I saw Asimo in person about a year ago. According to Kurzweil, his intelligence should double every 13 months or so. So in around 25 years, Asimo may be about one billion times smarter than he is now. Compared to one year ago, he can now run twice as fast and do simple office work. I like Fark.com’s headline: “Honda’s ASIMO robot now capable of menial office tasks like greeting visitors, making coffee, finding Sarah Connor.”

In his early 17th century book, Il Gioco degli Scacchi (The Game of Chess), Pietro Carrera - the father of the Sicilian defence - offers advice on how to prepare for a chess match that I thought might be good advice for traders as well:

You must abstain some days from meat to clear your brain, and also let blood. You should take purgatives and emetics to drive away the humours, and must above all be sure to confess your sins and receive spiritual absolution just before sitting down to play in order to counteract the demoniacal influence of magic spells.

Good morning, my name is Ugly, and I am a loser. I have it in me to do serious financial damage to my account.

Dear Diary,
CUTR got killed today - ouch.

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How differently would you feel if someone you loved was dying of depression instead of cancer?
Would you judge them on their illness?
Would you blame them for their disease?
I can’t stand ignorant people who have no sympathy for the mentally ill. It makes me want to use my kung fu skills and beat the shit out of them.
Someone who is diabetic takes medicine because an organ is not secreting the correct amount of chemicals. When the brain errors in the same way, it is suddenly the fault of the victim.

“It is one of the great paradoxes of the stock market that what seems too high usually goes higher and what seems too low usually goes lower.” - William O’Neil

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investors.com is free December 13-15. All you have to do is put in an email address.

Good morning, my name is Ugly, and I am a loser. I have it in me to do serious financial damage to my account.

Dear Diary,
I guess there is that one meeting thing today. Whatever.
I noticed CHE a year ago - it still looks awesome.
According to yahoo - 101.47% of MCX is owned by insiders. I think this one could fly. It is not very liquid, though.
VPRT is a recent IPO that goes up almost every day.
I like MVCO.
BKD is another recent IPO that goes up every day - why would it stop now?

This Friday I am visiting the trading office to check it out.

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“It is one of the great paradoxes of the stock market that what seems too high usually goes higher and what seems too low usually goes lower.” - William O’Neil

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Good morning, my name is Ugly, and I am a loser. I have it in me to do serious financial damage to my account.

Dear Diary,
TIE bit the dust big time on Friday. TIE has been up there at the #2 spot on the top 100 alpha list for a while. Friday’s candle looks really ugly for TIE.
Congratulations REDF, you made a new all-time high.
GRS and GGR both look good.
WSSI is performing nicely.

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The dinner was a lot of fun. There was a lot of delicious, healthy food and a lot of interesting conversation. Aubrey de Grey first spoke about the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) project and its goals. Then Kurzweil talked for about an hour on the Singularity. Most of Kurzweil’s slide show presentation contained exponential graphs (like this one or this one) of the rapid growth of information technology. Based on the charts one can predict that the next 25 years will change more than the last 500. If the growth continues at its current pace, computers will soon become self-aware, humans will be able to copy themselves to a disk and make backups, there will be full submersion virtual reality, as well as almost anything else you can and cannot imagine.
As chartists, we know that “the trend is your friend” and not to fight the trend. And never try to guess a top. But we also know that no chart goes up forever. I am excited to see how it all plays out. Regardless of the outcome, I think the world 25 years from now will be a much different place.
I wasn’t able to get a hold of an Othello board beforehand, and Aubrey didn’t bring his either. Weak attempts at creating a board from plastic cups didn’t work either and we finally agreed to play online at some point in the future.
Kurzweil couldn’t talk about FatKat (Financial Accelerating Transactions from Kurzweil Adaptive Technologies), no matter how much I pestered him. He did confirm what I already knew: that a small hedge fund will be launched in January, the program has returned more than 100% for the last two years, and Michael W. Brown - former CFO of Microsoft and chairman of NASDAQ - is an investor.