In 1997 I got a call from Barclays saying I appeared to have quite a lot of money doing not very much. Could they send someone round with some ideas. Essentially they had an investment arm based in Peterborough which was more effective than having money in a current account. They suggested I invest £250,000 with them.
Six years later I wrote a simple letter to the Times which said something like "I invested £250,000 in 1997 with Barclays investments.....during which time they completed 52 separate transactions and when I withdrew it six years later it had reduced in value to £130,000. Is this what is meant in the Samuel Jackson commercial as " Fluent in Finance"?
It appeared in the paper with its own cartoon and shortly after I got a call saying they had several letters telling the same story and asking if they could give out my address. I said that was fine and I got several letters saying how good it was to know they weren't alone. One asked if I could lead a group of investors to complain!
There is a GTO solution to HU no limit poker. It require no use of tells or gut feeling or even adjusting to how your opponents plays.
In fact armed with the GTO solution, you could tell your opponent your exact cards and your strategy given every scenario...and even with all that information they would not be able to beat you.
Humans have coded a program which provides a near perfect estimation of a Nash Equilibrium solution to limit Heads Up Poker. You can actually go on the web and play it, and they will show you its strategy in every situation, and you still can't beat it.
For No Limit, there is still a way to go, but the current bot playing the humans is beating 4 of the top 20 HU specialists in the world, having played trillions of hands against itself in search of a Nash Equilibrium solution.
Thanks. To quote "I did not know that"
It is why the likes of CMU are working on this and invested millions. It isn't the challenge of winning at poker as such, more a demonstration / discovery that extremely complex Nash Equilibrium can be learned (or at least extremely well estimated) by computers.
The main approach is the use of self play, with lots of clever pruning of game trees i.e. range of possible decisions in order to make the problem tractable.
This kind of thing could be extremely valuable across a lot of fields that require complex decision making.
I would be more interested on whether an AI computer could work out a bidding system at Bridge that would be substantially more efficient than the current human ones.
There would be two options:
1) Anything goes 2) System to be 'legal' under the rules of the EBU/ ACBL or whoever.
There are several 'bridge playing' computer programmes, but without exception the bidding system is 'hard-wired' and cannot evolve. (The play of the cards is, however, usually very good even though it tends to be monte-carlo simulations).
There is a GTO solution to HU no limit poker. It require no use of tells or gut feeling or even adjusting to how your opponents plays.
In fact armed with the GTO solution, you could tell your opponent your exact cards and your strategy given every scenario...and even with all that information they would not be able to beat you.
Humans have coded a program which provides a near perfect estimation of a Nash Equilibrium solution to limit Heads Up Poker. You can actually go on the web and play it, and they will show you its strategy in every situation, and you still can't beat it.
For No Limit, there is still a way to go, but the current bot playing the humans is beating 4 of the top 20 HU specialists in the world, having played trillions of hands against itself in search of a Nash Equilibrium solution.
Thanks. To quote "I did not know that"
It is why the likes of CMU are working on this and invested millions. It isn't the challenge of winning at poker as such, more a demonstration / discovery that extremely complex Nash Equilibrium can be learned (or at least extremely well estimated) by computers.
This kind of thing could be extremely valuable across a lot of fields that require complex decision making.
Can you recommend any reading that a lay person with a decent but non-expert grasp of economics, game theory and mathematics might benefit from?
In 1997 I got a call from Barclays saying I appeared to have quite a lot of money doing not very much. Could they send someone round with some ideas. Essentially they had an investment arm based in Peterborough which was more effective than having money in a current account. They suggested I invest £250,000 with them.
Six years later I wrote a simple letter to the Times which said something like "I invested £250,000 in 1997 with Barclays investments.....during which time they completed 52 separate transactions and when I withdrew it six years later it had reduced in value to £130,000. Is this what is meant in the Samuel Jackson commercial as " Fluent in Finance"?
It appeared in the paper with its own cartoon and shortly after I got a call saying they had several letters telling the same story and asking if they could give out my address. I said that was fine and I got several letters saying how good it was to know they weren't alone. One asked if I could lead a group of investors to complain!
What asset classes was the money invested in ?
Sounds like you'd have been better off at the races.
@MarkKleinmanSky: Exclusive: Ex-Chancellor George Osborne to take role with Blackrock Investment Institute, world's biggest asset manager to announce later.
Human error is rarely what the name says it is. It is sometimes human performance variance, but even more usually environmental variance. I would expand upon Richard's lists of measures by more explicitly breaking down management processes - organisational structure and culture, performance management systems (in particular) and alignment of goals with ethics and safety values are absolutely key to getting behaviours you want and minimizing behaviours you don't.
I agree with most of this, particularly your last sentence.
But - and this is a big but - one of the things we have forgotten as a society (and this has been shown up in the City but not just there) is the importance of character and judgment. Controls and processes and all the rest are important. But in the end you cannot - certainly in banking - set down rules and processes for every simple thing which could happen. You have to rely on people who have the right character and judgment when they have to make a decision when there is no rulebook, when there is no manager to ask, when there is no-one looking.
And what you need at that moment - and there are far more such moments in life than we perhaps think - is someone whose character, whose judgment, whose default instincts, are to try and do the right thing. Hard to define - but you know it when you see it - and when you don't.
Judgment is like a muscle. The more you use it the better judgment you develop. We have as a society I think forgotten its value. That is one reason why we got a lot of highly intelligent people in the City behaving in scummy ways. They forgot to ask themselves the question that we should all - almost without realizing it - be asking ourselves on a daily basis: "Not just can I do this?" (i.e. do the rules permit it). But "Should I do it?"
The difference between "can" and "should" is what a professional, moral conscience - judgment, if you will - is.
"Timshel" is a word I love, that I learned from a book I enjoyed called East of Eden. I have been trying to crowbar it in to conversation regarding "TM the PM", but it is apt here as well.
@MarkKleinmanSky: Exclusive: Ex-Chancellor George Osborne to take role with Blackrock Investment Institute, world's biggest asset manager to announce later.
@MarkKleinmanSky: Exclusive: Ex-Chancellor George Osborne to take role with Blackrock Investment Institute, world's biggest asset manager to announce later.
@MarkKleinmanSky: Exclusive: Ex-Chancellor George Osborne to take role with Blackrock Investment Institute, world's biggest asset manager to announce later.
No other than asking them regularly why they kept buying and selling so often. It seemed they would buy a share watch it go down nd then sell it. I thought they were only buying me rubbish but in fact most of us were being bought the same shares (depending on the amount invested).
@MarkKleinmanSky: Exclusive: Ex-Chancellor George Osborne to take role with Blackrock Investment Institute, world's biggest asset manager to announce later.
@MarkKleinmanSky: Exclusive: Ex-Chancellor George Osborne to take role with Blackrock Investment Institute, world's biggest asset manager to announce later.
Now that it's president Trump, despite all the fuss, what will the UK protestors do? Did they eventually ban him from the country? Or was it just the usual virtue-signalling?
What with Brexit as well, they could spend the next five years protesting. A dream occupation for them, surely?
There is a GTO solution to HU no limit poker. It require no use of tells or gut feeling or even adjusting to how your opponents plays.
In fact armed with the GTO solution, you could tell your opponent your exact cards and your strategy given every scenario...and even with all that information they would not be able to beat you.
Humans have coded a program which provides a near perfect estimation of a Nash Equilibrium solution to limit Heads Up Poker. You can actually go on the web and play it, and they will show you its strategy in every situation, and you still can't beat it.
For No Limit, there is still a way to go, but the current bot playing the humans is beating 4 of the top 20 HU specialists in the world, having played trillions of hands against itself in search of a Nash Equilibrium solution.
Thanks. To quote "I did not know that"
It is why the likes of CMU are working on this and invested millions. It isn't the challenge of winning at poker as such, more a demonstration / discovery that extremely complex Nash Equilibrium can be learned (or at least extremely well estimated) by computers.
This kind of thing could be extremely valuable across a lot of fields that require complex decision making.
Can you recommend any reading that a lay person with a decent but non-expert grasp of economics, game theory and mathematics might benefit from?
Hmm...good question, as this goes down the rabbit hole quickly of expert Game theory stuff combined with expert poker.
I think there are lectures on YouTube given by the slides author, Bill Chen (and some of his buddies), to MIT students. Chen now works in finance, but wrote a very good book at the maths of poker in which he introduced very good explanations of Game Theory in relation to poker. Before even all this bot / ML / AI, lots of poker players developed their game massively because of his book.
Perhaps the UK could also approach Canada for political union - her majesty might have to move to Ottawa but it would save us having to go through the costly and unpredictable process of Brexit as we would be able to join the Canadian trade agreement with the EU.
Brilliant.
There's been a campaign for years for WA, OR and BC to merge to form Cascadia. Which has to be the worst proposed name for a country that I've ever heard.
I love that article, so well written. On a cheerier note, it appears that more recent work has all but discredited the alarming forecasts about the collapse of Cumbre Vieja in the Canaries. So at least the East Coast will be safe .
It's a interesting article about Cascadia but there's a glaring error in the paragraph beginning "Finally, in a 1996 article in Nature..." The tsunami would have crossed the international dateline and reached Japan on 28th January, not 27th.
What you call character and judgment is what organisational culture should be there to provide. I describe organisational culture as what people do when no-one is looking. And it is possible to create and manage a culture so that, when the rulebook does not provide specific or applicable guidance, people will generally make the decision you'd prefer them to.
This is a key principle from Tom Peters classic, In Search of Excellence. By creating a strong culture around a few key values, you can give the workforce far more autonomy because you can trust that decisions made will not betray the core values of the organisation.
HROs cannot work without autonomy as decisions have to be made rapidly in unpredictable changing environments by those with the most knowledge of that particular situation, invariably not the executives both those on the front line. Thus culture becomes essential.
The financial industry is a 'high consequence industry' in that even small errors can cause massive consequences. It has much to learn from HRO principles and practice. If I have not already recommended it to you, try Sutcliffe and Weick's Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty.
For a more fun read about a very practical application of organizational culture that ultimately saved lives, Shackleton's Way by Morrell and Capparrell.
Thank you for these references. I will look them up. I actually used some of the stuff you wrote in that Nature article a while back in one of my talks - and I did credit you!
I think there is much to learn from other industries about how they manage risk and develop culture. It is - for me anyway - an endlessly fascinating topic because we see around us so many examples of what happens when it goes wrong.
Not to be pompous (or at least not too much), but "how to be good" or "how to make people want to/do good" and "how to stop them doing bad stuff" is at the heart of the human condition. Always has been. Always will be.
@MarkKleinmanSky: Exclusive: Ex-Chancellor George Osborne to take role with Blackrock Investment Institute, world's biggest asset manager to announce later.
Yet another member of the liberal metropolitan elite taking a big Brexit hit, then :-D
In 1997 I got a call from Barclays saying I appeared to have quite a lot of money doing not very much. Could they send someone round with some ideas. Essentially they had an investment arm based in Peterborough which was more effective than having money in a current account. They suggested I invest £250,000 with them.
Six years later I wrote a simple letter to the Times which said something like "I invested £250,000 in 1997 with Barclays investments.....during which time they completed 52 separate transactions and when I withdrew it six years later it had reduced in value to £130,000. Is this what is meant in the Samuel Jackson commercial as " Fluent in Finance"?
It appeared in the paper with its own cartoon and shortly after I got a call saying they had several letters telling the same story and asking if they could give out my address. I said that was fine and I got several letters saying how good it was to know they weren't alone. One asked if I could lead a group of investors to complain!
What asset classes was the money invested in ?
Sounds like you'd have been better off at the races.
Mainly the FTSE. To start with the shares were about £7,000 each which accounted for about £180,000 the rest in unit trusts -Europe Japan US-in units of £10,000
@MarkKleinmanSky: Exclusive: Ex-Chancellor George Osborne to take role with Blackrock Investment Institute, world's biggest asset manager to announce later.
Re: Cyclefree article Are the changes that fin tech is already bringing to commercial SME lending such as P2PFA, going to cause radical changes throughout the sector? With 50% growth pa in P2PFA, the oligopolies of main street banks may look time limited. Note that peer to peer now starting into mortgages albeit at very very small levels. Here is one recent article. http://www.businessinsider.com/p2pfa-q4-2016-stats-strong-end-to-year-p2p-funding-circle-2017-1?r=UK&IR=T
Both myself and Rod formerly of this parish have invested in this one. Less defaults, better security and higher rates than Funding Circle.
The loanbook isn't as mature, availability is lower and *sob sob* rates no longer trundle in without question at 12%, but yr still 'likely' to end up 7-8% RoR ahead...
Thanks. Our high street banks do not seem to realise what is coming their way.
@MarkKleinmanSky: Exclusive: Ex-Chancellor George Osborne to take role with Blackrock Investment Institute, world's biggest asset manager to announce later.
@MarkKleinmanSky: Exclusive: Ex-Chancellor George Osborne to take role with Blackrock Investment Institute, world's biggest asset manager to announce later.
With those shoes?
Blackrock is where one of his key advisors, Rupert Harrison, went to a couple of years back.
@MarkKleinmanSky: Exclusive: Ex-Chancellor George Osborne to take role with Blackrock Investment Institute, world's biggest asset manager to announce later.
I hope for them he is not handling their economic forecasting.
I would be more interested on whether an AI computer could work out a bidding system at Bridge that would be substantially more efficient than the current human ones.
There would be two options:
1) Anything goes 2) System to be 'legal' under the rules of the EBU/ ACBL or whoever.
There are several 'bridge playing' computer programmes, but without exception the bidding system is 'hard-wired' and cannot evolve. (The play of the cards is, however, usually very good even though it tends to be monte-carlo simulations).
Bridge is not something I know a lot about, but I wonder how would it differ from similar problems in poker where in no limit hold'em you can bet an infinite different amounts on each betting street?
I believe that it is thought that there a Nash Equilibrium strategy exists for bridge, and thus I would think similar techniques currently employed for "solve" poker would be applicable.
In 1997 I got a call from Barclays saying I appeared to have quite a lot of money doing not very much. Could they send someone round with some ideas. Essentially they had an investment arm based in Peterborough which was more effective than having money in a current account. They suggested I invest £250,000 with them.
Six years later I wrote a simple letter to the Times which said something like "I invested £250,000 in 1997 with Barclays investments.....during which time they completed 52 separate transactions and when I withdrew it six years later it had reduced in value to £130,000. Is this what is meant in the Samuel Jackson commercial as " Fluent in Finance"?
It appeared in the paper with its own cartoon and shortly after I got a call saying they had several letters telling the same story and asking if they could give out my address. I said that was fine and I got several letters saying how good it was to know they weren't alone. One asked if I could lead a group of investors to complain!
Groucho Marx's definition of a stockbroker: "A man who takes your money and invests it until it is all gone."
Mr. Roger, my sympathies. An almost 50% decline is pretty damned rubbish.
Thank you but a useful lesson and compared to some of the letters I got from people who had retired my circumstances were not nearly as bad. I think they got caught in the tech bubble. I remember them buying me £10,000 of Vodafone for 250 each and my accountant saying they couldn't be worth that if everyone in the world used them!.
Perhaps the UK could also approach Canada for political union - her majesty might have to move to Ottawa but it would save us having to go through the costly and unpredictable process of Brexit as we would be able to join the Canadian trade agreement with the EU.
Brilliant.
There's been a campaign for years for WA, OR and BC to merge to form Cascadia. Which has to be the worst proposed name for a country that I've ever heard.
I love that article, so well written. On a cheerier note, it appears that more recent work has all but discredited the alarming forecasts about the collapse of Cumbre Vieja in the Canaries. So at least the East Coast will be safe .
That has always seemed to be the problem with fund management. There's no possible quality control. No doubt those same useless people will still be in business and claiming to be masters of the world.
To be fair, they do help to keep politicians just off the bottom of the table of useless people.
There's something to be said about not having enough money to worry about investing it.
On topic: Excellent article. I have long wondered whether a policy of not encouraging the financial sector to grow any larger in the UK was a correct one, whether laissez faire / let 'em could be applied in reverse to HSBC whenever they chunter about HQs, whether indeed HBOS could/should have been sold to the Chinese to rebalance things back when they went west.
I guess the answers to these questions ultimately come down to whose sweat pays the debt. Questions of ownership and headquartering may take some risk away from HMG, but many liabilities would still fall the UK's way.
The other consequence of the banks' power (and political expediency) has been to ignore the largest part of UK net debt, in favour of a very narrow focus on government debt.
10 years after the financial crisis, we are no nearer to having a grown up conversation about such things.
What you call character and judgment is what organisational culture should be there to provide. I describe organisational culture as what people do when no-one is looking. And it is possible to create and manage a culture so that, when the rulebook does not provide specific or applicable guidance, people will generally make the decision you'd prefer them to.
This is a key principle from Tom Peters classic, In Search of Excellence. By creating a strong culture around a few key values, you can give the workforce far more autonomy because you can trust that decisions made will not betray the core values of the organisation.
HROs cannot work without autonomy as decisions have to be made rapidly in unpredictable changing environments by those with the most knowledge of that particular situation, invariably not the executives both those on the front line. Thus culture becomes essential.
The financial industry is a 'high consequence industry' in that even small errors can cause massive consequences. It has much to learn from HRO principles and practice. If I have not already recommended it to you, try Sutcliffe and Weick's Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty.
For a more fun read about a very practical application of organizational culture that ultimately saved lives, Shackleton's Way by Morrell and Capparrell.
Thank you for these references. I will look them up. I actually used some of the stuff you wrote in that Nature article a while back in one of my talks - and I did credit you!
I think there is much to learn from other industries about how they manage risk and develop culture. It is - for me anyway - an endlessly fascinating topic because we see around us so many examples of what happens when it goes wrong.
Not to be pompous (or at least not too much), but "how to be good" or "how to make people want to/do good" and "how to stop them doing bad stuff" is at the heart of the human condition. Always has been. Always will be.
If that is what fascinates you, I have a whole reading list for you. Why We Do What We Do by Edward Deci is a good start.
Looks like I'll be in London Friday a week today. Fancy meeting up to discuss all this and what I am working on. Sounds like a lot of it is of direct relevance either to your work or your interests. Planning a book this year.
What you call character and judgment is what organisational culture should be there to provide. I describe organisational culture as what people do when no-one is looking. And it is possible to create and manage a culture so that, when the rulebook does not provide specific or applicable guidance, people will generally make the decision you'd prefer them to.
This is a key principle from Tom Peters classic, In Search of Excellence. By creating a strong culture around a few key values, you can give the workforce far more autonomy because you can trust that decisions made will not betray the core values of the organisation.
HROs cannot work without autonomy as decisions have to be made rapidly in unpredictable changing environments by those with the most knowledge of that particular situation, invariably not the executives both those on the front line. Thus culture becomes essential.
The financial industry is a 'high consequence industry' in that even small errors can cause massive consequences. It has much to learn from HRO principles and practice. If I have not already recommended it to you, try Sutcliffe and Weick's Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty.
For a more fun read about a very practical application of organizational culture that ultimately saved lives, Shackleton's Way by Morrell and Capparrell.
Thank you for these references. I will look them up. I actually used some of the stuff you wrote in that Nature article a while back in one of my talks - and I did credit you!
I think there is much to learn from other industries about how they manage risk and develop culture. It is - for me anyway - an endlessly fascinating topic because we see around us so many examples of what happens when it goes wrong.
Not to be pompous (or at least not too much), but "how to be good" or "how to make people want to/do good" and "how to stop them doing bad stuff" is at the heart of the human condition. Always has been. Always will be.
If that is what fascinates you, I have a whole reading list for you. Why We Do What We Do by Edward Deci is a good start.
Looks like I'll be in London Friday a week today. Fancy meeting up to discuss all this and what I am working on. Sounds like a lot of it is of direct relevance either to your work or your interests. Planning a book this year.
I would love to meet up. I am however driving up to Keswick on that day so it depends on timing. A breakfast meeting sounds impossibly City-ish! How long are you here for?
@rowenamason: George Osborne joins his old aide Rupert Harrison at BlackRock as a part time senior adviser - won't be resigning as an MP
Damn - that's who my pension is with - will the management charges be rising ? Will I receive circulars with fantastical warnings of doom and gloom which fail to materialise ?
There is a GTO solution to HU no limit poker. It require no use of tells or gut feeling or even adjusting to how your opponents plays.
In fact armed with the GTO solution, you could tell your opponent your exact cards and your strategy given every scenario...and even with all that information they would not be able to beat you.
Humans have coded a program which provides a near perfect estimation of a Nash Equilibrium solution to limit Heads Up Poker. You can actually go on the web and play it, and they will show you its strategy in every situation, and you still can't beat it.
For No Limit, there is still a way to go, but the current bot playing the humans is beating 4 of the top 20 HU specialists in the world, having played trillions of hands against itself in search of a Nash Equilibrium solution.
Thanks. To quote "I did not know that"
It is why the likes of CMU are working on this and invested millions. It isn't the challenge of winning at poker as such, more a demonstration / discovery that extremely complex Nash Equilibrium can be learned (or at least extremely well estimated) by computers.
This kind of thing could be extremely valuable across a lot of fields that require complex decision making.
Can you recommend any reading that a lay person with a decent but non-expert grasp of economics, game theory and mathematics might benefit from?
Hmm...good question, as this goes down the rabbit hole quickly of expert Game theory stuff combined with expert poker.
I think there are lectures on YouTube given by the slides author, Bill Chen (and some of his buddies), to MIT students. Chen now works in finance, but wrote a very good book at the maths of poker in which he introduced very good explanations of Game Theory in relation to poker. Before even all this bot / ML / AI, lots of poker players developed their game massively because of his book.
@rowenamason: George Osborne joins his old aide Rupert Harrison at BlackRock as a part time senior adviser - won't be resigning as an MP
Damn - that's who my pension is with - will the management charges be rising ? Will I receive circulars with fantastical warnings of doom and gloom which fail to materialise ?
Osborne obviously gets a wodge of cash out the deal, but how does it benefit BlackRock ?
If Osborne isn't retiring, does taking the job nevertheless indicate he thinks the odds on a return or future premiership are longer than they might be?
There is a GTO solution to HU no limit poker. It require no use of tells or gut feeling or even adjusting to how your opponents plays.
In fact armed with the GTO solution, you could tell your opponent your exact cards and your strategy given every scenario...and even with all that information they would not be able to beat you.
Humans have coded a program which provides a near perfect estimation of a Nash Equilibrium solution to limit Heads Up Poker. You can actually go on the web and play it, and they will show you its strategy in every situation, and you still can't beat it.
For No Limit, there is still a way to go, but the current bot playing the humans is beating 4 of the top 20 HU specialists in the world, having played trillions of hands against itself in search of a Nash Equilibrium solution.
Thanks. To quote "I did not know that"
It is why the likes of CMU are working on this and invested millions. It isn't the challenge of winning at poker as such, more a demonstration / discovery that extremely complex Nash Equilibrium can be learned (or at least extremely well estimated) by computers.
This kind of thing could be extremely valuable across a lot of fields that require complex decision making.
Can you recommend any reading that a lay person with a decent but non-expert grasp of economics, game theory and mathematics might benefit from?
Hmm...good question, as this goes down the rabbit hole quickly of expert Game theory stuff combined with expert poker.
I think there are lectures on YouTube given by the slides author, Bill Chen (and some of his buddies), to MIT students. Chen now works in finance, but wrote a very good book at the maths of poker in which he introduced very good explanations of Game Theory in relation to poker. Before even all this bot / ML / AI, lots of poker players developed their game massively because of his book.
In 1997 I got a call from Barclays saying I appeared to have quite a lot of money doing not very much. Could they send someone round with some ideas. Essentially they had an investment arm based in Peterborough which was more effective than having money in a current account. They suggested I invest £250,000 with them.
Six years later I wrote a simple letter to the Times which said something like "I invested £250,000 in 1997 with Barclays investments.....during which time they completed 52 separate transactions and when I withdrew it six years later it had reduced in value to £130,000. Is this what is meant in the Samuel Jackson commercial as " Fluent in Finance"?
It appeared in the paper with its own cartoon and shortly after I got a call saying they had several letters telling the same story and asking if they could give out my address. I said that was fine and I got several letters saying how good it was to know they weren't alone. One asked if I could lead a group of investors to complain!
Groucho Marx's definition of a stockbroker: "A man who takes your money and invests it until it is all gone."
Re: Cyclefree article Are the changes that fin tech is already bringing to commercial SME lending such as P2PFA, going to cause radical changes throughout the sector? With 50% growth pa in P2PFA, the oligopolies of main street banks may look time limited. Note that peer to peer now starting into mortgages albeit at very very small levels. Here is one recent article. http://www.businessinsider.com/p2pfa-q4-2016-stats-strong-end-to-year-p2p-funding-circle-2017-1?r=UK&IR=T
Both myself and Rod formerly of this parish have invested in this one. Less defaults, better security and higher rates than Funding Circle.
The loanbook isn't as mature, availability is lower and *sob sob* rates no longer trundle in without question at 12%, but yr still 'likely' to end up 7-8% RoR ahead...
Thanks. Our high street banks do not seem to realise what is coming their way.
These are halfway towards credit card rates! Sainsbury's Bank or Nationwide Bldg Society were were offering personal loans at 'typical' rates of 3.6%/y, though 'typical' doesn't seem to mean that everyone with a clean credit record - meaning me - can get them.
A friend was offered about 5%/y by his own bank, Santander. He has a CCJ.
I think for rates to be this low business borrowers must be subsidising personal borrowers. How can peer-to-peer operations lend to creditworthy borrowers at 6-8%/y if the cheaper banks undercut this rate? They must be going for the borrowers with a few CCJs.
Also, small companies can't create money out of nothing. Large banks can play this trick, to multiply their profits. It's called fractional reserve banking.
Re: Cyclefree article Are the changes that fin tech is already bringing to commercial SME lending such as P2PFA, going to cause radical changes throughout the sector? With 50% growth pa in P2PFA, the oligopolies of main street banks may look time limited. Note that peer to peer now starting into mortgages albeit at very very small levels. Here is one recent article. http://www.businessinsider.com/p2pfa-q4-2016-stats-strong-end-to-year-p2p-funding-circle-2017-1?r=UK&IR=T
Both myself and Rod formerly of this parish have invested in this one. Less defaults, better security and higher rates than Funding Circle.
The loanbook isn't as mature, availability is lower and *sob sob* rates no longer trundle in without question at 12%, but yr still 'likely' to end up 7-8% RoR ahead...
Thanks. Our high street banks do not seem to realise what is coming their way.
These are halfway towards credit card rates! Sainsbury's Bank or Nationwide Bldg Society were were offering personal loans at 'typical' rates of 3.6%/y, though 'typical' doesn't seem to mean that everyone with a clean credit record - meaning me - can get them.
A friend was offered about 5%/y by his own bank, Santander. He has a CCJ.
I think for rates to be this low business borrowers must be subsidising personal borrowers. How can peer-to-peer operations lend to creditworthy borrowers at 6-8%/y if the cheaper banks undercut this rate? They must be going for the borrowers with a few CCJs.
Also, small companies can't create money out of nothing. Large banks can play this trick, to multiply their profits. It's called fractional reserve banking.
Fractional reserve banking multiplies bank's assets and liabilities. It may multiply profits or losses depending upon the interest margins,, bad debts, and operating costs.
Comments
Six years later I wrote a simple letter to the Times which said something like "I invested £250,000 in 1997 with Barclays investments.....during which time they completed 52 separate transactions and when I withdrew it six years later it had reduced in value to £130,000. Is this what is meant in the Samuel Jackson commercial as " Fluent in Finance"?
It appeared in the paper with its own cartoon and shortly after I got a call saying they had several letters telling the same story and asking if they could give out my address. I said that was fine and I got several letters saying how good it was to know they weren't alone. One asked if I could lead a group of investors to complain!
The main approach is the use of self play, with lots of clever pruning of game trees i.e. range of possible decisions in order to make the problem tractable.
This kind of thing could be extremely valuable across a lot of fields that require complex decision making.
There would be two options:
1) Anything goes
2) System to be 'legal' under the rules of the EBU/ ACBL or whoever.
There are several 'bridge playing' computer programmes, but without exception the bidding system is 'hard-wired' and cannot evolve. (The play of the cards is, however, usually very good even though it tends to be monte-carlo simulations).
Sounds like you'd have been better off at the races.
What with Brexit as well, they could spend the next five years protesting. A dream occupation for them, surely?
You're got to feel a little sympathy.
I guess this is a start,
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-s50-poker-theory-and-analytics-january-iap-2015/lecture-notes/MIT15_S50IAP15_L7_GameTheor.pdf
I think there are lectures on YouTube given by the slides author, Bill Chen (and some of his buddies), to MIT students. Chen now works in finance, but wrote a very good book at the maths of poker in which he introduced very good explanations of Game Theory in relation to poker. Before even all this bot / ML / AI, lots of poker players developed their game massively because of his book.
@michaelsavage: Lots of lucrative speeches, a new job with Black Rock, an abolished seat... will George Osborne really be a candidate in 2020?
I think there is much to learn from other industries about how they manage risk and develop culture. It is - for me anyway - an endlessly fascinating topic because we see around us so many examples of what happens when it goes wrong.
Not to be pompous (or at least not too much), but "how to be good" or "how to make people want to/do good" and "how to stop them doing bad stuff" is at the heart of the human condition. Always has been. Always will be.
Reportedly Trump has already been given the 'football', before attending church this morning.
sic transit gloria mundi
I believe that it is thought that there a Nash Equilibrium strategy exists for bridge, and thus I would think similar techniques currently employed for "solve" poker would be applicable.
https://twitter.com/mailonline/status/822428392909836288
Fascinating read
You have my genuine sympathies.
That has always seemed to be the problem with fund management. There's no possible quality control. No doubt those same useless people will still be in business and claiming to be masters of the world.
To be fair, they do help to keep politicians just off the bottom of the table of useless people.
There's something to be said about not having enough money to worry about investing it.
I guess the answers to these questions ultimately come down to whose sweat pays the debt. Questions of ownership and headquartering may take some risk away from HMG, but many liabilities would still fall the UK's way.
The other consequence of the banks' power (and political expediency) has been to ignore the largest part of UK net debt, in favour of a very narrow focus on government debt.
10 years after the financial crisis, we are no nearer to having a grown up conversation about such things.
Your praise for George has become somewhat lukewarm, Mr N!
Looks like I'll be in London Friday a week today. Fancy meeting up to discuss all this and what I am working on. Sounds like a lot of it is of direct relevance either to your work or your interests. Planning a book this year.
Miss Cyclefree, they say the way to make a small fortune is to enter F1 when you have a large one.
Mr. Roger, indeed.
Were people really giving their kids names like "Kellyanne" 50 years ago?
Why don't you vanilla mail me.
saved the world you know :-)
Thanks. I'll try the Chen book.
Sainsbury's Bank or Nationwide Bldg Society were were offering personal loans at 'typical' rates of 3.6%/y, though 'typical' doesn't seem to mean that everyone with a clean credit record - meaning me - can get them.
A friend was offered about 5%/y by his own bank, Santander. He has a CCJ.
I think for rates to be this low business borrowers must be subsidising personal borrowers. How can peer-to-peer operations lend to creditworthy borrowers at 6-8%/y if the cheaper banks undercut this rate? They must be going for the borrowers with a few CCJs.
Also, small companies can't create money out of nothing. Large banks can play this trick, to multiply their profits. It's called fractional reserve banking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgHlAdSpn7Y