Tito's Blog

Goldman Sachs Is Driving The Nail Into The Coffin Of Efficient Market Theory

In case somebody still believes in the efficient market theory, Goldman Sachs reported that they made money on 63 of 65 trading days during last quarter.

From Goldman Sachs 10-Q filing for Q2 2009 (page 124):

I tend to agree with Chris Martenson when he says that they are blatantly exploiting an unfair advantage at US taxpayers’ expense.

What these trading results tell us, as clearly as one could ever hope in this day and age, is that Goldman Sachs (and likely other major recipients of bailout money) is gaming the system to their benefit and everybody else’s loss.

I suppose it would be even clearer if we received individual, hand engraved notices informing us of this fact, but, for me, the presence of only 2 days of trading losses in an entire quarter is more than sufficient.

America, you are being looted, and the pirate’s name is Goldman Sachs.

Bayes Rules

I am a believer in the power of simple Bayesian statistics as a way to model the complexity of the world.

In the past two days I read two very interesting papers on the application of Bayes theorem to the semantic web and machine translation at The Unreasonable Effectivenes of Data and Introduction to Statistical Machine Translation.

Finally, here is Paul Graham’s original essay on a Bayesian approach to spam filtering, that spurred my initial interest.