Scientists, scholars and academics have yet to define genius, yet the concept is rightly applied to those exceptional individuals who, through their art, their science or their enterprise, create unique changes in our thinking, or our broader-world. Genius carries a certain mystical quality, distancing it from even that which we…
By: Vikas Shah, Originally Published at AllAboutAlpha.com Factory farming is a brutal endeavour. In this environment, chickens (and other animals) are given a variety of feeds and chemicals (stimuli) designed to make them grow as big as possible as fast as possible and hence maximise output. In truth, factory farms…
By Vikas Shah (Originally for AllAboutAlpha.com) Modern markets are hugely complex environments. CME Group for example, trades over 3 billion contracts (with a notional value of over U$1 quadrillion) each and every year. Alongside this, many of the world’s largest companies such as Google, Alibaba and Amazon (with market capitalisations…
“Macroeconomics has not done well in recent years…” writes Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, “The standard models didn’t predict the Great Recession; and even said it couldn’t happen. After the bubble burst, the models did not predict the full consequences.” In a hugely relevant recent paper titled “Reconstructing Macroeconomic Theory…
Each and every year, I have the pleasure of judging at the Rice Business Plan Competition. Tens of thousands of enterprising students from around the world compete, with a handful making it to the finals in Houston, Texas. At this incredible event, student entrepreneurs pitch to the crème-de-la-crème of global…
Money is a strange phenomenon. Our modern notion of it mean that (in essence) it is intrinsically useless apart from as a medium of exchange. Our government, regulators, law and communities agree that phenomena (whether a physical banknote or an electronic ledger such as a bank account) have certain value,…
Many of recent history’s most significant market events have manifest in what was (previously) the extreme of the market. These “bubbles” and “crashes” follow power laws, meaning that (in theory) they could reach any size and fundamentally threaten the functionality of the entire financial system. Typical central-bank and policy…