves, to produce blood cells, to store calcium - that's what it does, so which one is its function? Maybe all of them, or pick one somehow? Well the way one is usually picked is by evolutionary considerations. Which of those various uses is the way it evolved? You can give arguments like that about the spine but you can't really do it about language. There's a huge literature growing all the time on what's called "evolution of language" - libraries full of it now, the last twenty or thirty years mainly. It's very curious in a certain number of ways. One reason it's curious is because the topic doesn't exist. Languages don't evolve. They change but they don't evolve. That's quite different. Evolution means change in the genetic basis for language, what's called the universal grammar, "UG", in contemporary terminology.
It's also interesting to compare the huge library of speculations - and they are speculations - about what's called evolution of language, really means evolution of the capacity for language - compare that with incomparably simpler topics like evolution of the communication system of bees - by any measure that's a far simpler question but it's barely studied in biology because it's recognised to be too hard. On the other hand evolution of the language capacity, which is incomparably more difficult, not only because of the complexity but you don't have fossil evidence and so on, that's a huge topic. Actually a little bit is known about it, not very much. One thing that is known with considerable confidence is that in the past roughly 50 to 80,000 years, since humans left Africa, our ancestors left Africa, there's been no evolution of the language capacity, it's stayed identical, and there's very strong evidence for that [..]
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If you look at the archeological evidence there is a sudden leap in creative activity, sometimes called The Great Leap Forward by ??? anthropologists, roughly around 75,000 100,000 years ago, somewhere in that neighbourhood. [..]
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.. and as soon as those attempts were made, some very puzzling phenomena were discovered. It's commonly the case when you begin to look at some topic closely, it turns out everything you believed was wrong. [..]
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.. one puzzle about language that came to light about sixty years ago and is still very much debated, and bears on the question [..] take, say, the sentence "instinctively eagles that fly swim" and ask yourself what instinctively goes with. Well it goes with swim, not with fly. Similarly suppose you raise a question and you ask "Can eagles that fly swim?" Can goes with swim not with fly, which is a curious fact because a computational procedure is involved which is quite complex. There is a minimal distance relation that is true of the actual linkage, but it's minimal structural distance, it's the two things that are closest to each other when you look into the structures, and that's a complex computational problem. On the other hand if it worked the other way through proximity instead of structural distance, it would be a trivial computational problem, you'd just check the closest verb to instinctively or to can and that's the one it's associated with. That's elementary - elementary computational problem. But language doesn't use the simple computation, it uses a complex one, which ought to be puzzling - and is puzzling, I think. And it's not just true of these examples, it's true of every construction that's known in every language that's known, so there's something far reaching about it. [..]
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Now onto the main business, for me, for now. From 2012, approximately, to date, I have in one or other form studied, analysed and even, at various points, traded on the 'financial markets' - for example on 'derivatives' of stocks, currency 'pairs' (eg the euro, the pound, the dollar) and so on. From 2018 to date (2024, summer), I have had a growing number of 'methods' which seem to be correctly based on some equivalent of or actual 'physical law' pertaining to how prices move in markets where people are trading on financial instruments. I will only present here the specific discoveries I made and the numbers, precise or approximate case by case, involved. As for 'external validation' - I can tell you that Benoit Mandelbrot and George Soros have both stated in public, and you can dig that stuff up, their own position on these matters, and I think that their statements about this stuff is definitely worth reading as soon as possible. For example when Soros talks about 'reflexivity'. Mandelbrot talks about 'a fractal view of risk'.
So on to my stuff. In about 2012 I decided to give up trying to build web sites and trying to generate ad revenue and affiliate revenue - I had been fairly successful but to specialise in it would need funding, support and time, and on top of that giants like Google and Amazon were emerging and it was clear the moment Ed Snowden "revealed all" that I was never going to be a massive money maker in such a corrupt and centrally controlled universe as the retail and commercial space of the worldwide web.
Since childhood I had loved 'stocks and shares' - and had enjoyed playing computer games pertaining to them and even doing "penny share" trading on paper when I was young and preppy, briefly. I even bought some shares in the pre electronic age, so to speak, ie when you had to phone up and place the order by telling a person. It was excellent. Anyway, post Snowden I found myself testing out numerous stock trading games in the late era of flash games, and whilst those who knew I was doing this laughed at me for doing it - to their simplistic minds what I was doing appeared to be simplistic. In reality the main game I used to figure out the longterm plan, a flash game called Stock Market 60 - it was based on realistic market movements and in the longrun I came to understand that it only had a couple of flaws - mainly that it didn't show any 'crash' years, and you can't understand how markets work, in terms of price movement, if you only look at a few good years. Secondly it didn't really factor in the trading fees or 'spread' in buy/sell price involved. But aside from that it was invaluable. It set me up to understand where to look for the answers - to the question of how to profit from markets for real, using today's powerful online tools. Other games gave me insights, but that one provided a foundation by making it clear what the underlying process of money making is. The game showed how over a year you could make 10 to 20 percent, by just being reasonably intelligent. Not hard at all. And that's how stock markets really work. Except when they crash it all goes arse over elbows or whatever the expression is. And so such a thing isn't really a 'business', it's just a game, like poker, where sometimes you win but in the longrun you lose. That wasn't what I sought to do. I felt sure that the new tools available to us (at that time and more so now) would enable me to (a) produce the same type of percentage gain in a much shorter time, eg a month, and (b) protect myself powerfully against the crash periods.
I was correct about both those things but incorrect, back in 2012 when I decided this, that it would take only one to five years to figure it all out. In 2018 I had indeed come up with the first truly powerful knowledge and working algorithm. But in practical money-raising terms I had nothing, nothing which the humans would do anything but scorn, until about 2022, and even then what I had was insufficient as a way to make money when a thousand arseholes are raining limitation, penury, contempt, exclusion and judgment on you. For such circs I needed something WAAAY more potent, and that took until this very summer, the summer of 2024.
Most of the early maths etc is well recorded by me online and I'll add the links here shortly, but let's talk through it all from the beginning and all of the earliest maths and models and so on. From the computer game to the 2018 algo was a lot of work which was massively wrong or stupid, as well as some good ideas. No money was made indeed 'much' was lost during the first years. Luckily I only invested a few 1000 quid. The knowledge gained was way more valuable than that. The first thing I got working was a thing I called "the minute book method".