I will post more about the dinner later - it was a lot of fun. In the meantime, here is a picture (a little blurry) of me chillin’ with my homies, Kurzweil and de Grey.

“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

– Click here for today’s full list –

“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

– Click here for today’s full list –

“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

– Click here for today’s full list –

Wired had an article yesterday about computers that trade:

Computers have some major advantages over people in the trading game: They don’t sleep. They don’t ask for pay. And they aren’t subject to the equilibrium-killing forces of emotion, which have been known to provoke even the most disciplined human trader to abandon logic from time to time.

“They’re my partners,” said Greg Ballard, a trader based in Fort Smith, Arkansas, of his PC collection. “I make them work 24 hours a day, don’t give them vacation or anything.” They’re programmed to execute trades based on a periodically changing set of algorithms that track stock-index futures.

“Typically, emotions are your worst enemy,” he said. “You don’t want to accept the fact that you made a mistake, so you let that mistake grow. One of the benefits of having a more rule-based approach is you take emotions out of your decisions.”

I was just reading last night, in Ray Kurzweil’s book The Age of Spiritual Machines, about neural networks and genetic algorithms used for trading (keep in mind that this book was published six years ago):

Q: These evolution-based investment programs, are they really better than people? I mean, should I get rid of my stockbroker?
A: As of this writing, this is a controversial question. The security brokers and analysts obviously don’t think so. There are several large funds today that use genetic algorithms and related mathematical techinques that appear to be outperforming more traditional funds. Analysts estimate that in 1998, the investment decisions for 5 percent of stock investments, and a higher percentage of money invested in derivative markets, are made by this type of program, with these percentages rapidly increasing. The controversy won’t last because it will become apparent before long that leaving such decisions to mere human decision making is a mistake.

The advantages of computer intelligence in each field will become increasingly clear as time goes on, and as Moore’s screw continues to turn. It will become apparent over the next several years that these computer techniques can spot extremely subtle arbitrage opportunities that human analysts would perceive much more slowly, if ever.

Update: check out today’s article in The Age via kurzweilai.net regarding neural computation:

The “brain”, grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a single rat embryo, has been taught to fly an F-22 jet simulator by scientists at the University of Florida.

“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

– Click here for today’s full list –

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,
The temperature is rising over at WBMD.
The top 3 stocks, ranked by alpha, had strong moves today - NTRI, TIE and NMTI.
BOOM! Just like that - a new all-time high. Nice breakout - it could run for a while.
TRID is also continuing its upward move.
PWEI and IFO are running fast and furious.
I have liked GFIG for a while.
CLMS is another stock with a fine looking chart.

There are too many good looking stocks for me to believe the market is going to turn down from here. Besides, it usually continues in the direction that it is moving.

* user agreement — how to use ugly picks

I was just invited to the exclusive Mprize dinner this Thursday evening in Boston. With only about 35 invitation-only guests, it should be a great opportunity for me to ask Kurzweil about his artificial-intelligence investment program, FatKat, and to play a game of Othello with Aubrey de Grey. Anybody have any good questions they would like me to ask? Would an uglychart.com t-shirt be considered “snappy casual?”

“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

– Click here for today’s full list –

GTXC, which is up over 100% in the last month or so, is a “provider of innovative IP multimedia technologies” that claims to have developed “the first true artificial intelligence:”

GTX Global Cognitive Robotics(TM) is an integrated software solution that mimics human behavior including a dialogue oriented knowledge database that contains static and dynamic data relating to human scenarios. The knowledge further includes translation, processing and analysis components that are responsible for processing of vocal and/or textual and/or video input, extracts emotional characteristics of the input and produces instructions on how to respond to the customer with the appropriate substantive response and emotion based on relevant information found in the knowledge base.

via slashdot