Falkenblog

Not entirely convincing. I personally prefer Falkenstein as my Chomsky critic:

The spread is a debating tactic where you present a set of supporting arguments so wide and particular your opponents are unable to rebut them all because 1) they have day jobs and 2) they have limited space or time to address them in any particular forum. A champion spreader is Noam Chomsky, who selectively recites facts of world history from Indonesia, Russia, to El Salvadore and 200 places in between, which no one but a professional in Comparative Economic Systems would be familiar with (indeed, comparative economic systems was a flourishing economic subdiscipline precisely because it couldn't be easily refuted because those communist countries didn't have a free press and made up their production data, but after 1989 it was obvious this field was simple wishful thinking dominated by deluded Marxists-note:of the ones I knew!).

http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2012/09/economists-love-spread.html

I wasn't going to upgrade to S4, but now that I read this rant, makes me want to go and get one.

Every week some columnist gets on a soapbox and drones about how they are offended. Just read a good blog post about it: http://falkenblog.blogspot.fr/2013/03/taking-offense-is-not-righteous.html

"Curiously, a former definition of impoliteness has become a new focal point for all sorts of political and psychological offense. I remember Miss Manners noting that politeness has two, related, sides: not giving or taking unintentional offense. That's clearly old school. There seems to be a public bounty for perceiving slights, and lots of columnists are full-time commentators noting the latest injustice to their tribe. There's a website called MicroAggressions documenting slights felt by people who don't appreciate the guy who opened or failed to open the door for them. Interestingly, the more they talk about things, the more people get upset by people getting upset ad infinitum."

Best survey of the subject I have found (most are bullshit) is Finding Alpha by Eric Falkenstein which he has graciously offered for free on his blog. By the subject I mean, finding an edge in trading. Spoiler alert there is no system to follow. He wrote algos for a local options market maker, had a significant Econ PHD thesis. The basic premise of the book is that real Alpha is rare, idiosyncratic and gets exploited by those in the know and eventually the edge goes away after several years. He gives several classic historic examples which are what made this book so interesting and unique to me.
http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2016/08/finding-alpha-pdf.html

This reminds me of an article I read a year back, same topic:

http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2013/07/my-big-toe.html

"The bottom line is, if we are in a simulation, there needs to be compressive sampling because quantum effects between particles would otherwise require an infinite amount of memory, so the meaning of the wave function is that it's for data compression. [...] The fortuitous data compression implicit in wave functions is merely another reason to suspect we are in a simulation. "

This is actually an awesome illustration of why a lot of famous results in academic finance were wrong in the 70s and 80s. Returns don't average, they multiply. If you get HHTT or TTHH you're in terrible shape:

2.25 * .36 = .36 * 2.25 = .81

You started with $1 and now have 81 cents. I recently learned that a lot of early computer-era academic finance actually made the same error of averaging returns, as described in Finding Alpha:

http://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2016/08/finding-alpha-pdf.html

The book The Missing Risk Premium covers a lot of the evidence. The author give a synopsis here: https://falkenblog.blogspot.com/2013/07/missing-risk-premium-synopsis.html

Low volatility investing is based around the observation that low volatility stocks have higher average returns than high volatility stocks. This article is a good summary: https://www.researchaffiliates.com/en_us/publications/articles/s_2013_jan_making-sense-of-low-volatility-investing.html