Alcohol and Ozempic/Wegovy

  • More and more anecdotal evidence suggests that GLP-1 agonists (like semaglutide, the active ingredient in popular weight loss drugs Wegovy and Ozempic (off label)) could dampen cravings for alcohol.
  • A survey of individuals taking these drugs by Morgan Stanley has confirmed this phenomenon.
  • Up to six clinical trials are testing semaglutide in alcohol use disorder – which could provide conclusive proof.
  • Investors are generally trying to determine the implications of the weight-loss revolution. As this chart shows the number of expert calls done by investors on AlphaSense on the topic has risen rapidly.
  • Alpha Sense also has a handy guide to the Obesity space here (need to sign up).

Chief AI Scientist at Meta Talk

  • Yann Lecun is the Turing Award winning professor at NYU and Chief Scientist for AI at Meta.
  • His latest talk at MIT is worth a listen.
  • It is a bit technical but left me with a feeling that though LLMs are a big breakthrough, they have big limitations.
  • Models beyond the autoregressive LLM that start to mimic some of the planning and reasoning required to rival human intelligence are a lot more complicated with not-so-neat solutions.

Biology as Engineering

  • What if drug development could one day be like engineering?
  • Artificial intelligence has the potential to make this a reality, as is so well explored in this accessible Forbes profile.
  • One of the most exciting parts they highlight is de novo protein design i.e. building proteins from nothing (this is a nice post about it from Derek Lowe).

Scientific Revolutions

  • Fascinating chart showing how scientific revolutions progressed 1300-1850 between different countries.
  • Here, we leverage large datasets of individual biographies (N = 22,943) and present the first estimates of scientific production during the late medieval and early modern period (1300–1850). Our data reveal striking differences across countries, with England and the United Provinces being much more creative than other countries, suggesting that economic development has been key in generating the Scientific Revolution.
  • Source: Cambridge University.

The Laws of Trading

  • A book about trading isn’t ever actually about trading. It is either:
  • A former trader sharing stories from their glory days, e.g. Liar’s Poker, the exposé that morphed into a how-to guide, or
  • Tales of Icarus flying too close to the sun, where readers revel in schadenfreude, e.g., When Genius Failed.
  • So starts this engaging review of “The Laws of Trading” – a different take on the endeavour with broader lessons for decision-making in other domains.
  • The book’s author, Lebron, trained and worked as an engineer before switching to a career as a researcher and quant trader at Jane Street.

Collateral Damage

  • There has been a “seismic shift” in global financial markets – “the use of collateral, notably in the form of government securities” becoming “ubiquitous” at the cost of directly assessing borrower cash flow.
  • Pushed along by policy this switch from relationship to transactions banking has resulted in an unprecedented broadening and deepening of financial markets, especially derivatives.
  • Yet, this has also created huge vulnerabilities in financial markets, according to a new BIS article.

Patient Capital with High Active Share

  • High active share – where portfolios differ markedly from the benchmark – does well (+2% pa outperformance) but only if holding periods are over two years.
  • So having high active share isn’t enough if the fund trades a lot.
  • Being patient isn’t enough – as those with low active share do worse.
  • Full paper here.

Understanding AI

  • Economics says change happens in the adjustment of prices and relative prices.
  • Thanks to GPT, every programmer has the potential to be 10x more productive than the baseline from just 2 years ago.”
  • This means:
  • (1) The data-software combined price is collapsing opening enormous “volume growth”.
  • (2) Within it the relative value of software vs. data, especially unique data sets, is changing in the benefit of the latter (Media companies?).
  • (3) New scarcity is arising – likely in hardware and energy.
  • Full article here.
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