The Weekly Review #3
In this episode, I'll talk about the almost free Bloomberg-like terminal, reading newspapers in a terrible manner, and video instructions on how to lose money playfully.
Welcome to Vlad’s Notes, an investment newsletter from the founder of Roic AI. Make sure you follow me on Twitter to get more stuff that wasn’t included here or send me a message.
The Weekly Review is a special Sunday publication that highlights the most intriguing articles, companies, books, and services I came across over the previous week.
Service · OpenBBTerminal
In the last 10 years, the concentration of power in the hands of large tech companies has created numerous concerns among users, which has spurred the large acceleration of open-source projects. They can be as simple as a screenshot app or as complex as a Bloomberg-like terminal. All developments are made by a community and are free to use or edit as you like.
Putting aside that GitHub was purchased by Microsoft (nice move, by the way), which undermines a little bit the open structure of the platform, GitHub has more than 40 million repositories as of 2022 and is growing very fast
It’s a lot of code, and someone needs to pay for storage and distribution. It sounds like a big deal to earn money in a non-profit industry, right? Yeah, until they realized what a valuable asset the company had. Usually, the open-source code is of higher quality than the enterprise one. You’d be surprised how many "if it works, don’t touch it" solutions reside in production versions at big corporations.
On October 26, GitHub introduced Copilot, the AI autocomplete programming solution trained on billions of lines of open GitHub repositories that tremendously helps to write software faster and better. I participated in a private beta test and there was a clear wow effect and sad news for junior developers. The bar of tech skills now is way higher with the help of GitHub Copilot to get traction in an industry.
Among autocompletion, you can also write human-like text about what you need, and Copilot will create a ready-to-use function. Let's look at one example to help you understand how simple it is to write code today, even if you aren't into tech fields.
You write:
// find all png images in the input directory
// and copy them to the output directory
Copilot gives a result:
function makeIt (input, output){
var files = fs.readdirSync(input);
for (var i = 0; i ‹ files. length; i++){
var file = files il;
if(file. substr(-4) == ' .png*){
var src = input + '/' + file;
var dest = output + '/' + file;
fs.createReadstream(src).pipe(fs.createWritestream(dest));
}
}
}
Magic? Yeah, but we digress a little from the investment topic.
One of the most popular open-source repositories in the finance section on GitHub is OpenBBTerminal. The guys simply created a free Bloomberg-like terminal where you can check everything from fundamental analysis to the BigMac index and portfolio backtesting.
They have almost 17 thousand stars (the domestic alternative to likes on Facebook). That is a lot. You don’t have to be a coder to install and use this solution. Just download the installer, click ‘Next’ 3 times, don’t read the License Agreement, and then click Finish. All as usual.
To use advanced features, you may also need to purchase API access from some providers. However, soft offers a completely free version that makes use of websites like Yahoo Finance and others.
My recommendation of the week goes to these guys.
Article · Reading the news is the new smoking
I came from a five-newspapers-every-morning guy to let’s check in 15 minutes for interesting stuff and facts. Reading all the articles in a newspaper gave me a feeling of being in the know and having an informational advantage. But what I had in reality was amusement for my mind, no more.
If someone reads newspapers, he soon starts to realize that most articles can be compressed into six meaningful sentences. 60% of every article is statements about general concerns like "inflation is high", childish explanations of definitions like "P/E is the ratio of a company's share price to the company's earnings per share, which tells investors how much a company is worth," and a comment on a subject from a guy you don’t know.
Another bad tendency of business newspapers is to explain any stock price movements. No one knows for sure why stocks plunged 5% yesterday.
"Some people think we’re, like, doing public service," he said. "We’re not. This is entertainment for people who want to feel smart." — an editor at a big-name news organization (a piece from the article)
Adam Mastroianni wrote an excellent article about reading the news and how it affects people. What about my experience? As an investor, I need to get facts, not opinions and made-up explanations. Is the journalist discussing the lobbying issues of the new Tesla factory in Berlin? Good, I just need to get the fact that the car production in Europe is still on pause, not about the quirky relationship between Elon and the German government, because it can move forward tomorrow or doesn’t change at all. Nobody knows in advance how or when they will come to a consensus.
My 15-minute method came down to visiting the WSJ printed version webpage because, in addition to the title, it gives you a one-sentence description of an article. Usually, you don’t need more than that. This method is applicable to U.S. and world news. In the business section, things get a little bit more complicated. I still read all the articles, but in a scrolling mode, skipping the tedious parts that start with "… — said Jessie Foster" and "people are saying".
You could say, why not just use Twitter or Reddit? First, I need to trust the source. Second, the quantity of information there is unlimited. You can find yourself scrolling aggregators and social media all day while there’s a specified number of articles in a printed version of The New York Times or The Economist.
Anyway, while I don’t offer you to stop reading newspapers completely, I highly recommend the article "Reading the news is the new smoking" by Adam Mastroianni as a way to make your reading time and source selection more effective.
Video · I Tested The Most Terrifying Investment Strategy
Through my research on one topic four months ago, I discovered Ben's channel. I quickly became interested in it, so I watched all of his videos. There’s nothing serious or educational; it’s just funny pieces of content about investing, speculation, and losing money playfully.
One video at the end of a working day will be the perfect cherry on top of the cake.
That’s all for today, thank you.
Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and share this post with your friends.