ALL THINGS BIG AND SMALL 2.0

THE SECRET GARDEN Away from prying eyes The secret garden thrives A shrine to beauty in Nature raw Feeling blessed I stare in awe Of God's love it reminds Of Nature and the tie that binds. ~~~ntk # I stumbled upon this secret garden in Changi Village, a nook carved out of the secondary vegetation. At least 30 varieties of plants growing in wild abundance. Hibiscus, Camelias, Bougainvillea, Bamboo, Ferns, Palm, Torch Ginger, Blue Pea, Morning Glory, Geraniums, wild Orchid, wild Yam and Tapioca and much more. May God bless the secret gardener.

TECH TRENDS I WOULD LIKE TO MONITOR IN THE NEXT 5 YEARS * * All are in various stages of commercial application, but definitely advancing very rapidly in development. 1. Drones- By now everybody knows what drones are. 2. Internet of Things: Machines, appliances, 'talking' (sending data)to each other, and the data can be harvested for use to provide information for increased efficiency. Think your fridge telling your smart phone you are running out of butter for baking 3. Robotics: Robots everywhere from the factory floor to the home, in the air and under the sea. Remote vehicles mining for minerals under the sea-bed. Pilotless fighter aircraft. 4. Financial markets: Algorithmic trading, pattern recognition and high speed trading (think 1000 trades per second) enhanced by Artificial Intelligence 5. Smart wearables- smart watches, smart clothes, maybe smart shoes monitoring your health, sleep, mental state etc 6. Materials science: self-assembling (think Transformers), self...

FOR THOSE DREAMING OF SPENDING THEIR RETIREMENT IN A CHEAPER COUNTRY THAN SINGAPORE: A comparison of living costs in selected cities. The website  https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/  has a fairly comprehensive and reasonably accurate database on monthly living expenses in cities around the world. And a fairly accurate Cost of Living Estimator where you fill in your personal details and they come up with a monthly estimate of your monthly expenses. I obtained the results be low after filling in my estimated requirements in many items from groceries to Internet bills, to gym membership, eating out and public transport cost. For a household of two. This estimate excludes domestic help, and health insurance. *You can judge for yourself, the degree of accuracy of sample items for Singapore in the second and third images below. My estimated cost of living is S$1,367.00 monthly. ***Please note that I am not typical: I don't have an interest in clothes, electronic ...

A BIG PICTURE EXPLANATION OF WHAT AFFECTS THE DIRECTION OF A COUNTRY'S STOCK MARKET. Investors can choose to earn returns through yields (interest payment) from bonds or dividends from stocks. Bonds (which are like loans) pay out a coupon (interest) on their principle. Stocks (not all) pay out dividends. But dividend payouts are not a certainty, and depends on the company's performance. The bond yield of a country is usually measured by the yield on its 10-tear bond. The dividend yield of a country is the dividend yield of its dominant stock market Index e.g. the SP500 or Singapore's STI. One measure of whether a country's stock market is still attractive is the difference (spread) between the dividend yield of its stock market and the yield on its 10 year bonds. Sovereign bonds are risk-free investments (theoretically) and so a choice between bonds and stocks is a choice between no risk and some risk but potentially higher gain. The bigger (on the positive side) th...

THE HUMANIZATION OF ROBOTS AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE As robots and artificial intelligence (AI) become increasingly prevalent in human society, there is a trend to make them look , talk, think and behave more like us i.e. make them unto our image.  AI software already show some  human traits. Here are a few examples: ROBOTS DO DREAM One of the latest techniques in AI called Deep Learning Neural Networks [DLNN] (commonly used in machine vision, speech recognition and search) is actually capable of dreaming. While other AI has to be fed data for input, DLNN is also capable of generating some of its own input data and has its own ideas of what an object should look like. This it does by entering into a dream-like state. You can view some artistic/hallucinatory/horror/Salvador Dali-like dreams of DPNN contributed by Google’s AI Group at http://thenewstack.io/deep-learning-neural-networks-google-deep-dream/  ROBOTS LEARN LIKE YOUNG CHILDREN A...

A Common Sense Valuation Comparison of Global Equity Markets * and the relevance for quantitative (algorithmic) Mean Reversion startegies # click on image to see bigger Table Table 1: Worksheet Table 2: Earnings-based Table 3: Dividends-based ·          Each country’s financial markets have their own characteristics and peculiarities so comparing them with a global average of Price/Earnings, Price/Book etc  is meaningful. ·          Because of the loose money policy (Quantitative Easing) by the major economies (Eurozone, USA, Japan, even China in some ways) in the recent years, leading to low interest rates, there is a tendency for financial asset bubbles to arise, caused by excess funds chasing yields. ·          The interplay between the Bond market and Equity market is an often underrated  factor in determining the directi...

ON MACHINE LEARNING Most of the knowledge in the world in the future is going to be extracted by machines and will reside in machines. – Yann Le Cun, Director of AI Research, Facebook MACHINE LEARNING is the automated discovery of Knowledge. With the Internet and sensors everywhere flooding the world with data, the ground for machine learning is extremely fertile. Machine Learning is done by learning algorithms. Pedro Domingos’ book is a discourse on the quest for the Master Algorithm which is able to learn anything and everything anytime. However, the quest for a Master Algorithm is by default a quest to know the nature of the learning process, and there are five schools of thought here on just what happens when we are learning so that machines can emulate them. (Dominos call’s them the five tribes of machine learning).  Each of the tribes have their strong and valid points and any master algorithm would have to take a bit from each tribe.  them. Bel...