Category Archives: Uncategorized

Google Books on Steroids with Allsearch.ai

January 20, 2023 tremendousblog 1 Comment

Another day, another Generative AI breakthrough! The latest: a search engine that queries thousands of books to answer any question.

It’s called Allsearch.ai. And it just might change research forever.

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Google Books on steroids

Search through the contents of 1000s of books!

AI semantic search finds the most relevant passages & GPT writes a summary

Textbooks, classics, histories, science, economics, tech, philosophy – you name it!

Much much more to come 👀

Link below, enjoy! pic.twitter.com/yxqb1R2f90
— Dwarkesh Patel (@dwarkesh_sp) January 17, 2023

I tested it out this morning with three prompts. Let’s see how it does!

I’ve been hopping into an icy shower every day this week. So first, I asked about the health benefits of cold plunges.

The response wasn’t great, with numerous health benefits ignored.

I don’t think cold exposure protects you from catching the cold. And why Allsearch assumes cold plunges involve a race, I don’t know.

Meanwhile, it missed the benefits to alertness, sleep and hormone levels.

On to prompt # 2…

I decided to go with something more straightforward and historical. This time, Allsearch was on point.

Allsearch correctly notes that the USSR economy was in shambles, which led the government to collapse. Students are going to love using this for their papers!

For the 3rd and final prompt, I dug into the world of technology:

Again, Allsearch’s answer is excellent. It covers personal computing, the space race, and the computer revolution in business.

Where Allsearch beats ChatGPT hands down is in citing sources. If you want to know more about a topic, you have a reading list right there on the page!

You also trust results more when you see where they came from.

I think this is an amazing tool. The results aren’t perfect, but for a version 1.0, it does a great job.

Never one to miss an opportunity, I just contacted the creators to schedule a meeting. This might make a juicy investment. 🙂

What do you think of Allsearch and generative AI? Leave a comment at the bottom and let me know!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Why Crypto is Still Massively Overvalued

December 20, 2022 tremendousblog 2 Comments

Cryptocurrencies have had a painful year. But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

The promise of many major protocols like Ethereum is that they can power useful apps. But despite their giant valuations, almost no one is actually building anything.

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From a new report on the Swiss crypto site Blockzeit:

…according to the data from December 2022, Ethereum (ETH +2.21%) has 183 active developers each day, which is the most among all blockchain protocols and dapps. Cosmos (ATOM +1.41%) and Cardano (ADA +0.18%) came in second and third, respectively, with 145 and 142 active developers. A total of 18 active engineers are presently working on Bitcoin (BTC +0.44%), the most valuable cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

Ethereum has a fully diluted market cap of $148 billion. That’s after dropping by two thirds this year.

That puts the value of Ethereum at over $800 million per developer. This valuation is absurd.

Consider that Microsoft employs about 100,000 of the best coders on earth. And yet, each is worth just $18 million of market cap.

Microsoft carefully screens engineers and hires the best of the best. Almost all of them work full time.

Can every random person who writes a single line of code on Ethereum be worth 40 times as much?

The numbers for other cryptocurrencies are even more stark. Bitcoin has just a handful of engineers, despite a fully diluted market cap of $356 billion.

If we follow Microsoft’s developer to market cap multiple of $18 million, Ethereum is worth just $3.3 billion. That’s 98% less than its current value.

There are real use cases for crypto. But enthusiasm, and prices, got way ahead of reality.

“There’s the signal and the noise. In crypto, 99% of it was noise. But there’s real value and signal there.”
Mark Cuban

I’ll be avoiding this market until I see some real products.

What do you think of crypto valuations? Leave a comment at the bottom and let me know.

The next blog will be on Friday — I’m going camping!

Why the Stock Market’s Inflation Worries Don’t Make Sense

July 1, 2022 tremendousblog 1 Comment

We’ve been seeing some scary inflation numbers recently.

The consumer price index rose 8.6% from last year in the latest report. These eyewatering levels have gone on for months, spooking consumers and markets.

The S&P 500 is down 20% for the year, largely due to worries about inflation.

But strangely, bond markets are actually predicting lower levels of inflation now then when the S&P 500 was at its peak!

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The key number to look at is the 5 year breakeven inflation rate. This figure measures the difference between yields on inflation-protected Treasuries and yields of Treasuries without that protection.

The difference between those bond yields shows how much inflation investors expect.

Markets peaked at the end of 2021. At that time, investors expected inflation of about 2.9% a year over the next five years.

Now, investors expect inflation of just 2.6% through 2027.

The stock market is freaking out about inflation. But the much larger bond market actually predicts falling levels of inflation.

Perhaps what’s really causing the turmoil in stocks today is psychology. People are terrified of losing their money.

That’s a legitimate fear, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the realities of the inflation rate.

I suspect inflation will moderate in the coming few quarters, in line with the bond market’s expectations. And as that happens, I expect stock markets to rise.

Until then, I’m holding my stocks.

What do you think is next for stocks and inflation? Leave a comment at the bottom and let me know!

There will be no blog on Monday for the holiday. I’ll see you on Tuesday.

Have a great holiday weekend everyone! 👋

Correction to Prior Article

March 25, 2022 tremendousblog Leave a comment

About an hour ago, I posted an article about a Melvin Capital position in GameStop Corp. A very astute reader pointed out to me that the SEC filing on which it relied was from a prior year, so the information was no longer up-to-date.

Fortunately, thanks to the reader’s help, I was able to confirm the error and remove the post within about 1 hour.

I apologize for this oversight. 🙏

Unfortunately, that old report came up as the first result in a Google search I did for SEC data, and I neglected to confirm the date. I’ll be watching those dates like a hawk in the future! 🙂

I appreciate your understanding and look forward to digging into financial markets and more with you in the future!

Business, Uncategorized

Hedge Funds Hit Hard by Meme Stock Losses, Badly Behind S&P 500

August 18, 2021 tremendousblog Leave a comment

Losses betting against meme stocks have hit hedge funds hard this year. The latest data from Barclay Hedge shows year-to-date gains for equity long/short funds of 8.51%. (This is the type of fund that would typically take short positions in stocks.)

Meanwhile, the S&P 500 has returned 18%.

One of the largest sources of losses for hedge funds this year is short positions in AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc. Its shares are up more than 18 fold this year, inflicting billions in losses on short sellers. Other meme stocks like GameStop Corp. have also produced large losses.

This continues a pattern of long term underperformance for this strategy:

Investors are losing patience and rapidly withdrawing their money.

If you’re an investor in a fund with a losing strategy, a weak track record, and a habit of betting against the hottest stocks in the market, I ask you: why not try an index fund?

I Listened to Sammy “The Bull” Gravano’s New Podcast

December 16, 2020 tremendousblog Leave a comment

It’s awesome! Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, Gambino crime family underboss turned government witness, released the first episode of his new podcast today. It’s called “Our Thing” and you can see it here.

I found it very engaging. The style is spare and fast-paced. The first episode covers the planning of a hit on Genovese family boss Vincent “The Chin” Gigante and also Gravano’s later arrest and cooperation with the federal government.

This episode includes interviews with both Gravano and the FBI agents who caught him, so you get a reality check on what could have otherwise been a self-serving narrative.

I found the sound effects really enhanced the story, which is rare in podcasts, where I find they generally detract. Give it a listen! The next episode in this series, which took two years to develop, should come out in the first days of 2021.

Tremendous