Fifteen Years in 2023

And one more thing…Fifteen years

I started this website and blog on January 22, 2008, 15 years ago. I just realized this morning that I had passed that waypoint on Sunday. In March, if the lord willing, I will celebrate my 80th birthday. It has been interesting and fun, not always right, but seldom late to a Macro turn. I remember so well my start in the business, walking onto the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade on July 15, 1970, just as the Corn Blight hit, corn had traded for years around 1.10 a bushel, all of a sudden it was 1.70 a bushel, the excitement keeps showing its face.

I then quickly became a member of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange trading cattle, hogs, and pork bellies. During my ten years on the CME floor, I got to see the start of currency and interest rate futures.

Then in 1980 as the computer saw its early start in trading I moved upstairs and in a sense I have never left the computer trading scene, even engaging in the development of machine learning AI for data analysis and trading.

It would have been much easier to have waited 20 or 30 years and let silicon valley do the hard part, raise the big AI development money. Apparently another early AI participant, IBM, invested 4 to 5 billion dollars between 1997 and 2008 in acquiring data bases and developing Watson. Now AI is everywhere and almost anyone can leapfrog onto the train and act like it is something new.

See WSJ article from 1986 which talks about our early work on machine learning AI.

Donald Knepp