Blog about Personal Projects, Articles and Papers on Economics, Finance and Technology
The enterprise AI agent stack is stratifying into six layers with different winners at each. Models commoditize; context — your organizational world model — compounds. A framework for agentic AI architecture decisions.
7 min read
Apps beat games in mobile revenue for the first time in 2025. GenAI led the charge with $3.5B in growth. Eight charts show who controls the app economy.
3 min read
Variance drain is the hidden cost of volatility: why a portfolio averaging +10% can lose money. The ½σ² formula explains the gap between paper and real returns.
4 min read Finance
Claude Opus 4.6 brings a 1M token context window, 68.8% ARC-AGI-2, and Agent Teams to Claude Code. Full benchmark comparison vs GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro with pricing analysis.
6 min read AI
a16z sees AI fundamentals thriving with 80% GPU utilization. AQR sees the CAPE at the 96th percentile. Both have data. Both may be right.
4 min read Finance
How hybrid recommender systems balance multi-armed bandits against LLM inference cost economics in 2026. A deep dive into Netflix recommendation algorithm architecture and Spotify's AI DJ recommender system.
5 min read AI
AQR's 2026 data shows private equity returning 4.2% versus 3.9% for public equities. The 30bp illiquidity premium barely justifies years of lockup.
3 min read Finance
Britain faces strategic isolation: locked out of EU defense cooperation, unwilling to join Trump's coalition. The mid-Atlantic bridge has nowhere to land.
2 min read Commentary
At Davos 2026, Carney told allies to take down the signs of the liberal order. Middle powers are learning to navigate between giants without illusions.
4 min read Commentary
Sara Hooker's research challenges the trillion-dollar scaling thesis. Compact models now outperform massive ones as diminishing returns hit AI.
4 min read Finance
85% of AI projects fail. Only 26% translate pilots to production. The winners automate the coordination layer where employees spend 57% of their workday.
2 min read AI
Japan holds $5 trillion in foreign assets. With 30-year JGB yields now above 3%, the carry trade that defined Japanese investing faces new friction.
2 min read Commentary
Cornell research: GLP-1 users cut grocery spending 5.3%, fast food 8%. With 16% household adoption and savory snacks down 10%, food stocks face headwinds.
4 min read Finance
AI was supposed to free us. The Jevons paradox plays out in real time: efficiency expands workload, not leisure. 77% of workers say AI added to their work.
2 min read AI
New OFR data reveals $12.6 trillion in daily repo exposures—$700 billion larger than previous estimates. The plumbing of modern money remains poorly understood.
5 min read Commentary
Steve Eisman explains how U.S. equity markets have structurally decoupled from everyday economic reality through concentration and passive investing.
4 min read Finance
Context windows aren't memory. Explore EM-LLM's episodic architecture, knowledge graph tools like Mem0 and Letta, and why vectors fail for sequential data.
3 min read AI
Buffett exits after paying $26.8B in taxes. What 60 years of letters reveal about admitting mistakes, insurance float, and why Abel inherits $300B in cash.
4 min read Finance
Academic paper finds Bitcoin 51% attack costs $6.77B. Derivatives enable attack profits via shorting. Analysis of why attacks haven't happened yet.
4 min read Finance
Apple's $157B cash pile and Gemini-powered Siri shift show a restrained AI strategy. Analysis of whether Apple wins as AI models become commodities.
3 min read AI
Why Machines Learn explains ML math with real equations and geometric intuition. Review of Ananthaswamy's approach to neural networks, PCA, and GANs.
3 min read AI
Rebalancing for 2026: reducing S&P 500 at 40× CAPE, adding Europe after Germany's €1T pivot, and bonds at 4.2% yields. Full allocation rationale.
10 min read Finance
Netflix's $72B Warner Bros deal vs Paramount's hostile $30/share tender. Deal mechanics, aggregation theory, and why internet distributors win streaming.
7 min read Finance
Nike lost $27.5B in market value by weakening three complementary assets simultaneously. Analysis of how Donahoe's strategy destroyed competitive advantage.
7 min read Finance
Michael Burry launches Substack warning AI markets mirror 1999. His Nvidia-Cisco comparison, the GPU depreciation debate, and what hyperscalers need to justify capex.
5 min read Finance![Is AI Really Eating the World? AGI, Networks, Value [2/2]](https://static.philippdubach.com/ograph/ograph-eatingtheworld2.jpg)
AGI predictions miss the point. Multiple competing models means price war. Value flows to applications, customer relationships, and vertical integrators.
7 min read AI![Is AI Really Eating the World? [1/2]](https://static.philippdubach.com/ograph/ograph-eatingtheworld1.jpg)
Benedict Evans' AI analysis argues 'we don't know how it matters.' But current evidence points to model commoditization: $400B capex, 97% price drops.
5 min read AI
Four-day forecasts now match one-day accuracy from 30 years ago. How AI models like WeatherNext 2 use CRPS training to preserve extreme weather signals.
2 min read AI
Phase 2 trial shows semaglutide reduces alcohol craving and heavy drinking with effect sizes exceeding naltrexone. What this means for AUD treatment.
2 min read Medicine
Damodaran argues gold is a collectible, not an asset you can value. So why hold it? As insurance against hyperinflation and market dislocations in 2025.
1 min read Finance
Build an LLM agent in 50 lines of Python. Why context engineering and emergent behaviors are best understood through hands-on experimentation, not theory.
1 min read AI
OpenAI lost $11.5B in one quarter. But Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argues each AI model is independently profitable. Here's why the math is complicated.
4 min read AI
Diffusion models corrupt data into noise, then reverse the process. Learn the math with Stefano Ermon's Stanford CS236 course, free on YouTube.
1 min read AI![Pozsar's Bretton Woods III: Three Years Later [2/2]](https://static.philippdubach.com/ograph/ograph-Pozsar2.jpg)
Part 2/2: Assessing Bretton Woods III three years later. Evidence shows gradual reserve diversification and gold strength, but also persistent dollar dominance.
6 min read Economics![Pozsar's Bretton Woods III: The Framework [1/2]](https://static.philippdubach.com/ograph/ograph-Pozsar1.jpg)
Pozsar's Bretton Woods III: how Russia sanctions triggered a shift from Treasury-backed reserves to commodity-backed money. Part 1 of 2 on the framework.
7 min read Economics
Michael Mauboussin's argument that every cash-generating asset is valued through a DCF model. Why this Morgan Stanley paper changed how I think about value.
1 min read Finance
Critical analysis of the State of AI Report 2025 by Nathan Benaich: reasoning models, China's AI rise, business adoption growth, and survey bias concerns.
2 min read AI
Mary Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine for peripheral immune tolerance. Read the popular science summary.
1 min read Medicine
Agent-based modeling shows how random market transactions naturally produce extreme wealth concentration, and why even a small wealth tax changes everything.
2 min read Economics
A Rutgers study finds news sentiment embeddings from OpenAI models cut stock price prediction errors by 40%. Time-independent models perform just as well.
2 min read FinanceNVIDIA's SLM research claims 40-70% of LLM tasks can shift to small language models. Here's what their cost analysis misses about real-world deployment.
3 min read AIAmycretin's Phase 1 data shows 24.3% weight loss, beating Wegovy and Zepbound. How Novo Nordisk plans to replace its $20B Ozempic franchise before 2031.
5 min read Medicine
The zero price effect explains why politicians love free transit proposals. But making buses free might weaken the rider advocacy that protects service quality.
4 min read Economics
Are stock returns normally distributed? Formal normality tests reject this assumption for most equity indices, with major implications for risk management.
2 min read Finance
Apple's Illusion of Thinking paper found AI reasoning models collapse at high complexity. But critics argue the methodology, not the models, may be flawed.
2 min read AIKalshi's CFTC-regulated exchange now offers sports betting nationwide. If you can bet on oil futures, why not NFL touchdowns? The line is thinner than you think.
2 min read FinanceLLMs excel at parsing market sentiment and writing reports, but finance demands audit trails and explainable decisions that black box models cannot provide.
1 min read FinanceNew NBER paper shows optimal Fed policy should partially accommodate tariff inflation, exposing a fault line in the dual mandate when prices and jobs conflict.
1 min read EconomicsUBS paper uses Transition Probability Tensors to bridge machine learning and arbitrage-free derivatives pricing, offering a faster alternative to Monte Carlo.
2 min read FinanceDeFi's institutional TVL hit $42B in 2024 as BlackRock launched its tokenized fund. Layer 2 dominance, bridge exploits, and MiCA regulation define the shift.
1 min read FinanceResearch shows passive investing makes markets more volatile as index fund growth amplifies each trade's price impact while active managers lag behind.
2 min read FinancePure-play green bond issuers see lower CO2 emissions, higher ESG ratings, and cheaper financing. Mixed issuers show no environmental benefit, research finds.
1 min read FinanceGoogle released AlphaFold 3 for free, predicting molecular interactions beyond proteins. But is this generosity or a cloud platform play to own drug discovery?
1 min read AI
Statistical analysis of 20,000 crash game rounds verifies the 97% RTP claim. But 179 rounds per hour means expected losses exceed 500% of wagers hourly.
4 min read Finance
Training RoBERTa to predict Hacker News success revealed temporal leakage inflating metrics. How temporal splits, calibration, and regularization fix it.
5 min read AI
Analysis of 32,000 HN posts reveals 65% negative sentiment correlates with 27% higher engagement. Six-model comparison, power-law distributions, full data.
2 min read AI
Build an open-source ML RSS reader with swipe interface. Uses MPNet embeddings and Thompson sampling for personalized feeds that escape the filter bubble.
4 min read AI
Build a privacy-focused newsletter with Python, Cloudflare Workers KV, and Resend API. Zero tracking, zero cost, full control. Open source code included.
4 min read Tech
Cursor AI deployed YOURLS on Azure via SSH in 15 minutes: server config, MySQL, SSL, and a custom plugin. Full transcript and tutorial available.
2 min read AI
Build the right mental model for gradients with this PyTorch visualization tool. 2D surface plots with gradient vectors show the direction of steepest ascent.
1 min read AI
How I trained a YOLOv11 model to detect playing cards at 99.5% accuracy and built a real-time Monte Carlo blackjack odds calculator using computer vision.
6 min read AI
A hands-on project predicting postprandial glucose curves with XGBoost, Gaussian curve fitting, and 27 engineered features from CGM data. Code on GitHub.
6 min read Medicine
GPT-3.5 matched RavenPack's 41% returns in a sentiment analysis trading strategy using 2,072 news headlines. See the full backtest results and comparison.
6 min read Finance
Built a CGM data analysis tool with Python to visualize Freestyle Libre 3 glucose data alongside nutrition, workouts, and sleep for endurance cycling.
3 min read Medicine
How I built a crypto mean reversion trading bot using PELT change point detection on Kraken, targeting altcoin price overreactions with automated execution.
3 min read Finance
How I built Python portfolio optimization tools, tripled the Sharpe ratio from 0.65 to 1.68, and published the results as an academic paper on MPT.
2 min read Finance
A Hugo blog tech stack with Cloudflare R2 image hosting, responsive WebP shortcodes, Workers AI social automation, and GitHub Pages CI/CD deployment.
2 min read Tech