Machine learning in Business

When #Business #Analytics meets Machine Learning. Machine learning, #ML, #AI, #Algorithms, #businessanalytics

[Thomas James Investing @Thomas_james_1]

In March I told you to wait for ‘capitulation volume’ to confirm a bottom.

We got that confirmation on the 20th March and 31st March, and then exploded to new highs.

Yesterday, on Friday, we saw 2x the average volume we’ve seen over the last 2 months.

Sounds like capitulation to me.

[Amy Nixon @texasrunnerDFW]

Probably the most alarming US housing chart I’ve ever seen:

In the late 1980s, the majority of homebuyers were families with young children

Today, just 24% of homebuyers have young children

[OddStats @OddStats]

Mondays after terrible Fridays for the NASDAQ

[Next Science @NextScience]

🚨 SCIENTISTS ARE QUESTIONING THIS POPULAR "HEALTHY" SWEETENER

It's found in countless sugar-free drinks, keto snacks, and protein bars. But new research suggests erythritol may affect blood vessels linked to brain and heart health.

Scientists stress that the research is still ongoing and does NOT prove erythritol directly causes strokes. However, the findings are raising important questions about a sweetener millions consume every day.
⚠️ A reminder: "Sugar-free" doesn't always mean risk-free.

Source:
University of Colorado Boulder. Journal of Applied Physiology. Witkowski, M., et al. Nature Medicine.

[Sahil Bloom @SahilBloom]

This is a cheat code for consistency...

[Grant Stenger (hiring) @GrantStenger]

@0xCheshire @ElmWealth and @richdewey have a great paper on this effect

[柴郡🔔｜Crypto+AI Plus @0xCheshire]

看见一个很离谱的论文……

如果你每天在收盘时买入美光科技，在第二天开盘时立刻卖出，几十年来会获得高达 138,330,342% 的收益。

但如果每天开盘买入，当天收盘时卖出，你的投资最终会几乎全部亏损-99.92%。

作者表示，这一切都是既得利益者的阴谋，所有市场都一样。

是的，包括咱们大 A。

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

Two math olympiad champions wrote a training manual in 1993 on two old Macintosh computers, and every American kid who has won a major math competition in the last decade learned to think from it.

Their names are Sandor Lehoczky and Richard Rusczyk. The book is called The Art of Problem Solving. Most people in math know it as AoPS.

Since 2015, every single member of the US International Math Olympiad team has been an AoPS student. Not most of them. Every one.

That statistic sounds impossible until you understand what the book actually does.

Lehoczky and Rusczyk were not professors. They were competitors. Lehoczky earned the sole perfect AIME score in 1990 and led the national first place team. Rusczyk was a USA Mathematical Olympiad winner and a perfect AIME scorer in 1989. They had both survived the same brutal selection process the book was designed to train students for.

And the first thing they decided was that almost every existing math textbook was teaching the wrong thing.

School math gives you formulas. You memorize them. You apply them. You pass the test. Then you sit down in front of a real competition problem and the formula does not apply, and you have nothing underneath it.

That is the gap. The gap is not knowledge. It is thinking.

The entire premise of AoPS is that problem-solving is a transferable skill, not a bag of memorized tricks. A student who genuinely understands why a technique works can adapt it, combine it with something else, and deploy it in a context they have never seen before. A student who only memorized the technique freezes the moment the problem looks different.

The book teaches the difference between a formula and a method.

A formula tells you what to compute. A method tells you how to see. The students who win olympiads are not the ones who know more formulas. They are the ones who have trained themselves to look at an unfamiliar problem and recognize its structure. To see that this problem is secretly asking the same question as a problem they solved three weeks ago, just dressed differently.

Rusczyk calls this "learning to read the problem." Not reading the words. Reading what the problem is actually asking underneath the words.

The second thing they built into the book is tolerance for being stuck.

Most students treat confusion as a signal to stop. The book treats confusion as the starting point. Every chapter pushes students past the point where the obvious approach runs out. That moment of running out is not failure. That is where the actual thinking begins.

Lehoczky once described it this way. If you can solve a problem quickly, you are not learning. You are performing. Learning only happens when you are past the edge of what you already know.

The book was written on old Macintosh computers in 1993. Rusczyk launched the AoPS website in 2003. Today the community has over one million users. Thousands of students enroll in AoPS online courses every year. Most winners of every major American math competition are AoPS alumni.

A platform built by two kids who were good at math competitions has become the infrastructure that produces the next generation of mathematicians, engineers, and scientists who are good at thinking.

The formulas you memorized in school will eventually be obsolete.

The thinking you trained will not.

What is one problem in your life right now that you have been avoiding because you do not yet know the right formula to solve it?

[Wolf of X @WolfofX]

Humans are 200,000 times more sensitive to petrichor, the smell that follows rain, than sharks are to the smell of blood.

[Possum Reviews @ReviewsPossum]

Last night, I read the entirety of C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. It's a novel told in the form of letters written by a demon to another demon instructing him on ways to manipulate his "patient" to do evil.

This one quote sounded familiar.

[Hereafter @idyllicmusing]

Soil fertility alone explains 34% of the differences in national IQ. Countries on the best soils (Mollisols, Andisols) average 10–15 IQ points higher than those on the wort soils (Oxisols, Ultisols), even before accounting for education or income.
This geographic pattern is visible in real populations. Japan and Taiwan sit on volcanic Andisols and consistently rank among the highest in global intelligence metrics due to their nutrient‑rich, high‑CEC soils. Meanwhile, much of equatorial Africa rests on Oxisols, soils so weathered and nutrient‑stripped that they produce chronically low micronutrient availability.
The further a soil’s pH drifts from 6.5, the more national IQ (MNIQ) declines. If your soil is too acidic (like much of the tropics), zinc and iron become unavailable. If your soil is too alkaline (like the Middle East), micronutrients get locked up too. The correlation between soil fertility and national IQ is r = 0.58, meaning soil alone accounts for 34% of the variation. Explaining 34% of a complex human trait is extremely high.

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

Absolutely incredible.

ALL 7 hourly candlesticks on today's Nasdaq 100 chart were red as tech stocks fell in a literal straight-line lower.

Biggest drop since "Liberation Day."

[James Altucher @jaltucher]

For people who are worried about the market today, I get it. This stuff is very stressful.

So I put together a chart of all of the times the VIX (the "fear index" of the market) was up over 30% in a day (like today) in the past ten years.

23 out of 25 instances the market was higher one month later. The only two times it wasn't was Feb 2020 when Covid hit the economy in March 2020.

What is the underlying message? When people are afraid, they make bad decisions. Do the opposite.

Attached is a chart summarizing my results.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The car that used to be in my garage is currently in an Earth-Mars elliptical orbit and will be there for at least 10 million years

[Master | 最強打野(穢土轉生) @CryptoMaster_70]

Jensen:
Asian parents' culture, toxic😟
I know they love me, I usually “alright, alright..."

黃仁勳今天說了內心話 一路過來真不容易
“亞洲父母有毒 總是會糾正你“
"我63歲了 他們依然覺得我不夠好“

[Mike Investing @MrMikeInvesting]

This rule has proven success, & will guarantee your portfolio to outperform the S&P 500 year after year…

Buy stocks when $VIX is $30.

Buy even more stocks when $VIX is above $45+

Sell stocks when $VIX is $14.

& simply repeat the cycle!

[OddStats @OddStats]

HOLY. FUCKING. SHIT.

You know those terrifying charts that show how "right now" looks sorta like some scary time in the past? Well, this one is a fucking doozy.

The blue line below is the most recent 67 days. The red line is statistically the single most similar 67 day period in stock market history...early Summer 1929. I shit you fucking not.

And you're thinking..."hey, we still have time until it peaked back then." Sure do. And when does that 1929 peak correspond to 2026?

How about *exactly* July OpEx (7/17/26).

HELP ME, ODDSTATS. I'M SCARED AND I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO.

Panic. That's what. Freak the absolute fuck out and sell everything. Buy as many puts as you can.

Be afraid, be very afraid.
They're heeee-ere.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water.
You'll believe an elephant can fly.

But seriously, remember that as scary as this is, 1929 was very different from today. Only men were allowed to trade stocks then. Electricity and the female orgasm hadn't even been invented yet.

We'll probably be fine this time. Maybe.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

An engineering professor who failed math her entire childhood spent years figuring out exactly what had been sabotaging her, and the answer was not low intelligence. It was a hidden mode her brain kept switching into that nobody had ever told her existed.

Her name is Barbara Oakley. The book is called A Mind for Numbers.

She failed math and science from grade school to the end of high school. Numbers felt like a language everyone else had been taught in secret.

So she ran toward the thing she was good at. She enlisted in the Army right after graduation, and the Army paid her to learn Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey.

She got very good at Russian. Good enough to earn a degree in Slavic Languages, serve four years in Germany as a Signal Officer, and rise to Captain.

Then the wall appeared.

She watched her career options shrink because she could not handle the technical side of her own job. The people with math moved up and moved out. The people without it stayed stuck. So at 26 she did something that sounds insane. She left the Army and enrolled in engineering, starting from remedial math, sitting in classrooms with teenagers.

In between, she worked as a Russian translator on Soviet trawlers in the Bering Sea and as a radio operator in Antarctica. Today she is a professor of engineering at Oakland University with a doctorate in systems engineering.

The question that drove her for years was simple. What changed? She was the same brain that failed algebra. Why did it suddenly start working?

The clue was hiding in the one subject she had mastered. She noticed she had never learned Russian by staring at it. She practiced a little every day, walked away, came back, and the language quietly assembled itself between sessions. Math she had attacked the opposite way. Lock eyes with the problem. Push harder. Refuse to look away until it cracks.

It never cracked. And neuroscience explains why.

Your brain has two modes. The focused mode is the one you know. Tight attention, prefrontal cortex engaged, grinding through familiar steps. The diffuse mode is the one nobody teaches you. It runs in the background when you relax. It is loose, wide, and wired for connecting ideas that sit far apart from each other.

Oakley uses a pinball machine to explain the difference. In focused mode, the bumpers are packed tight. Your thought bounces in the same small circle, over the same ground, again and again. In diffuse mode, the bumpers spread out. The thought travels. It reaches parts of the brain the tight loop could never touch.

The trap has a name. The Einstellung effect. The first approach that comes to mind blocks every better approach behind it. The harder you focus, the tighter the loop, the more locked in you become. The grinding feels virtuous. It is actually the cage.

And every time her mind wandered off a math problem as a kid, she dragged it back, believing the wandering was laziness. The wandering was her brain trying to switch into the mode that solves things. She spent ten years fighting the half of her brain that wanted to help her.

You cannot run both modes at once. The diffuse mode only takes over when you genuinely let go. Which is why answers ambush you in the shower, on a walk, at the edge of sleep. Salvador Dali knew this. He napped in a chair holding a key over a plate, and the instant he drifted off, the key dropped, woke him, and he carried the half-formed ideas straight back into focused work. Edison did the same trick with ball bearings. Two of the most inventive minds in history were deliberately farming the mode the rest of us treat as slacking off.

The practical version fits in two sentences. Focus hard on the problem until you stall. Then stop completely, and let the other mode take the shift.

The break is not a reward for the work. The break is the work. It is also why cramming fails and procrastination is fatal. Diffuse mode needs hours and nights between focused sessions to build anything, and procrastination burns that time before the first session even starts.

Oakley failed math for ten years using one mode at full strength.

She became an engineering professor the day she started using both.