read recommendations

people and outlets

people and outlets i follow that post regularly

• Gwern - writes about ai, statistics, psychology, great repository of interesting papers.
• Lyn Alden - the US, investing. @LynAldenContact
• Zlotan Pozsar - shadow banking, liquidity flows, central banking, and shifting reserve currency regiemes.
• Wolf Street - financial market news, monetary economics.
• Goldman Sachs Top of Mind - in depth reports on current global issues.
• Tyler Cowen's Blog "Marginal Revolution" and Podcast "Conversations with Tyler"
• The Macro Compass by Alfonso Peccatiello - substack on macro trends.
• John Kemp Energy News - energy markets research.

interesting reads

papers, books, essays i find interesting, insightful and relevant

tech and ai

• Leopold Aschenbrenner's "Situational Awareness: the Decade Ahead" - an ex-openai employee's perspective on the future outlook of ai. very much disagree with his risk assessment and his strategic geopolitical suggestions but it's a (somewhat technical) deep dive by a very smart insider.
• "How LLMs work" by 3Blue 1Brown - a visual intro to understanding transformer models.
• Answering the Call of Automation: How the Labor Market Adjusted to Mechanizing Telephone Operation - labor market adaptation in response to automation. complimenting this: Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation - proves ai is already having very significant productivity and labour saving impacts highlights interesting skill-based disparities.
• "Cultural Evolution of Cooperation among LLM Agents" by Google Deep Mind - a super interesting paper on how "societies" of LLM models develop cooperative behaviors over generations in a Donor Game. Claude 3.5 wins!

economics and markets

• Mandelbrot's "The (mis)Behaviour of Markets: a Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward" - challenges the assumptions of gaussian distributions and efficient markets. applies fractal geometry to markets, shows that they exhibit self-similarity. for more technical stuff see "The Variation of Certain Speculative Prices" (1963) and "A Multifractal Model of Asset Returns" (1997).
• Rothbard's "The Mystery of Banking" - a detailed and historically accurate explanation (and critique) of how the banking system works.
• "Political Cycles and Stock Returns" - develops a model linking political cycles and stock returns to time-varying risk aversion, showing that higher stock market returns under Democratic presidents are driven by high risk aversion during their elections, rather than their policies.
• the Baumol effect - how productivity gains in one sector raise costs in less productive sectors.

investing

• Seth Klarman's "Margin of Safety" - value investing with a focus on exploiting market inefficiencies, maintaining a contrarian mindset, and prioritizing preservation of capital. (find on Libgen or emial me for a pdf)
• "Intelligence and Global Bias in the Stock Market" - uses a log-normal model to reveal how biases, driven by managerial discretion and accounting practices, systematically distort stock prices from their intrinsic values. identifies stable proxies for true fundamentals.
• Warren Buffett's "The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville" - arguing against the efficient market hypothesis by demonstrating that disciplined investing in undervalued securities consistently outperforms the market.