thanks!

Email me. First.last[a]gmail

glad you found the talk so interesting! I was really excited when I first started learning about financial history too. But be careful, you may end up buying and reading a lot of books lol

that's the big question atm as the fed is in a quiet period prior to its upcoming meeting. after having JUST signalled more rate increases though, I can't imagine them failing to deliver at least a 0.25 point raise, arguing the SVB's problems won't be replicated elsewhere and that the price of services is still rising even if goods have stabilized (at least in the US)

what makes you think it even could be? that budget runs through congress

@@williamjameshuggins see Blackrock’s latest letter about “going direct”. 2019

Quote from their website in article about Clarity AI “Clarity AI uses big data and machine learning to create actionable sustainability and impact insights and expand these to a uniquely broad universe of companies, countries and local governments.” Note the last word.

@@blueskiesandgreenpasturesp3848 - i read these sorts of documents all the time. Blackrock will NOT be "making" fiscal policy decisions anywhere. What they will do is rank the sustainability of local government actions and let investors decide what to do with it. surely it is appropriate to shine light onto local government initiatives rather than just coughing up the coin? I wouldn't invest in a local gov bond that wanted to provide subsidies to a coal mine (for instance) so I tend to appreciate having some metric for the sustainability of gov/corp projects. As Aladdin users would point out. its not an automated system. The risk, in my opinion, is in investors discontinuing independent analysis and relying solely on Aladdin. Its the same problem with Institutional Shareholder Services (very handy, but risks concentrated decision making)

@@williamjameshuggins the problem is that Larry Fink and Janet Yellen and the Fed are becoming a little too close. However , the good news is that more states are pulling their retirement funds out of Blackrock!

McMaster University. all the videos supporting the course are curated into lessons on my channel page. email me if you want to the slides ([email protected])

apologies, I should have been more specific. nice chart here: www.bankofcanada.ca/2021/09/bank-canada-balance-sheet/#chart2 adjustable graphing tool: www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/banking-and-financial-statistics/bank-of-canada-assets-and-liabilities-weekly-formerly-b2/ the initial response was to borrow heavily from the members of Payments Canada (its a liability, source of funding for the BoC). you can see this peaked in February 2021 around $390 billion, which has declined to about $250 billion today (April 2022). this funding was supplemented with QE but it wasn't the majority of the funding (this appears as "excess" settlement balances, or "excess" deposits by the federal government - right now, its about $80 billion). both of these accounts are usually about $250 MILLION, so we're more than 1000 times above "normal target" right now - crisis still on

It lacks sensationalism - because this is from a university course and not designed to "rack up view or subscribers". I'm genuinely surprised BlackRock and Aladdin have generated so much interest among youtube viewers. Its neither apocalyptic, nor run of the mill imo.

@@williamjameshuggins You'll own nothing and you'll be happy, nothing to see here folks banks don't print money just work hard eventually you'll make it....

i'm not selling anything - i'm providing free access to one of the courses i teach (check out the rest of the content!) there is absolutely no benefit to me. this short clip is not meant to be alarmist, only to highlight what econometricians call "model risk". if you doubt that highly trained people can all line up behind a model and that this can cause massive problems for the market overall, have a look at what the Gaussian Copula Function did for us in the lead up to 2008, or what a dogged reliance on modelling assumptions meant for LTCM in 1998. nonsense indeed...

Yes, just another investment platform, with an operating system of its own, that is completely opaque and never informed about to the public, despite being used even by state-run pension funds... I'd say that makes it pretty important and interesting for most people. Further more, in BlackRock promotional videos they boast that they make use of advanced AI technology and neural networks. I'd venture to claim that it is pretty sophisticated. But then what do I know, I'm just a doode who studied statistics and programming at uni. But thanks for the reassurance!

@@kebman and I’m just a dude with a 20 year career in asset management technology who has implemented Aladdin and Charles River and many other investment platforms at various asset managers and hedge funds. Believe me, it’s not that sophisticated, and they publish white papers for any meaningful risk metric they use. Aladdin isn’t really an ‘operating system’ per se, it’s a collection of tools sitting on top of a relational database. If you saw it you he stunned by how old much of it is. Some of it is literally 10+years old. They have a couple of products aimed at making us of AI, but it’s mainly just marketing.

Well, it is not really about agreeing with the assumptions. You can use common sense to drive your suspicions. But, It is all about testing diff assumptions and their corresponding conclusions. We don't care too much about the assumptions made, content-wise, they can be wrong and still provide a reliable model. See Friedman. In Quant stuff, assumptions are merely simplifications deemed necessary to better deal with the variables worked with, which can be the complicated part - not, attempting to make the assumptions complex or capturing all the complexity.

Lets just completely kill humans👍

@Visitor Sin "The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it” John Kenneth Galbraith

It's rigged

@@AnonymousanonymousAYes, but in a more complex way than most people think. What kind of ethics does Aladdin have? Will an investor use their own insight to override a “godly” algorithm? Likely not. So investors are making trades that will make more money. Something most people don’t think about is where does this money come from? If the algorithm makes money, someone else has to lose some money somewhere. Investors are only focused on the profits of shareholders, so the shareholders will continue to profit, while people unknowingly lose money elsewhere

thanks Peter! the whole course (at least the recordings) are up on the channel page. glad you like it :)

after you mentioned it i did some reading and talked about them in our synchronous class that week. the division of revenues 25/75 is really interesting and it will be interesting to see how they perform once they are scaled up