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Platformonomics TGIF #114: January 30, 2026
Platformonomics TGIF is a weekly roll-up of links, comments on those links, and perhaps a little too much tugging on my favorite threads. Get Platformonomics Updates By Email It’s that most magical time of the year: HyperCAPEX season! Meta and Microsoft are in; Amazon and Google report next week. Full annual retrospective to follow (last…
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Toto, We’re Not in Mediocristan Any More
More on the poor applicability of financial models to the real world from the Economist: Goldman Sachs admitted as much when it said that its funds had been hit by moves that its models suggested were 25 standard deviations away from normal. In terms of probability (where 1 is a certainty and 0 an impossibility), that translates into…
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Tick, Tock, Let’s Mock
Sun changed their ticker from SUNW to JAVA today, going so far as to say “JAVA is a technology whose value is near infinite to the internet”.Curious minds wonder what the value of Java is to Sun. By making Java the heart of the company, one can only assume Sun’s financial reports will start breaking out Java revenues,…
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Or Maybe Your Model Leaves Something to be Desired…
From last week’s WSJ (requires a paid subscription for now, pending Rupert’s next move): “Wednesday is the type of day people will remember in quant-land for a very long time,” said Mr. Rothman, a University of Chicago Ph.D. who ran a quantitative fund before joining Lehman Brothers. “Events that models only predicted would happen once…
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Christopher Hitchens on Harry Potter
Today’s New York Times Book Review has Christopher Hitchens weighing in on the latest Harry Potter book as only Hitchens can. Hilter, Stalin, George Orwell, Eton, Sir Oswald Mosley, Tom Brown, Kipling, Shakespeare, Beowulf, Latin incantations, “his holiness the pope”, Kantian, Russellian, Manichean, Gestapo, gulag, George W. Bush, anti-Semitism, Perry Mason, Ian Fleming, Walter Bagehot and Arthur…
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Fake Steve Unmasked – A Nation Mourns
It was bound to happen eventually Dan. I had you pegged but have to admit my theory included a west coast co-conspirator. Please sustain it even if all the ‘tards now know your name. And don’t let Forbes.com split every post across ten pages as they are wont to do…