Dev's Digressions

 If a coin landed on heads 60% of the time and you are offered 1:1 odds would you play?  Short answer, yes obviously we should play. The expected value is 20% per flip.  EV = 0.6*x - 0.4*x = 0.2 But how much should you bet? This depends on your individual risk appetite. There is a whole area of economics dedicated to studying this known as utility theory . Economists use utility functions to quantify human preferences of different choices. Each individual aims to maximize their utility function. This can be applied to investment decisions with respect to the risk reward trade-off. For a given level of utility there is an indifference curve that represents the tradeoff between additional risk and additional expected return. An investor can be expected to get the same satisfaction from each point on this curve.  This is all a fancy way of saying that traditional risk measurements do not account for the subjective aspect of risk. Everyone has a different attitude toward...

The benefit of social media is that it gives everyone a voice. The downside of social media is that it gives everyone a voice. An example of the latter are pseudo finance "influencers" on LinkedIn. You know, those Entrepreneurs|Founders|Futurists|Evangelists that will post an arbitrary graph along with a GPT scripted paragraph of "investment advice" in an attempt to harvest the content machine for engagement. A staple of these trending travesties is a thing called the Benner Cycle .  The Benner Cycle is a chart of predicted market cycles that was published by an Ohioan farmer Samuel Benner in his book "Benner's Prophecies of Ups and Downs in Prices", which was published in 1884. This chart is intended to predict market movements from 1924 through to 2059 and is described in the book by Benner as a "sure thing". As you can see in the chart there are two overlapping cycles, a major and a minor cycle. The peaks and troughs are assigned as points...

Over the past few years I have repeatedly had the "Who is the tennis GOAT?" debate with a friend of mine, Joe. A lifelong tennis fan, Joe preferes Federer while I, a relatively new convert to the sport, have been most impressed by Djokovic. With little tennis experience at my disposal I don't have a lot of evidence to support either player. However, thanks to Jeff Sackmann, who maintains a publicly available tennis database , what I do have is the result of every ATP Tour match since 1968. So here goes my attempt to leave bias at the door and answer this question once and for all with my good friend (better than Joe), statistics.  Stuff we already know Engaging in this debate generally starts with a list of the grand slams each player has won. This isn't enough to make a comparison on relative abilities though because these impressive tallies were racked up across different time periods, against different crops of players and on different surfaces. Nadal's dominan...