Author: Edouard Chazal

Profiting From the Losers

Instead of trying to identify profitable trading algos on in-sample data that validate out-of-sample and remain profitable forward, one could instead try to identify unprofitable algos in some data sample that turn profitable in a forward sample. This often works because markets have become more mean-reverting in recent years.

→ Price Action Lab

A History of ETA

A brief history of the most infamous and highly distributed Swiss movement. 

The last we checked, the deadline was somewhere out in 2019 (2023 for Nivarox hairsprings – a much more difficult technology to reproduce).

And thus, ETA has become the little (watch) engine that could, that did, and now won’t for much longer.

→ Worn&Wound

B. B. King, Defining Bluesman for Generations

The thrill is not yet gone as he helped pave the way to great artists and inspired many more to keep up the fight. 

“Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon,” he said. “I’d go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I’d sing and play.

“I’d have me a hat or box or something in front of me. People that would request a gospel song would always be very polite to me, and they’d say: ‘Son, you’re mighty good. Keep it up. You’re going to be great one day.’ But they never put anything in the hat.

“But people that would ask me to sing a blues song would always tip me and maybe give me a beer. They always would do something of that kind. Sometimes I’d make 50 or 60 dollars one Saturday afternoon. Now you know why I’m a blues singer.”

And from the New Yorker :

That tension in his music—it was, in retrospect, I suppose, a play between a jazz ear and a blues hand, and even between the city and the country—paid off in a quality that I recognized at once that night, though I might not have known the word for it. It was the thing that marked him off from all those earnest English pasticheurs: B. B. King swung.

Credit : Danny Clinch

→ The New York Times

Mayweather : The Boxer and the Batterer

An essay on Floyd Mayweather Jr. as both :

I can’t, of course, say what’s behind Mayweather’s serial abuse — physical, verbal, or emotional — of women. Men who are rich beat women; men who are poor do, too. They do it in Alaska and South Carolina, in New York and Oslo and Dubai. They do it when they get away with it, and they do it when they don’t. Every day, an average of three women in the United States are killed by a current or former lover. But the more I watched Mayweather fight, and the more I read about his allegedly violent acts outside the ring, the more I began to see it as all of one piece. The circus that follows him. The bag filled with cash and gambling slips. The entourage. The houses and the women installed in them, the diamond rings as collars. The way he takes the measure of a situation in the ring, determining when it’s safe to punch and when to duck.

→ Grantland