ogni lasciata è persa. One life, live it. or Opportunity seldom knocks twice. – Italian proverb
Donald Knuth: “programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do.” (for vibe coding, it’s just a tool. if you are using it to confuse other programmers and make it hard for people to understand the code, then it is not programming.)
None of us is as smart as all of us. (this is talking about the market.)
It is about quality not quantity when it comes to living.
猫猫这几天晚上都在喵喵叫。以前是从楼下叼了东西上来，用叫声通知我们，告诉我们她很能干。现在是更大声地叫，像小孩子的哭声，很委屈，说怎么没人陪我玩了？
from index fund to ETF, exchange-traded fund for diversification
it was computer that made the index fund feasible in 1970s.
the research done by Scholes and Black has indicated some market ineffeiciencies that could potentially be mined such as the tendency for less volatile stocks, thos with a lower “beta” for greater returns.
the total rational participants makes an effeicient market.
the volatility of the market could be manufactured.
what we are witnessing today is the slow, almost imperceptible motion of a growing deep ocean swell that will form into a massive wave as it hits the investment beaches. – Dean LeBaron, 1975
only small secrets need protection. Big secrets are protected by the public’s incredulity. – Joseph Goebbels
Wag the dog is a political term for the act of creating a diversion from a damaging issue usually through military force. The metaphor originally referred to an important or powerful entity (the dog) being controlled by a less important one (the tail). It later became used to describe a type of diversionary foreign policy where military action is used to distract from other issues.
“If you can’t beat the market, you should consider joining it.” said Charles Ellis. This is the same as “wanting the market wants.” It seems reasonable. But how to walk this talk is not that simple.
- Bogle’s Vanguard: the prospectus of the “First Index Investment Trust” was filed formally with SEC in May 1976. It projected that the cost of managing an index fund of S&P500 would be 0.3 percent annually in operating expense, and 0.2 percent in transaction costs – roughly a tenth of the all-in cost of an actively managed fund. In the end, FIIT raised only $11.32 million on August 31, 1976. FIIT was renamed as Vanguard Index Trust in 1980, and later the Vanguard 500 Index Fund. At the end of 1982, its assets were just $100 million. It reached $1 billion in 1988.
Michael Lipper: The jury is still out, but you have to keep costs so low that there’s very little profit in indexing for conventional mutual fund management companies. Besides, most money managers have a hard time swallowing the idea that you can’t beat the market. It’s a paradox they’re not willing to accept yet. (1977)
the name of the game is to be the best. that is the motto of capitalism. who wants to be operated on by an average surgeon, be advised by an average lawyer, be an average registered representative, or do anything no better or worse than average?
On May Day 1975, US regulators had abolished the practice of fixed commissions for stock trades.
the 1978 Revenue Act generated the 401(k) retirement plan. It encouraged Americans to save for their own pension through stock funds – this buoyed virtually every investment company.
In September 1980, Vanguard reached $3 billion of assets under management. the company jumped into the 401(k) business in 1983, and by the end of the decade it managed over $47 billion. this positioned Vanguard as a low-cost provider in a high-cost industry. that is the competitive edge for Vanguard.
Book: Burton Malkiel, A Random Walk down Wall Street
Bogleism
| Whenever Jack Says: | What He Means Is: |
|---|---|
| I know it’s not your fault. | It’s your fault. |
| You decide. | Do what I would do. |
| I’m sure it’s my own fault. | Well it sure isn’t my fault. |
| I need it by 3:00. | I need it by 1:00. |
| Something doesn’t look right here. | You screwed the whole thing up. |
| Don’t spend too much time on it. | Stay as late as you need, make sure it’s right. |
| Pick me up around 7:00ish. | Pick me up at 7:00 and not one second later. |
- tales of efficient markets, the benefits of diversification, and the importance of low costs
Over time, he (David Booth) spotted an obvious blind spot in its mix of fund managers and financial securities—the pension plan had plenty of managers still trying to pick the best stocks in the S&P 500, as well as an internal index fund, but had no exposure to smaller stocks. This was common among big institutional investors at the time. The stocks of smaller companies tend to be far more volatile, and trading conditions vastly trickier than for the big blue-chip members of the S&P 500. At the time, there weren’t even any dedicated indices just for smaller companies.
An equity fund that would invest only in smaller stocks. That would even the playing field for smaller companies. It’s the most dynamic part of the US economy, but they’re being starved of capital.
- In August 1981, IBM launched its first-ever personal computer, initially priced at just $1,565.
Luckily, the US stock market rebounded in 1982, and small caps enjoyed a particularly strong year. The inaugural DFA fund returned nearly 29 percent, compared to the S&P 500’s 14.7 percent gain. That was a boon to DFA’s sales pitch, and by early 1983 its assets under management were approaching the $1 billion mark.
“Rolf Banz, a Swiss protégé of Myron Scholes, had been using the CRSP data compiled in Chicago to calculate the average returns of smaller stocks, and found that while they were far more volatile than the better-known blue-chip stocks, they offered far better returns in the long run. In the 1926–75 period, Banz studied, the average annual rate of return from large stocks was 8.8 percent, while smaller ones boasted an 11.6 percent rate of return.”
Eugene Fama: The stock market conforms to this, but only to a degree. Stocks do fall or rise 1 percent more often than 2 percent — but they also tend to fall by a statistically improbable amount far more often than a normal distribution would imply, Fama’s 1964 thesis showed. In the jargon of statisticians, stock market returns show a nasty tendency of having “fat tails” on an otherwise normal bell curve.
Moreover, Fama’s thesis — titled “The Behavior of Stock-Market Prices” — corroborated earlier work by the likes of Mandelbrot and Samuelson which argued that markets are close to random and therefore impossible to predict. As the young economist wrote in the introduction, “The series of price changes has no memory, that is, the past cannot be used to predict the future in any meaningful way.”
Eugene Fama: The net effect of the efforts of thousands upon thousands of investors continually trying to outsmart each other was that the stock market was efficient, and in practice hard to beat. Most investors should therefore just sit on their hands and buy the entire market.
- Perhaps the stock market wasn’t entirely efficient, and maybe there were indeed ways to beat it in the long run?
Stephen Ross’s “arbitrage pricing theory” and Barr Rosenberg’s “bionic betas” posited that the returns of any financial security are the result of several systematic factors.
“In 1973, Sanjoy Basu, a finance professor at McMaster University in Ontario, published a paper that indicated that companies with low stock prices relative to their earnings did better than the efficient-markets hypothesis would suggest. Essentially, he showed that the value investing principles espoused by Benjamin Graham in the 1930s—which revolved around buying cheap, out-of-favor stocks trading below their intrinsic worth—was a durable investment factor. By systematically buying all cheap stocks, investors could in theory beat the broader market over time.”
“Then Banz showed the same for small caps, another big moment in the evolution of factor investing. Follow-up studies on smaller stocks in Japan and the UK showed similar results, so in 1986 DFA launched dedicated small-cap funds for those two markets as well. In the early 1990s, finance professors Narasimhan Jegadeesh and Sheridan Titman published a paper indicating that simply surfing market momentum—in practice buying stocks that were already bouncing and selling those that were sliding—could also produce market-beating returns.”
Behavioral economists, on the other hand, argue that factors tend to be the product of our irrational human biases. For example, just like how we buy pricey lottery tickets for the infinitesimal chance of big wins, investors tend to overpay for fast-growing, glamorous stocks, and unfairly shun duller, steadier ones. Smaller stocks do well because we are illogically drawn to names we know well. The momentum factor, on the other hand, works because investors initially underreact to news but overreact in the long run, or often sell winners too quickly and hang on to bad bets for far longer than is advisable.
- Bogle: “I had no idea that, within a decade, the ETF idea [proposed by Nathan Most at their meeting] would ignite a flame that would change not only the nature of indexing, but also the entire field of investing. I can unhesitatingly describe Nathan Most’s visionary creation of the ETF as the most successful financial marketing idea so far during the twenty-first century. Whether it proves to be the most successful investment idea of the century remains to be seen.”
On March 9, 1990, the TSE unveiled TIPS, the Toronto 35 Index Participation Fund, the first ever ETF.
On January 29, 1993, SPDR finally began trading. It charged investors a feee of 0.2 percent a year. By the summer of 1993, SPDR finally broke the $300 million of assets mark it needed to break even on the cost of running it, and by the end of its first year it held $461 million.
Today, ETFs are a $9 trillion industry.
- Charles Ellis’s book “The Loser’s Game”
“Indexing was a scale game, and we wanted to jump ahead of our competitors and seize more assets around the world,” says Fred Grauer.
IN THE EARLY 1990S, a Morgan Stanley executive named Robert Tull had assiduously studied the prospectuses of LOR’s SuperShares, Canada’s TIPS, and the Amex/State Street’s SPDR, and became enamored with the idea of listed index funds. He used them to design something the investment bank dubbed “Optimized Portfolios as Listed Securities,” or OPALS.
- Barclays Global Investors
In 1989, Fred Grauer therefore convinced Wells Fargo to sell 50 percent of WFIA to Nikko Securities, a Japanese brokerage, for $125 million. The new combined company was given the unwieldy name Wells Fargo Nikko Investment Advisors, or WFNIA, and managed $70 billion at the time.
In the end, Barclays’ deeper pockets prevailed, and after a long courtship it bought WFNIA for $440 million in 1995.
WFNIA was smashed together with the asset management arm of Barclays de Zoete Wedd, the bank’s securities division, and together they would manage $256 billion at the time. Although the combined firm was eventually renamed Barclays Global Investors, it became a reverse takeover. Grauer soon led the combined company, its headquarters stayed in San Francisco, and the academic culture of WFIA eventually permeated the whole organization.
In early April 2009, $4.2 billion offer from CVC for iShares ETF.
At 8:20 p.m. in New York on June 11, 2009, BlackRock announced that it had struck an agreement to buy BGI from Barclays in a deal valued at the time at $13.5 billion, through a combination of cash and the UK bank acquiring a 20 percent stake in BlackRock. CVC received $175 million as compensation for Barclays breaking its deal to sell iShares.
- ETF’s big three: BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street
Larry Fink: “I believed I had figured out the market, but I was wrong — because while I wasn’t watching, the world had changed.” 2016 UCLA commencement speech
John Wooden: “If I am through learning, I am through.”
the investment game was changing all the time. adapt and learn.
- Book: Trillions by Robin Wigglesworth
Dead Poets Society 在梦想中追求自由,在生活中找寻诗意
- quotes from movies
John Keating: No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.
John Keating: We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?
Henry David Thoreau: “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
McAllister: “Show me the heart unfettered by foolish dreams and I’ll show you a happy man.”
John Keating: “But only in their dreams can men be truly free. ‘Twas always thus, and always thus will be.”
John Keating: They’re not that different from you, are they? Same haircuts. Full of hormones, just like you. Invincible, just like you feel. The world is their oyster. They believe they’re destined for great things, just like many of you. Their eyes are full of hope, just like you. Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because you see, gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen. You hear it?… Carpe… Hear it?… Carpe. Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.
“So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won’t do in your essays.” – N.H. Kleinbaum, Dead Poets Society
Font type: Dead Poets Society movie poster: Classic Roman The tagline “He was their inspiration. He made their lives extraordinary.” above the title is set in Albertus. Emporia Roman vs. LucaPacioliRough.
notes
蒲渠波：美国军队的实力从未衰退，衰退的是指挥链的智力。伊朗的神棍政权是否该打，从来不是问题；真正的问题是，一支绝世武功的军队，却受困于一个志大才疏的总司令，以及一群唯唯诺诺却心怀鬼胎的参议幕僚。古人说得很清楚：一将无能，累死三军。伊朗的泥潭，也许只是开始。
link: blog - abuse of notation
the central limit theorem: Through it, the most random, unimaginable chaos can lead to striking predictability.
You started with a distribution of possible outcomes that has no structure at all — equal chances of rolling 1 through 6. But by taking an average of multiple measurements, then repeating that process over and over, you get a precise, predictable, mathematical structure: the bell curve.
Laplace distilled this structure into a simple formula, the one that would later be known as the central limit theorem. No matter how irregular a random process is, even if it’s impossible to model, the average of many outcomes has the distribution that it describes. “It’s really powerful, because it means we don’t need to actually care what is the distribution of the things that got averaged,” Witten said. “All that matters is that the average itself is going to follow a normal distribution.”
the central limit theorem has limits of its own. It only works when you’re combining many samples, and those samples need to be independent. If they’re not — for example, if you only run a national presidential poll in a single small town in Maine — repeating the experiment won’t get you closer to the expected bell curve.
book: The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide By Steven W. Thrasher
book: The Overseer Class: A Manifesto By Steven W. Thrasher
Toni Morrison: I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.
Kiese Laymon: Many of us have made a life of hoping to get chosen for jobs, chosen for awards, chosen for acceptance from people, structures and corporations bred on white supremacy. We’re hoping to get chosen by people who cannot see us. Knowing that they hate and terrorize us doesn’t stop us from wanting to get chosen. source: Guardian 2015
- When Richard Nixon said “I’m not a crook” on the 1973 TV, everyone knew he was a crook. Now when Trunmp said “I’m a crook and so what” with his corruption, he got covered by both Congress and Supreme Court. Trump admin is the start of self-destruction of USA from the top.
朴正熙1917年11月14日出生于韩国庆尚北道。1944年毕业于东京日本陆军士官学校，升至陆军少将、第二军副司令。1961年5月16日，他率领部下发动5·16军事政变，出任国家再建最高会议副议长、议长。1962年兼任韩国代总统，成为韩国的第三任总统。1963年，他以陆军大将军衔退役，以民主共和党候选人的身份竞选连任总统。1969年10月，韩国国会通过了宪法修正案，使已经连任两届的朴正熙得以再连任一届总统。1972年10月，朴正熙宣布“为了实现祖国和平统一这一韩民族的最高理想，韩国需要改革政治体制”，并开始实施非常措施，即所谓的“十月维新”。后来,韩国统一主体国民会议制定出改变总统任期限制的“维新宪法”。根据这部宪法，总统任期6年，无连任限制，并且不再实行全民普选，而是由统一主体国民会议选举出总统。1972年12月23日，2359名统一主体国民会议代议员在奖忠体育馆举行了总统选举，这就是所谓的“体育馆选举”。朴正熙获得2357票，当选第8届总统。整个选举是一场只有朴正熙一个人参加并最终由朴正熙当选总统的闹剧。这段历史被人们称为“维新独裁”。1978年7月6日，朴正熙又毫无悬念地全票当选总统，并于12月27日宣誓就职，开启了他的第5个总统任期。
book: David Apatoff, The art of Bernie Fuchs
walipini: A walipini is an earth-sheltered cold frame.
M31, or Andromeda galaxy, is the nearest major galaxy to our own Milky way
DC3V flexible LED filament or ceramic hard
book: Harvey Mansfield, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control: The History of Modern Political Philosophy, 2026
book: Harvey C. Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World, 2023
book: Captive Minds: A Study of Manipulation, by leading philosophers and political thinkers Avishai Margalit and Assaf Sharon, 2026 Harvard
Helen Vendler, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, 2010
Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook (Ecco, 1994)