Antonis Ballis

Associate Professor in Financial Technology and Programme Director of MSc FinTech at Aston Business School, Aston University.

[Antonis Ballis @antonisballis]

One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction.

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

We've published a paper that explains our views on AI competition between the US and China.

The US and democratic allies hold the lead in frontier AI today. Read more on what it’ll take to keep that lead: https://t.co/TgJBeodWYK

[David Duvenaud @DavidDuvenaud]

Announcing Talkie: a new, open-weight historical LLM! We trained and finetuned a 13B model on a newly-curated dataset of only pre-1930 data. Try it below!

with @AlecRad and @status_effects 🧵

[Antonis Ballis @antonisballis]

Just back from 3 days in Tokyo looking at Japan’s CBDC push and the pace of e‑payments. With the digital wallet and prepaid market racing toward $227B by 2026, a BoJ‑backed CBDC isn’t a “nice to have” anymore. Having that extra public money option in a volatile period is exactly the kind of redundancy and resilience modern payment systems need.

[NBER @nberpubs]

Marketplaces for consumer loans come with almost zero search costs, but hidden costs coming from choice complexity and reputation concerns can limit consumer search, from Alex Günsberg and @CameliaKuhnen https://t.co/vcxCn9116T

[Aniket Panjwani @aniketapanjwani]

Just finished recording a ~4 hour course on Claude Code for beginners

About half is edited already - should be out on YouTube early next week!

Subscribe if you haven't already and you'll be the first to know: https://t.co/j1pUNOiEcV

[NBER @nberpubs]

Featured in the latest Digest: China's Rise in Global Research

https://t.co/Tps66f6Px3

[He He @hhexiy]

https://t.co/H3TAsaThYQ

[Jun Du @jundu_econ]

Is Trump a Secret Agent for BYD? 😉https://t.co/bbWbc3AGDQ

[Antonis Ballis @antonisballis]

Delighted that one of my latest pieces of work here at @AstonBusiness has been picked up by @Investopedia.

"Bitcoin is neither a pure safe haven nor a speculative anomaly-it occupies a flexible, contingent position that may shift based on crisis characteristics, investor sentiment, and geographic context."

Proud of the work done with my co-authors. Links to both the article and the full paper below.

https://t.co/00m5m3mDJC

https://t.co/R096NQpHvi

[NBER @nberpubs]

AI agents put in simulations of novel settings offer an alternative for applying theory, requiring minimal or no modifications, from @BenSManning and @johnjhorton https://t.co/dtF1DfRLuC

[Antonis Ballis @antonisballis]

HSBC and Standard Chartered securing Hong Kong’s inaugural stablecoin licenses represents a calculated institutionalization of digital credit. By operating under the HKMA’s 2025 regulatory framework, these systemic banks are effectively deploying a narrow-banking model via distributed ledger technology.

​The structural mandate for 100% backing in High-Quality Liquid Assets (HQLA) mitigates traditional maturity transformation risks, while the prohibition on interest serves as a deliberate friction point to prevent aggressive deposit disintermediation. Ultimately, the efficacy of these instruments as a medium of exchange depends on interoperability; without cross-platform integration, they risk becoming "walled gardens" with marginal utility over existing RTGS systems. https://t.co/MwKDbavvFy

[Antonis Ballis @antonisballis]

Άρθρο μας στην Καθημερινή της Κυριακής (01/03). «Είναι οι πληρωμές, ανόητε: Η αθέατη στρατηγική ευαλωτότητα της Ευρώπης».
Ευχαριστούμε την @Kathimerini_gr για τη φιλοξενία.
https://t.co/x9usHHRP4C

[Zhuo Xi @birdxi1988]

You can see how special the Lognormal distribution is through Maximum Entropy:
• Fix mean + variance → Normal
• Fix log-mean + log-variance → Lognormal
• Fix log-mean → Power law
So Lognormal behaves nearly Normal with small σ, but mimics Power Law tails with Large σ
#RWRI

[NBER @nberpubs]

The standard approach to portfolio selection first forecasts asset returns and then plugs them into an optimizer, but this separation is deeply problematic, from Yijie Wang, Hao Gao, @camharvey, Yan Liu, and Xinyuan Tao https://t.co/9EN0v1I48B

[Antonis Ballis @antonisballis]

https://t.co/pRqRoj8ry3

[NBER @nberpubs]

AI valuations can be both rational and fragile: necessary to sustain the investment boom along an optimistic path, yet vulnerable to confidence reversals, from Ricardo J. Caballero https://t.co/pbD9kM56kg

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

This friend of mine was about to sell some of his gold holdings until he saw this.

[Antonis Ballis @antonisballis]

Another powerful option in Europe’s arsenal: the $8 trillion in US bonds and equities held by European investors (nearly double the rest of the world combined), sitting largely in banks and funds. A coordinated sell-off, even partial, could flood the market, crash Treasury prices, drive yields sharply higher, weaken the dollar significantly, and amplify the pain of any tariffs far beyond trade alone. It’s economic MAD, but it underscores who’s really funding America’s deficits if push comes to shove over Greenland.

[Tej Parikh @tejparikh90]

Check out the latest edition of my @FT newsletter. (1/2)

Tech dominance is about innovation, and diffusion. That's why China may have the edge in the AI race:
https://t.co/tQfZfuYOVk