Z's 3-in-3 - Periods When to Make Money and more...

Today in 3-in-3:

• Thing 1 - Periods When to Make Money
• Thing 2 - AI of the week
• Thing 3 - Intrinsic Motivation: The Secret Ingredient of the Great Innovators

Thing 1 - Periods When to Make Money

You lose your entire farm to a brutal economic downturn.

Most folks would be crushed, but not Samuel Benner. This Ohioan farmer, in a stroke of genius, decided to fight fire with fire – or rather, market chaos with market code-cracking.

Instead of just rebuilding his farm, Benner became obsessed with understanding why the market behaves the way it does. With nothing but pen, paper, and historical data on things like - believe it or not - pig prices!

Benner's Big Beat: Decoding the Market's Rhythm

Benner envisioned the market as a pulsating dance with

• Peaks (sell high!)
• Troughs (perfect buying opportunities!)
• Plateaus (HODL!).

The whole economic shebang followed a predictable rhythm, with booms every 8-9 years, busts every 16-18 years, and moderate stretches in between. This idea challenged the common perception of markets as random and unpredictable.

Fast Forward: Does Benner's Cycle Still Hold True?

Jumping to today.

Financial enthusiasts have put Benner's predictions to the test, overlaying them on charts of modern market giants like the S&P 500. The results?

Matched against S&P 500 - Silvan Frank (the two charts have somewhat different time scales. The lines represent the years of the Benner cycle, even though they appear to be a bit off)

Surprise, surprise, they line up pretty well!

Major market events like the Great Depression, the dot-com bubble burst, and even the 2008 financial crisis fall close to Benner's predicted boom-and-bust periods.

Now, it's not a perfect fit, but it's intriguing. It suggests that while Benner's model might not predict every hiccup, it has a knack for highlighting potential shifts in the market's mood.

Lessons from the Past: Why Benner's Cycle Matters

So, what can modern-day investors and financial gurus learn from this 150-year-old farmer's insights? Here are two big takeaways:

History Repeats Itself (Kinda, it rhymes)
Economies, like fashion trends, seem to follow cycles. Understanding these boom-bust patterns can give you a strategic edge.

The Past is a Powerful Teacher
No model is a fortune-telling machine, but studying historical trends can offer valuable clues about what might lie ahead.

Thing 2 - AI of the week

• Xiaomi launched a 24/7 robot-run "dark factory" - produces smartphones without any human workers.
  The 80,000-square-meter facility has 11 production lines that are 100% automated for key processes, allowing it to manufacture Xiaomi's upcoming foldable phones at a rate of about one every three seconds
• OpenAI and Arianna Huffington's Thrive Global launched a hyper-personalized AI health coach - Thrive AI Health.
  The goal is to leverage AI to make behavior change more powerful and sustainable, in order to reduce the burden of chronic diseases which account for 90% of U.S. healthcare spending.
• Odyssey, a startup co-founded by self-driving car industry veterans, emerged from stealth with a "Hollywood-grade" AI video generation platform.
  They aim to revolutionize visual effects and storytelling capabilities by providing filmmakers with fine-tuned control over every element in their scenes, including geometry, materials, lighting, and motion
• Poe introduced Previews, a new feature that lets you see and interact with web applications generated in chats on Poe. Previews works well with LLMs that excel at coding, including Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o, and Gemini 1.5 Pro.
  Examples: Interactive presentation, Flashcards, Drum machine
• Kuaishou Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, and University of Science and Technology of China released LivePortrait, a framework that can animate images from a video reference. Try it out

Thing 3 - Intrinsic Motivation: The Secret Ingredient of the Great Innovators

The great ones don’t do it for money or fame or power.

Or to build an institution, or to help others, or to save the world.

Like a child tinkering, they create it for its own sake.

Free of the burden of ambition.

Deaf to the demands of the world.

- Naval Ravikant

Having this inner drive helps them stay way beyond when any reasonable person would quit. They elevate their craft to the art form. And that's why they are great.

Cheers, Zvonimir