Notes from 16/3–23/3

Thank goodness it’s mostly business as usual here. Not much has changed for me which is great! Sadly my friend from exchange had to go back because her embassy and university basically dictated it.

COVID-19

Quant’s View on the Coronavirus Market Impact

There’s an opportunity to seek out alternative data alongside some traditional data to understand this market. Some of these might include:

• Plant shutdowns by company, sector, and country. (satellite imagery of plant parking lots)
• % of white collar working from home
• Hiring freezes and layoffs
• Unemployment rate
• Airport traffic
• Vaccine development progress
• Hospital activity
• Internet services/web outages (indicative of increased usage)

There are many additional datasets that can generate alpha. If you can find a way to differentiate your data gathering in times like this, you can either profit in the downturn or build the best turnaround portfolio possible.

Coronavirus in the News: Are they Overreacting?

Code is here

Pretty standard polarity and sensitivity analysis.

Through the use of web scraping and NLP (sentiment analysis), this analysis shows the media’s reaction to the current Coronavirus situation in the US. We showed that on average, articles are 40% subjective and fairly neutral in polarity. We also showed that the articles between two news stations were, in fact, different and that the NY Times has been reacting to the changes in the situation much more than CNN.

Hopefully, the next time you open a news article, you’re a bit more confident about how well what you’re about to read is portraying the reality of the Coronavirus situation.

Why Covid-19 is worse than the flu, in one chart

Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID19 mortality and healthcare demand

We therefore conclude that epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time. The social and economic effects of the measures which are needed to achieve this policy goal will be profound. Many countries have adopted such measures already, but even those countries at an earlier stage of their epidemic (such as the UK) will need to do so imminently. Our analysis informs the evaluation of both the nature of the measures required to suppress COVID19 and the likely duration that these measures will need to be in place. Results in this paper have informed policymaking in the UK and other countries in the last weeks. However, we emphasise that is not at all certain that suppression will succeed long term; no public health intervention with such disruptive effects on society has been previously attempted for such a long duration of time. How populations and societies will respond remains unclear

The graphs are absolutely terrifying. hundreds of thousands dead, possibly even 2 million (for US).

Blockchain

Bitcoin’s Cost of Production — A Model for Bitcoin Valuation

How decentralized blockchain messenger works

Whitepapers

Github

It’s an entire blockchain built just so you can send messages…

Where does the money go for blockchain investments?

All data comes from Pitchbook

1. 74.72% worldwide blockchain investments have been made in three markets: US (50.59%), China (17.05%), and Canada (7.08%). The US market has the biggest number of start-ups (933) and deals (1,330), while Chinese companies have the highest average valuation ($115.2 M) and deal size ($70.31 M), which indicates a high investment concentration.
2. Blockchain investment has doubled from 2017 to 2018 with more funding goes into cryptocurrency-related start-ups, regardless of the poor performance of the cryptocurrency market. As of October 27, 2018, $10,680 M have been raised (including ongoing IPOs), while only $5,623 M were collected in 2017. A large portion of the new investment goes into cryptocurrency platforms.
3. The most active investors are those exclusively dedicated to blockchain investments since there is a high knowledge barrier in understanding the technology.
4. ~75% of the deals are early stage investments in the blockchain space. Out of the 3,035 recorded deals, 2,271 (74.83%) deals are early stage investment (Angel/Early Stage VC/Seed Round/Grant/Accelerator/Incubator).
5. Technology integration is happening in the space. The number of M&A deals increases from 40 in 2017 to 91 in 2018. However, few of the deals were made by non-blockchain/traditional companies, indicating that the M&A deals are more about technology integration within the industry.
6. As expected, most of the investment has been directed to cryptocurrency-related startups in 2017/18. These startups work around cryptocurrency issuance, exchange/trading, mining (hardware and software), wallet, payment, etc. The investment is still growing rapidly regardless of the poor performance of the cryptocurrency market.
7. The most invested “buzzwords” in 2018 include: Blockchain Security, Crypto Assets & Exchange, Financial Software/Services, Stablecoin, and Blockchain Games/Gaming Platforms.
8. New investments are primarily made into: Cryptographic Technology (the base for security and protocol design), Stablecoins, and Assets Securitization/Management. Particularly, Consensus Algorithm/Protocol Development has attracted a large portion of money. The reasons is that all existing protocols have some flaws in design, and therefore a “perfect” protocol is still needed.

Blockchain — Ethereum

How To Deploy ERC20 Token on Mainnet/Testnet Using Truffle, Infura and MetaMask

A guide useful to reference

What ETH2 has learned from ETH1

It seems like all of this is really just the very very beginning

The technical challenges of building a decentralized application

To summarize, here are some of the main topics that were discussed throughout the article:

• We briefly touched on the various ways applications can interact with the Ethereum blockchain
• Then, we evaluated some performance shortcomings of a frontend-only dapp and noted how complicated game functions might be better handled by a processing-heavy backend
• Then, we described how backend workers are necessary to guarantee transaction delivery and to act upon blockchain state changes, noting the utility of replicating transaction information onto our PostgreSQL tables in enabling complex queries
• Then, we described the transition towards a PubSub pipeline as the organization needs became more diversified, which involved moving domain-specific knowledge further downstream of the processing pipeline, as a subscriber’s responsibility (instead of publishers to the message bus)
• Then, we described particular nuances of developing with Google PubSub, specifically the challenges of ingesting blockchain-related messages whilst handling duplication and no order guarantees

Tools

Technical Writing Courses

Can we please just adapt this?!

OR-Tools by Google

OR-Tools is an open source software suite for optimization, tuned for tackling the world’s toughest problems in vehicle routing, flows, integer and linear programming, and constraint programming.