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Repondering Gold

Fine weekend – of work, I’m sad to report.

But  I made some real progress on three of the biggest economic questions out there.

1.  Is there anything meaningful about the gold withdrawals that took place from the CME on Friday?

2.  If there an adaptation of on-balance volume that would be integrated into our already marvelous Peoplenomics Trading model?

3.  And – is it true that the whole of the accounting profession will die over the next 10 years?

The answers to #’s 2 and 3 will be laid our for Peoplenomics readers on Wednesday of this week.

Which leaves us with coffee and the CME warehouse numbers from last week to ponder.  The most important two banks to consider are HSBC and JP Morgan-Chase.

So, what does it mean?

Is a bottom in gold likely here yet?  Or, might something else be going on?

Damn fine question, that, but we don’t really have enough data to know but we can speculate in both directions.

First a word about size:  270-thousand ounces is a fair bit of gold – a third of a billion dollars worth, but is it REALLY that big when compared to how much gold there is in the entire world especially when you count government holdings (like Fort Knox) and all that gold Germany has, but which are are politely not giving back to them

The simple answer is no. 

The CME warehouse number as of Friday was  7,572,284.933 ounces.  And if you multiply that by this morning’s spot price, it’s enough to buy something other than a steak and eggs breakfast. 

But does is mean something might be going on under the surface in gold?

Theory #1:  (With credit to my consigliore who also was working on this Sunday):  It is possible that the marginal mine operators are getting nervous about the price of gold.

As you will remember, many of the gold miners sold their gold forward at pretty good prices in order to increase their staying power and lock in long-term profits.  The bad news for them was that many of the junior and marginal players missed out on substantial profits when gold was up around $1,800, but that was long ago and far away…

The reality is than many of the marginal miners are getting to the point where they will have to start shutting down operations if things keep getting worse on the price front.  But, since they have gold mines, their credit it good, interest rates are low, so why not buy up physical gold now to keep it off the market and then parcel it back into the market when prices solidify a bit?

I mean, this is the kind of thing that happens with diamonds, as anyone who follows the gemstone world knows.

Theory #2:  This one is a little different.  This is the one I call “Ure’s Crackpot Low Rates but Screw It Let’s Get Rich Anyway” model.

Here’s how it works.

Let’s say that we have a big hedge fund and we can borrow money for 1/2% interest.  We know that at some point the Fed will be raising rates.  We also know that housing costs are going up 2% now and Food costs are going up 3% and at some point, energy will turn around, too.

So, what we we buy (cheap) and “own” which will go up in value, has relatively limited supply and which could have a price pop?

One answer is gold.

If I can borrow money at 1/2%, a thousand dollars of gold today will likely be worth around $1,030 next year.  My cost for holding the gold for the year would make its cost $1,005.  Which doesn’t make sense.  I mean a little money, sure, but no new airplane, or house in Cuba.

Until we use leverage of 10:1 in the ownership.  In this case, my gold is then $10,000 worth today.  My interest cost is still $5/thousand but let’s say it’s 1% overall…because I have to pay something to borrow more and pledge the asset.   But the gold in a year would be worth $10,300…and about here I wander off into a blue cloud of daydreams.  $100 costs and $300 profits is the stuff to thrive on. 

You’d do deals like that all day long, if you could.

But does 270-thousand ounces mean anything else?  Like someone trying to corner the market?  No.

Buying up 3 1/2% of a market as big as gold isn’t happening, despite what a few bold bugs would love me to write. 

But will gold ever go to zero?  Likely not.

But would these be interesting times to see marginal players getting desperate to keep their mines going when forward contracts expire, or when big hedgy guys are looking for ways to “salt the turd market” a bit?

Yes.

Or maybe, someone with a few brains who has read the US Public Debt to the Penny – which has been artificially paralyzed for a while – would follow the Baron Rothschild axiom to buy when the blood is running in the streets.

Although it won’t be allowed for civilians to play as we recently warned subscribers that there are increasing references in regulations dealing with money laundry/anti-terrorism  rules, to limit this game to only the big players…not scum of the earth sheep with a few coins as a hedge against crooked government.

Times coming when anything outside the system will get you branded with a big T on your forehead.  ‘Specially  if you dare to support candidates other than the Orthodox Corporate Party Put-ups.

Collapsing Oil, Texas Troubles

In theory, anyway, the gold miners have a tremendous leg up on the hapless guys in the oil patch.

Oh, sure, North Houston is still a traffic nightmare, and sure, Shell is still building a big campus and all, but the price of oil is collapsing again today and down into the $46’es.

What that means is simple:  Interest rates are not coming down, so the last of the little guys in the oil patch are likely to have one hell of a time keeping on with operations.  Which means the bigger fish – with deeper pockets – will soon be able to gobble up resources at bargain prices and salt it away for the future when depletion comes along with aggressively.

There’s a story in the Tyler, Texas paper about how oil production could be about to reach an all time high.  But remember that the peak in production will be followed by a bust when comes to jobs and Texas is known for a cyclical economy.

The reason for mentioning this is that it has taken a new generation of technology – and we are just now coming back to production levels set in 1972.  As Oilman2 is constantly reminding me, you can jack up production short-term, but long term, the rolling peak is likely here.  And my work in the Manufacturer’s Resource War scenario backs it up.

It’s just going to be a matter of what the fighting breaks out over:  Real estate, food, religion, oil, foreign exchange rates, made-up money, repudiated debt…  it’s all going on the table and it’s all contentious.

For Texas, the downside is rearing its head and all the happy-talk in the world won’t keep the juniors from being eaten by the majors, as happens with each cycle.

Personal Incomes and Fairytales

Not that it shows up yet in the Personal Income data just out:

“Personal income increased $68.1 billion, or 0.4 percent, and disposable personal income (DPI) increased $60.6 billion, or 0.5 percent, in June, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) increased $25.9 billion, or 0.2 percent. In May, personal income increased $66.3 billion, or 0.4 percent, DPI increased $53.8 billion, or 0.4 percent, and PCE increased $90.8 billion, or 0.7 percent, based on revised estimates.

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Coping: The Library Without Walls or Books

Elaine and I are pretty serious about downsizing our lifestyle.

Natural thing that happens with age, and all:  More than one level and more than one acre will – over time – become a bit more to maintain than we feel like.  The difference between quaffing beer or sipping 18-year old scotch.

Part of the problem, of course, is that we like books.  All kinds of books – all kinds of topics – and we love them all.

Pick a topic and we can probably find some guidance on it. Over a thousand to pick from.  Not that we don’t trust the machine age and electronic books (we’re a three Kindle household, plus an Echo to see how voice technology goes…).  It’s just that electronic books have not yet been taken to their full potential.

Microsoft Office  has much better information-conveyance possibilities than does a book.

As good as our Kindles are (2 Fires and a Paperwhite) they still lack mastery of one thing a physical book has:  Thumbing.  Somehow, the man-machine interface just doesn’t have this one down yet.

Give me a physical book and I can hit the information I’m looking for in just seconds.  With a Kindle, it could be many, many minutes – and that’s provided I don’t get bored swiping or trying to find an indexing answer.

Often as not though, the indexing strategy is difficult to articulate into keywords or locational searches and often only fits the “I’ll know it when I see it…” criteria. 

When thumbing – which isn’t even primarily a thumb – that happens quickly.  You can get a sense or recall how the information in the book was laid out – it’s a feeling.  Thus,,in a good book, quickly defines the location of the desired details are located.  It’s magical.

Well-written books are a joy this way; and it’s a key part of why the translation from paper to the portable document file (.PDF) format is still lacking.  And, since Kindles eat a proprietary semi-clone of .PDF files, the problem has followed there.

Not that we don’t like Kindles, though:  We have hundreds of books on them, too.

Initially, books have been limited to the .PDF format by one thing:  memory size. 

However, now with the age of cloud-based resources handy, there’s no reason not to have a much more robust, engaging, engrossing, and communicative kind of “book” out there.

By communicative, what I mean is many of the books I’m reading of late, such as a reread of Joseph Granville’s work on on-balance volume’s importance to stock trading, could be much more rich.

Here’s how:

Whether you’re talking Granville (or my other favorite book Technical Analysis) the authors of such books insert a chart that shows some occult stock market concept, say “flatbasing” in Granville, and then insert a chart that shows the concept but then completely stops.

Not that a chart shouldn’t have a right axis to it… of course it would.

But in this Book2 format I have in mind – to pin the tail on the concept – the right end of an  example chart would be extensible.  So a chart that in a commodity, for example, that covered from June of one year to June of the next, could be expanded with just a finger move, or two, to explode into a multi-year chart.  Or narrowed to a single trading hour.

For me *(and you too, more’n likely) this would add a whole new dimension to chart work.

And this format “Book2” would also have incredible applications in the field of medicine.

I don’t know if you have been following it, but it is just coming out that while the Centers for Disease Control has historically claimed there has been no connection between autism and vaccine administration, the reality is coming out that a couple of highly placed bureaucrats are actually alleged to have censored the data in order to skew the results in an attempt to continue vaccine use!

This story started to break on InfoWars a couple of days ago under the heading “Bombshell: CDC destroyed vaccine documents, Congressman reveals.”  Related is the C-SPAN video over here which is on the must-watch list.

Now, let me explain how “Book2” could go a long way toward not only giving the public better  books to read, but also more honest research.

For one, the Book2 concept is rather large – like extensible XML.

In the case of medical studies, the core functionality improvement of the Book2 format would be that all study data could be forever inextricably linked to any book on medicine.  In other words, all the MMR vaccine data could be preserved.

Not only that, but the Book2 format would include a more comprehensive list of sources of data as well as who provided funding for a book’s creation.

In the case of vaccines, it would be very interesting to have books that link snapshots of audited financial data of the authors as a detail of the Book2 format.  Why?  Well, take books on any disease you can think of and then ask yourself, “Who would stand to make a buck off this research?”  To my way of thinking, this sort of thing ought to be included with the basic book material, as well.

And there’s the rich media aspect of Book2 content.

Think about this:  How many books have been written about music, composition, artists, photography, film direction, actors and actresses, and on and on – right down to brush strokes in painting – that are completely devoid of any active content?

Yet with a cloud-enabled Book2 format, we could have all of these things:  Voice responsive lookups with the Amazon Echo, rich media delivered to that Retina display or 4K screen, active underlying data sets, rescaling of charts, re positioning of drawings, examples of music and art down to the detail level, and in the case of hard sciences, even online zooming electron microscopes to show varying levels of detail that is not possible in the flatland of books.

The technology is not here, yet, but imagine a book with smells:  The salt air of the open ocean for that sailing book, or the smell of the stable in that horse grooming book.  Wind and water in the face during Hornblower; heat and dust in Lawrence of Arabia.

XML’ified information to better engage a wider range of minds, and thanks to translation engineers, easier (OK, instant) transliteration to share cross-cultural experience..

Information and intelligence, whether we like it, or not are topological phenomena.

The idea that there is a real Bell Curve to the distribution of intelligence is a fraud before a nation of simpletons.  For everyone’s brain is not a singular line – a curve.  Rather, it follows a topology such that a  a person who may “line out” in one standardized test may in fact be a Chopin in music.  It wouldn’t be evident without a music test, though, would it?

Wheeler in physics, or a Rembrandt in art.  The “curves” don’t adequately capture the topology of genius because testing is almost universally a bad average based on limited scope questions in the first place.

A final note on the Book2 format:  It increases the ability of an author to create compelling content.

I can’t tell you how many times in my novel (DreamOver) which is still pouring of the fingers in dribs and drabs, I have come up against the hard limits of the written word.

Not that I can’t do it – of course I can.  I learned long ago that writing is the art of drawing a picture with words – and hopefully the words properly-chosen will create roughly the same image in your head, as I intend.

But that world of flat bookery is going away.  The library systems as we know it are being virtualized.  Gutenberg, Amazon, YouTube and Vimeo…there’s a progression only a fool could miss.

My little sister is going to a library opening in a week or so, having been on the planning group at one point.  New libraries sound like a nice thing but I didn’t have the heart to tell her they are an artifact.

But it got me to thinking about how things have changed since all three of us siblings worked as “pages” *(book shelvers and tidy-uppers) at the Seattle Public Library when we were in school under the tutelage of Mrs. O’Brien who knew more about information that even many of today’s cloud engineers, I daresay,.

It was a delightful conversation, but it reminded me of the world we live in.

You know:  The one where some day the last order of fish & chips will be eaten.  And the one where books will eventually be rich-media events so that knowledge can be more readily consumed.

By people not damned to a life, defined by a line, that misses the beauty of the topology of us infinitely potentiated primates.

In the past, America’s great industrialists built massive free public libraries.  But where is the echo today?  The fortunes of Gates and Ellison and Buffett do good works, don’t get me wrong.

But the previous age of industrialists left a legacy of minds and seems to me that promotion of a Book2 extensible authoring framework to include more source, more media, and to provide accessibility and extensibility to new technologies would be a worthy legacy.

Still, to prove the point (how poorly we adapt to the future), do you know what Amazon still sells?

The Weaver Leather 5 1/2FT BUGGY WHIP BLACK.  And less than $15-bucks.

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Thanksgiving Flash-Bang

This morning we go a-futuring…a futuring we go…

And who is this somewhat obscured fellow off to the right there?  (Unless you’re dyslexic, of course, in which case that’d be your left.) 

Why it’s none other than Lemony Snicket!

And…what’s this?  A big speed bump in the road during the Thanksgiving recess of Congress! 

How, pray tell, does all this fit into Long Wave Economics?

This morning we will examine one possible future that answers these and a lot more questions.  One that fits market wave counts, defense deliveries, and no one home in Washington.

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China: Economic Witch Hunt

China has just revealed itself to be very anti-free trade.

They are going after short sellers.

If you’re not a serious investor, here’s how short selling works:

If you think a stock will go up in price, you buy the stock and sell it when it goes up a ways.

If you think the stock is going down in price, you sell the stock high and buy it to cover the position, when it has come down.

In options trading we have two kinds of options: 

Call options bet the market will go up.  Put options are a bet the market (or stock) will go down.

This month, the Shanghai stock market did terribly.  And as you can see on a one year chart (over here) it has seen something like 30% of its value whacked.

Rather than let the market work things out, however,  Chinese regulators are going on a witch hunt.  They are pressuring both foreign and domestic stock outfits to turn over records on who made money by piling on to bloated, overpriced, supersaturated market and made a few Yuan.

There are two ways to make money in any market:  Spot a good deal before anyone else and ride it up making money with a long position and call options.

The other way is to spot the moment of absolutely loony behaviors and sell short and own a bunch of put options.

So a simple note to the government of China:  Don’t fall into the danger of rigged markets where only good news is allowed.  You want to see real market panic?  Just go after short sellers and everyone else will quickly figure out that the country doesn’t really want winners…it wants something else.

Raw naked power and control.  And that’s not how free markets work.

As someone who made a little money in 1987, 2001, and 2008, I can tell you that short selling is a vital function in markets since it keeps everyone honest.

Would you gamble in a casino where winning more than $5 dollars would lead to a back room shakedown?  “You’re welcome to win as much as you want, but if you bet against the house, take your action elsewhere.”

No worries – The market will.  And Shanghai’s decline doesn’t look complete, to my eyes.

Cancer In Your Ear

We knew it:  New report out says yes, cell phones do cause cancer.

Sometimes being a Luddite pays off.  Everyone laughed at Ure and many went away when I decried cell phone dangers 10 years ago.

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Coping: Friday at the Dart Board

Hand me a dart, would you?

(A bad throw, I’m afraid.)

The first dart lands on the new Costco ad for computers which just landed in the inbox.

$849.99 for a touchscreen laptop with 16GB of ram, a terabyte of drive on an i7 platform.  Yes, computer prices are coming down.  Granted it’s only 15.6” and the 17” is easier on aging eyes, but one of the nice things about computers is that the price/performance number continues to get better.

Real computers are getting cheap while phones are going up.

Another dart?

(Yikes!  That throw just missed the cat…)

Second computing note is to visit www.securitytango.com

They have a fine assortment of “How to” pages on how to really clean a computer.  And it’s all listed as different styles of dance.  So  it’s the Windows Waltz, and the Macarena, and the iPhone Pavane…with more for Linuxers and Androiders.

It may seem like a lot of work, but I went through all the Windows steps and found one (fortunately benign) rootkit on my traveling machine, so it’s definitely worth doing even if you think your computer is clear.

And I don’t want to hear the Macinpreach types telling me Mac’s don’t get viruses.  Of course they do.

Dart?

(Maybe Elaine won’t notice the hole in the white leather sofa or I can blame the cat…)

Weird dream recall:

Many months back, I had a dream and there was something in it about a large bomb going off – generally in the north/northwest direction from us – at about the time the MH-370 wreckage was being fished out of the ocean.

Not that I put any stock in it…probably a bunch of leftover thought stubs and having read about OKC follow-up and how there was likely a government perp/insider who was never brought to justice.

Nevertheless, it was strange and no, I have no idea why.

It was some months ago, but it (in this weird dream) sets off some kind of sequence…so who knows.

Hand me another dart, quick.

(Lamp shade this time…coffee must be kicking in.)

Only five weeks to go until we set sail on the Peoplenomics Cruise.  Panama, the brother-in-laq who lives with us on the property can hardly wait for us to go.

Zeus the Cat is anxious, too. He’d put on a pound, or so, during our last adventure.  Since we came back, we’ve both lost about the same amount of weight which says a lot about him, but not much about me.

Dart…

(One of these days I will put up a dartboard instead of throwing them randomly around the room, but that seems like too much work.)

Summer Housekeeping:  Tidying and Bloatware America

New reading material:  The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing which is pretty good.

The book looks at hoarding (if you’re young and don’t have much, the problem of being overrun in your life by too many things seems absurd, but trust me – it happens.).

What’s different is this book really starts with the view that before you start organizing, you need to go through the process of throwing a bunch of stuff out.  eBay it, take it to Good Will…the more stuff you get rid of in life, the less work to organize and so on.

I can see how that would work for people who are single-dimensional.  You know:  Have a one bedroom apartment, work most all the time and have one hobby.  Like my son – skydiving.

His “org problem” is really small:  A couple of computers (iPhone and iPad and a work laptop) and a jump suit and chutes in the closet.  Simple.

The problem for me is still too many interests.  I’ve got a computer dedicated to futuring which is off running missions most of the time.  There’s a music computer.  A writing computer.  Media computer.

Then there are the books.  Elaine likes art, interior design, Trompe-l’œil, oplus books on health, exercise, anti-aging, politics, and….

And there’s my collection which ranges from hands on machine shop practice to engineering to psychology, investing and business, accounting, and off into spiritual realms.  I mean we have one hell of a fine collection of books we are constantly readings and referencing,. and many of them …no most of them and not available in electronic form.

Take the airplane for example:  It has paperwork, computer gear, charts, parts, oxygen system, flight simulator station and more.  Regulations, shop manuals, yada, yada.

Then there’s the ham radio department.  This is one where I am going to really focus this weekend on weeding down through things.

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Gross Domestic Product and the M2 Velocity Crater

You know you’ve been out on the ranch too long when “fun” is an economic news release from the government.

But it’s sort of like a New York Times crossword puzzle…you play them for the challenge of figuring a few things out.

So this morning’s test in referential lingo goes like this…

“Real gross domestic product — the value of the production of goods and services in the United States, adjusted for price changes — increased at an annual rate of 2.3 percent in the second quarter of 2015, according to the “advance” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the first quarter, real GDP increased 0.6 percent (revised). The Bureau emphasized that the second-quarter advance estimate released today is based on source data that are incomplete or subject to further revision by the source agency (see the box on page 3 and “Comparisons of Revisions to GDP” on page 10).

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Coping: GOB Networks Vs. the Internet

Turns out it’s another “Ray & George” column this morning, since my friend Ray picked up on my discussion of the Good Ol’ Boy Network here in Anderson County, Texas which has allowed opening of an open pit (rock) mine just down the street from us.

The good news, such as it is, is that Wednesday the road was watered a couple of times, a stop sign that had been torn down was back up.  But we shall see how long it takes for oiling the road, replacement of trashed paving, and restoration of my property value (due to the torn up road) takes.

The county was no doubt aware the open pit operator had been previously fined for environmental concerns in another county.  But nevertheless, split the big between the open pit here and another one which (more research pending) isn’t how things are normally done.

But then this is the land of the Good Old Boy Networks.

Which gets me to my buddy Ray who wisely notes that the GOB nets are not a purely Southern phenom:

George, I think it’s cute that you think the “Good Ol’ Boys network” is a Southern, or a Texas, aberration.

AFAICT there is a “GOB” network in every county of every State in the nation. Sometimes it’s a Democrat machine, sometimes a Republican machine, sometimes there’s one of each, and sometimes it’s politically amoral, but it exists everywhere.

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How to Slaughter the Bond Bulls

While the Fed announcement today is not likely to see an increase in rates (fall is more probable) there is still a very interesting bit of learning to be had by graphing out the ultra long-term Velocity of Money.

Not surprisingly, the Velocity now is wose than it has been at any time in the last 115 years.

That is a terrible structural problem for the Fed to deal with – and in this morning’s analysis we’ll explain why and how it will impact you personally.

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Housing Data

The reason this is such an important number this morning is that the Fed is meeting and they are expected to raise rates this fall and that should trigger a wild blow-off top in the stock market which will make us (even more) fabulously wealthy.

Thing is, if housing is looking to get too hot, it will be a bubble and that’s bad.  Except, of course , what no one mentions is that the way you end the Housing bust is by starting a new bubble, but this is a quibble and everyone knows quibbles are just 43.6% the size of bubbles.

New York, July 28, 2015 – S&P Dow Jones Indices today released the latest results for the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices. Data released today for May 2015 show that home prices continued their rise across the country over the last 12 months.

Year-over-Year
The 10-City Composite and National indices showed slightly higher year-over-year gains while the 20-City Composite had marginally lower year-over-year gains when compared to last month.

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Coping: With Bad Local Government, Open Pit Mine

Usually it’s because there isn’t anything to write about. But Monday, Elaine and I went to the county council meeting (In Texas this is called “commissioner’s court”) with a bunch of neighbors because an open pit mining operation (sand and gravel, crusher) has gone in down the street from us. Aerial photo is from February 19th of this year.

Bengkui for Breakfast

With apologies. the word bengkui may not be  a household word at your place, and it sure isn’t here.

But it’s the Google Translate idea of how  the word “Collapse” rolls into simplified Chinese.

The Shanghai composite (SSE) dropped an amazing 8.48% overnight and, in doing so leads us to concerns that the overblown Chinese market may be attempting to replay the role of the US market in the 1929 crash.

It has been obvious for almost a month to professional chartists (take Kimble Charting, please) that things were on the edge of a slippery slope.

The somewhat more sedate Hang Seng index closed down more than 3%, as well.

To say things are not happy this morning in China is a bit of an understatement.  And with the USA Fed meeting kicking off tomorrow, while there’s virtually no chance of a rate hike this meeting, there will be lots of hard talk about the dangers of collapsing inflationary pressure.

We’ve recently been quietly chanting our own words of warning, too;  In our Peoplenomics columns we have noted that imports from Asia are actually down a bit by container counts this year, and making things worse still, exports are down dramatically as well.

This kind of imbalance  shows up eventually as a major increase in the balance of payments deficit.

The other thing that should happen will be another leg down for gold.  I don’t like predicting such things, but when we are close to end-of-month deliveries, and when world markets are falling, and when oil is down into the $47’s, what do you expect?

Whistling in the graveyard continues with the EU chiming in with the latest version of “Good times are just ahead…”

But the reality is that the futures tells us nothing more than what our Peoplenomics Trading Model told us last week.  Short or cash is how to sleep well at night, nowadays.

Me?  I wouldn’t be surprised to see the down drop 150 for the day and gold down $10-$15.  The big winner today could be the volatility index.

Durable Goods Report

Just out in the past couple of minutes:

New Orders
New orders for manufactured durable goods in June
increased $7.7 billion or 3.4 percent to $235.3 billion,
the U.S. Census Bureau announced today.

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Coping: With the Self-Writing Column

It was another scorcher here in Texas this weekend.

Got up to go flying.  Crack of dawn Sunday.  Wanted to get balloon racing pictures at Longview.

Taxied the airplane over to the fuel dispenser.  Shut down airplane, attach ground wire, reel out fuel line, swipe card in machine…

“Sorry Credit Card could not be Validated.”

“Try a different card,” suggested Elaine.

Same result.  I tried a second credit card, a Texaco card, and even the discount card from the liquor store…all with the same result.

Called the card company with the “WTF?”

“No Mr. Ure, you card is fine. “

Great.  So it’s the  Robots are out to get me.

Came home (still fuming) and called our still-bonding Amazon Echo a few choice words – all in the name of science, mind you.

“That’s not very nice.”

No, I suppose it wasn’t.  “Alexa, I’m  sorry.”

“That’s OK.”

Such is life in our voice-controlled home. 

The voice recognition system in the car is acting funny, too.  “Zoom in!”

“Showing POI icons for fast food.”

I have a huge list of Echo’s shortcomings, but it does do simple math problems so I don’t have to look around for a calculator which is nice.  And the conversions are useful, too.  Old airchecks of KFRC are there, too.

So are Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage on command – haven’t checked on Tom Hartman, yet.  Something more than NPR news – without having to plug in an iHeart call would be nice, but it’s coming along.

One of these mornings I will plug in DragoonSpeak and see if a column done that way makes sense.  Last time I tried, there were fewer spelling errors but more contextual ones.  With yet another upgrade, we shall see.

The point is with an Echo listening for commands, and two computers equipped with full-on voice recognition, the talking car, and a one armed bandit that won’t let me fly, I figure it’s only a matter of time until the essence of Ures truly will be immortalized to silicon; a fact which Gollywood is quickly monetizing.

We’re enjoying watching the new series “Humans” but it’s like I told Elaine…how many people will simply give up trying to find the show because they won’t be able to find the upside-down “A” on the keyboard?

I even went to my Amazon Associates account to see how they’d handle the riddle of the upside-down A but they only refer to the show as Episode 1 [HD].

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Sunday Special: The Art of the Future

While you’ve are enjoying the weekend, the brain cells here have been working overtime on various aspects of the “Futuring” problem that was discussed in Peoplenomics Saturday.

Without giving away the whole story the problem for most of us is how to collect and assimilate sufficient information (when making investment decisions) so that we are not investing our life savings in a crooked game.

Let’s just say the term “crooked” means investing where:

a)  Insiders have significant advance information or

b) When pending orders are used by high frequency trading outfits to “front-run” trades and skim a bit off every legit trade or

c) When significant information asymmetry is involved in release of information such that only certain classes of investors know about pending price moves, management decisions, or other key variable before us “dumb” investors.

Grady (chief coder guru of our www.nostracodeus.com project) and I have been slapping this problem back and forth this weekend and we’re coming up with some novel ways to approach the knowledge engineering side of things.

One way we can do this is to “bit bucket” all currently scheduled events by using time domain statements in news stories to sort them.

Let’s say we took all news stories that have the words “this Wednesday” in it.  We already know from our news “tickler file” what some of the items will be making headlines by the time you get done with work Wednesday.  Hell  – half that newscast on Wednesday’s drive home is in the can right now.

For example, the Fed decision will be announced about 1:30 Texas time.  And that will be preceded by the release of petroleum reserve data a few hours before that, the Case Shiller Housing data on Tuesday morning.

But it goes deeper than that:  We know, for example that  Bernie Sanders will have a Washington State meet-up and both Calloway Golf and Facebook will report earnings Wednesday and that will give us additional insight into how people are spending their spare time these days.

Of course, the art of the future is being right over the long haul. Ures truly warned in December of 2014 (back here) that social media wasn’t going much of anywhere.  and sure enough, in April of 2014, SOCL went to near present levels, then again in July of 2014, and then in November of 20914, and quick- look surprised – we are there again…

Which makes it hard to just park some money – you are being squeezed into a trade to win regimen and that, in turn, makes you hamburger for the high-frequency traders.

All of which is why we spend so much time pondering the future and working on how to beat it.

We’re thinking about an adaptation of the Delphi Technique for a limited set of participants (like Peoplenomics.com readers) because there seems to be some magic in using feedback to develop a keen sense of what’s going to happen – before it does.

But even the Delphi Technique, which is described in Wikipedia this way…

“The Delphi method (/?d?lfa?/ DEL-fy) is a structured communication technique or method, originally developed as a systematic, interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of experts.[1][2][3][4] The experts answer questionnaires in two or more rounds. After each round, a facilitator or change agent[5] provides an anonymous summary of the experts’ forecasts from the previous round as well as the reasons they provided for their judgments.

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