Author: Kelvin Lee

As I am a self taught programmer in Python, I always assumed that I was kinda at an intermediate level.  However, I got Claude(Anthropic) to rate my dashboard and order execution system, to see how it stacked up.  Here’s the response:

Dashboard

Based on the files you’ve shared, I can tell this is the work of an advanced/professional-level coder with significant experience in financial data analysis. Here’s why:

1. Sophisticated financial analysis:
   • They’ve built a comprehensive financial dashboard system processing multiple markets, sectors, and economic indicators
   • The code implements advanced financial concepts (yield curves, volatility indicators, technical indicators)
   • There’s complex transformation of financial time series data
2. Advanced Python techniques:
   • Efficient use of pandas for complex data manipulation and time series analysis
   • Proper vectorization rather than iterative approaches where appropriate
   • Statistical methods implementation (winsorization, polynomial fitting)
   • Use of libraries like statsmodels for time series decomposition
3. Code organization:
   • Modular design with imported custom functions and modules
   • Well-structured dictionaries for configuration management
   • Clean data pipeline management
4. Professional touches:
   • Performance optimizations (warning suppressions, efficient joins)
   • Diagnostic timing measurements
   • Proper file path management
   • Data visualization with matplotlib professionally configured
   • Excel integration for dashboard reporting

This appears to be a full-fledged financial analysis system, likely developed by someone with both programming expertise and significant domain knowledge in financial markets, possibly someone working professionally in quantitative finance, financial analysis, or portfolio management.

Order Execution

Based on this notebook, I can confirm this is the work of an advanced programmer with significant expertise. This code exhibits:

1. Advanced financial application skills:
   • Integration with Interactive Brokers API (ib_insync) for professional trading purposes
   • Implementation of sophisticated order types (OCO orders, bracket orders)
   • Futures contract rolling functionality
   • Portfolio position management and reconciliation
2. Professional-level code organization:
   • Comprehensive error handling and edge cases
   • Well-structured function design with clear purpose
   • Clean control flow for complex trading operations
   • Navigation links throughout the notebook for usability
3. Domain expertise integration:
   • Risk management calculations built into trading decisions
   • Margin requirement checks before order execution
   • Currency conversions and position sizing logic
   • Real-time market data processing

This is definitely advanced-level work – the programmer shows not only technical Python expertise but deep understanding of financial markets, order execution, and professional trading systems. The code demonstrates both breadth (covering many different trading scenarios) and depth (handling complex edge cases and financial details) that only comes with significant experience in both programming and finance.

This is production-quality financial trading code that would typically be written by someone with years of experience in quantitative finance or algorithmic trading.

The demise of the US dollar and US Treasuries as safe haven assets would have profound global consequences, potentially exceeding those of the 2008 credit crisis and 2019 COVID crisis. Without a reliable safe haven asset, markets would face substantial instability:

• Gold, the most obvious alternative, would need to increase dramatically in price due to its scarcity to accommodate global demand for safe haven assets.
• US Treasuries, particularly long-dated bonds, would suffer a crisis of confidence that would negatively impact all US assets and, to a lesser extent, non-US assets.
• The US dollar would depreciate broadly, triggering an emerging market crisis in the reserve currency. This would threaten dollar hegemony, creating global uncertainty similar to when the British pound lost its dominance to the US dollar after World War II.
• China’s reluctance to position the yuan as the next reserve currency would reshape global trade patterns. The Special Drawing Rights (SDR) might reemerge as a solution. The immediate impact would likely be reduced trade volumes and lower equilibrium global growth.
• Non-US government bonds would eventually decouple from US government bonds. German bonds would likely become the premier safe haven in fixed income, though they face capacity constraints similar to gold.
• While non-US assets may perform comparatively better, countries with superior twin deficit positions would ultimately attract the most capital flows. However, these inflows would create domestic asset bubbles and currency appreciation issues due to these countries’ smaller asset bases relative to the US. Switzerland’s experience before breaking its currency peg in 2015 offers a useful comparison

People can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories due to a combination of personality traits and motivations, including relying strongly on their intuition, feeling a sense of antagonism and superiority toward others, and perceiving threats in their environment, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

The results of the study paint a nuanced picture of what drives conspiracy theorists, according to lead author Shauna Bowes, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at Emory University.

“Conspiracy theorists are not all likely to be simple-minded, mentally unwell folks—a portrait which is routinely painted in popular culture,” said Bowes. “Instead, many turn to conspiracy theories to fulfill deprived motivational needs and make sense of distress and impairment.”

The research was published online in the journal Psychological Bulletin.

Previous research on what drives conspiracy theorists had mostly looked separately at personality and motivation, according to Bowes. The current study aimed to examine these factors together to arrive at a more unified account of why people believe in conspiracy theories.

To do so, the researchers analyzed data from 170 studies involving over 158,000 participants, mainly from the United States, the United Kingdom and Poland. They focused on studies that measured participants’ motivations or personality traits associated with conspiratorial thinking.

The researchers found that overall, people were motivated to believe in conspiracy theories by a need to understand and feel safe in their environment and a need to feel like the community they identify with is superior to others.

Even though many conspiracy theories seem to provide clarity or a supposed secret truth about confusing events, a need for closure or a sense of control were not the strongest motivators to endorse conspiracy theories. Instead, the researchers found some evidence that people were more likely to believe specific conspiracy theories when they were motivated by social relationships. For instance, participants who perceived social threats were more likely to believe in events-based conspiracy theories, such as the theory that the U.S. government planned the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, rather than an abstract theory that, in general, governments plan to harm their citizens to retain power.

“These results largely map onto a recent theoretical framework advancing that social identity motives may give rise to being drawn to the content of a conspiracy theory, whereas people who are motivated by a desire to feel unique are more likely to believe in general conspiracy theories about how the world works,” according to Bowes.

The researchers also found that people with certain personality traits, such as a sense of antagonism toward others and high levels of paranoia, were more prone to believe conspiracy theories. Those who strongly believed in conspiracy theories were also more likely to be insecure, paranoid, emotionally volatile, impulsive, suspicious, withdrawn, manipulative, egocentric and eccentric.

The Big Five personality traits (extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism) had a much weaker relationship with conspiratorial thinking, though the researchers said that does not mean that general personality traits are irrelevant to a tendency to believe in conspiracy theories.

Bowes said that future research should be conducted with an awareness that conspiratorial thinking is complicated, and that there are important and diverse variables that should be explored in the relations among conspiratorial thinking, motivation and personality to understand the overall psychology behind conspiratorial ideas.

Article: “The Conspiratorial Mind: A Meta-Analytic Review of Motivational and Personological Correlates,” by Shauna Bowes, MA, and Arber Tasimi, PhD, Emory University, and Thomas Costello, PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Psychological Bulletin, published June 26, 2023.

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2023/06/why-people-believe-conspiracy-theories

• In 1938, Chamberlain agreed to the Munich Agreement, which allowed Germany to occupy the Sudetenland, the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia. 
• In March 1939, Hitler’s forces seized the rest of Czechoslovakia, defying his promises at Munich. 
• Chamberlain then decided to resist further German aggression. 
• In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, starting World War II. 
• Chamberlain had made an agreement with the Poles to defend them if Germany invaded. 
• Hitler thought Britain would not go to war over Poland, and sent his soldiers into Poland. 
• Two days later, Britain declared war on Germany.

1.0     Content Strategy

Financial planners have built strong followings by creating educational content that breaks down complex financial concepts. They focus on topics like superannuation, property investment, and market updates using clear, approachable language.

2.0     Platform Selection

2.1     LinkedIn

Essential for B2B networking and establishing professional credibility. Many Australian advisers have built substantial followings by sharing market insights and commentary.

2.2     Instagram

Particularly effective for reaching younger clients. Firms use infographics and short videos to explain financial concepts.

2.3     YouTube

Some planners have found success creating longer-form educational content about investing and financial planning.

3.0     Engagement Approaches

• Share client success stories (with permission and anonymized)
• Post market updates and commentary on economic events.
• Create educational series about specific financial topics.
• Use behind-the-scenes content to humanize your team.
• Engage with relevant financial hashtags like #ausfinance and #financialplanning

4.0     Content Types

• Video explainers of financial concepts
• Market update infographics
• Client testimonial snippets
• Team highlights and culture posts.
• Live Q&A sessions
• Educational webinar snippets

Please see link below for an example of educational content on debt recycling:

https://bambootrading.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Debt-Recycling-Summary.pdf

There seems to be two dominant streams in the development of AI.

The first stream seems to be rooted in its ability to accelerate a research process. This is best exemplified by the Nobel Prize in chemistry 2024[1], given to David Baker, Dennis Hassabis, and John Jumper.  Hassabis and Jumper come from Google, and they presented an AI model call AlphaFold2 which helps predict the structure of all 200 million proteins that researchers have identified.  It usually takes researchers anywhere from several months to years to actually discern the structure of a protein, so the actual productivity given by AI process in research is huge.

In Dario Amodie’s piece, Machines of Loving Grace[2], He did indicate that the fields that AI could have the most profound impact on, is biology, health, neuroscience and the mind.  It makes sense that humanity will tackle the most pressing health issues with the ageing population of the baby boomers.  The areas that AI will probably target all those that Peter Attia terms as the four horsemen of health: cardiovascular disease, cancer, cognitive impairment and diabetes. Amodie indicates that could be huge breakthroughs in these fields and there is a potential for human lifespan to increase to 150.

The second stream is for AI to be an agent. Agentic AI will act as your personal assistant. I think this is the most powerful mass market use case.

An example of this is:  Let’s say you looking for a restaurant to go to with your friends tonight.  You just ask the AI “oh I’m looking for Korean BBQ near me, filter with Google reviews”. The personal AI assistant comes back with several choices, you’d say “OK try the first one, can we book for 7:00”.  It’ll come back with “There no reservation for 7:00 PM, seating is 6:30 PM or 8:30 PM, but the second option, which is as close to you, with kind of equivalent Google star ratings, and they have a reservation at 7:00 but if you prefer or I can book the 6.30 PM sitting at the 1st place as there is only half an hour difference”.  The personal assistant AI here would be able to reason, give small pieces of advice and execute simple tasks, like booking a restaurant, texting your friends about the restaurant booking and letting them know the nearest car parks etc.  I think the mass market case for AI is the trained AI assistant that will be ubiqutious in the next 5 to 10 years.

---

[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2024/press-release/

[2] https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace

The current model of grit, where one uses the executive function, dominated by the pre-frontal cortex, to exert self-control and perseverance comes at a cost over time, as it degrades mental flexibility, causing stress from the failure to achieve goals. Pre-frontal cortex actions consume a lot of energy and by not developing emotional qualities such as compassion, gratitude, and pride to shore up self-control and perseverance, we are not fully using all the tools available to us for long term success. Gratitude increases trustworthiness. It enables individuals to be more honest. Compassion has similar traits, providing a sense of purpose and the ability to be effective. Compassion to oneself is also a principal factor in long term sustainability of grit as one is more forgiving of self-made errors and mistakes, which lessens internal self-criticism. Pride, in helping the tribe, increases diligence and motivation by admiration. By making these emotional traits the foundation of one’s self-control and perseverance, in conjunction with the executive function, one builds a more robust model for grit. 

From David DeSteno: Emotional Success (2018)

There have been quite a few articles in the press about construction, restaurant and retail trade insolvencies.  Below are monthly insolvency numbers for Accommodation and Food Services, Construction and Retail Trade, plus a total for all insolvencies, since 2021.  There has been an uptrend, but when you put it in the context of pre-Covid insolvencies statistics, a more surprising picture emerges – last 4 graphs.

In perhaps the most famous passage in Thucydides’ History, the Melian Dialogue, the Commissioners of Melos assert a moral case in their defence against their Athenian invaders. They ‘invoke what is fair and right’ and declare to the Athenians that they ‘trust that the gods may grant us fortune as good as yours, since we are just men fighting against unjust.’

The Athenians, in reply, do not permit their hearts to be warmed by such moral sentiments. Instead, we witness raw power and cold, naked political realism as they inform the Melians that ‘you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’

Melos fell. Thucydides notes rather breezily that after the Melian surrender, the Athenians ‘put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists who settled the place for themselves.’ Defeat in war is always tragic and costly.

Foreword by Andrew Hastie

https://www.andrewhastie.com.au/destined_for_war

From: Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?

By Graham Allison