Weekend Reading

 

Intelsense Insights

Quantamental Q30

Quantamental Q30 has been around for more than 2 years and has seen the ups and downs of the Covid crash and rally, Ukraine-Russia war and the tech meltdown and recessionary fears in the US and its impact on the emerging markets. Yet, it has delivered a solid ~34% CAGR over this period. All it requires is 15 mins of time per month to execute. Embrace a completely hands-off systematic approach to investing. You can subscribe to it from here: Smallcase: https://intelsense.smallcase.com/smallcase/INSMO_0003 Directly: https://www.intelsense.in/#!/Subscription

Creating a new history on Wikipedia

Posing as a scholar, a Chinese woman spent years writing alternative accounts of medieval Russian history on Chinese Wikipedia, conjuring imaginary states, battles, and aristocrats in one of the largest hoaxes on the open-source platform.   One of her longest articles was almost the length of “The Great Gatsby.” With the formal, authoritative tone of an encyclopedia, it detailed three Tartar uprisings in the 17th century that left a lasting impact on Russia, complete with a map she made.   One article she tampered heavily with was on the deportation of Chinese in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and ’30s. It was so well-written it was selected as a featured article and translated into other languages, including English, Arabic, and Russian, spreading the damage to other language editions of Wikipedia.   The hoax started with an innocuous intention. Unable to comprehend scholarly articles in their original language, she pieced sentences together with a translation tool and filled in the blanks with her own imagination. “As the saying goes, in order to defend a lie, you must tell more lies,” she wrote. Before long, they had accumulated into tens of thousands of characters, which she was reluctant to delete. https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgbwm/chinese-woman-fake-russian-history-wikipedia

Many of the things that you believe right now are utterly wrong

At various times throughout the history of humankind, our most brilliant scientists and philosophers believed many things most eight-year-olds now know to be false: the earth was flat, the sun revolved around the earth, smoking cigarettes was good for digestion, humans were not related to apes, the planet was 75,000 years old, or left-handed people were unclean.   Around 100 years ago, doctors still thought bloodletting (that is, using leeches or a lancet to address infections) was useful in curing a patient. Women were still fighting for the right to vote, deemed too emotional and uneducated to participate in democracy, while people with darker skin were widely considered subhuman. The idea that the universe was bigger than the Milky Way was unfathomable, and the fact the earth had tectonic plates that moved beneath our feet was yet to be discovered.   It is challenging to accept the fact that much of what we believe right now will, in 20, 100, 500, or 1,000 years, seem as absurd as some of the ideas above. But it would take a great deal of arrogance to believe anything else. https://www.persuasion.community/p/misinformation-is-here-to-stay-and

The biggest lesson in investing

The biggest lesson is to stay the course and be focused on the long-term. And, when you might have an economic downturn or downturn in markets to think far enough ahead to see that as an opportunity and stay invested. Often the times when you feel most like getting out of the markets is the time when you shouldn’t.   And, when you look back on it, you can barely see Black Monday in terms of the long term chart of equity investment. It will have been many people on that day who decided that investing in equities wasn’t for them, and they will have lost out on a great deal.   So, the biggest lesson I’ve learned is not to panic in the short term. But, try to stay focused and invested and the moments when you feel really, really sick to your stomach, that is almost always the right time to be buying more and getting more exposure to equities in the long term. https://www.livewiremarkets.com/wires/2-the-biggest-lesson-from-35-years-of-investing

On clear thinking by Danny Kahneman

What gets in the way of clear thinking is that we have intuitive views of almost everything. So as soon as you present a problem to me, I have some ready made answer. What gets in the way of clear thinking are those ready made answers, and we can’t help but have them.   We have beliefs because mostly we believe in some people, and we trust them. We adopt their beliefs. We don’t reach our beliefs by clear thinking, unless you’re a scientist or doing something like that. There’s a fair amount of emotion when you’re a scientist as well that gets in the way of clear thinking. Commitments to your previous views, being insulted that somebody thinks he’s smarter than you are. I mean lots of things get in the way, even when you’re a scientist. So I’d say there is less clear thinking than people like to think.   Very quickly you form an impression, and then you spend most of your time confirming it instead of collecting evidence. https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/daniel-kahneman/

First synthetic embryos created

Researchers have created the world’s first “synthetic embryos” in a groundbreaking feat that bypassed the need for sperm, eggs and fertilisation.   Scientists at the Weizmann Institute in Israel found that stem cells from mice could be made to self-assemble into early embryo-like structures with an intestinal tract, the beginnings of a brain, and a beating heart.   Known as synthetic embryos because they are created without fertilised eggs, the living structures are expected, in the near term, to drive deeper understanding of how organs and tissues form during the development of natural embryos.   But researchers believe the work could also reduce animal experimentation and ultimately pave the way for new sources of cells and tissues for human transplantation. For example, skin cells from a leukaemia patient could potentially be transformed into bone marrow stem cells to treat their condition. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/aug/03/scientists-create-worlds-first-synthetic-embryos