There's big money in biotech in the Greater Boston area. Last year, venture capital firms invested more than $3 billion in the state's biotech and pharmaceutical companies, according to the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council. The amount has risen every year since 2012. Local companies have already produced revolutionary treatments for rare diseases, cancer and more. And there's promise and hope for cures and treatments still to come. Because of that, there's no shortage of capital.Biotech companies often go public even if they haven't yet put a product on the market, let alone turned a profit. MIT finance professor Andrew Lo says there's good reason for so much exuberance.

Opinion article by Andrew W. Lo and Kenneth Kosik on the potential role of California in the space of Alzheimer's Disease research.

“Nobody’s talking about this story,” Max Tokarsky said. Not exactly true, as the founder and CEO of InvestAcure is telling anyone who will listen. A former non-profit executive-turned-evangelist for the Impact Investment and Public Benefit Corporation model, Tokarsky is slated to present the keynote address at the Alzheimer's-2018 International Conference in Rome, Italy May 8. The Rome conference brings together researchers from around the world focused on groundbreaking research to slow, reverse or prevent dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. A life-long social entrepreneur and former non-profit executive, Tokarsky will present "The Enigma of Eroom’s Law and The Wall Street Math Stifling Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery" in Rome. He wants to talk about funding a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. But he’s not talking about just asking major corporations or the government or even Big Pharma for help. Tokarsky wants everyone to pitch in. And he’s figured out a way we can.

Buying a stock is one thing, but when do you sell? That question will have been nagging many nervous investors in recent months, after watching global stock markets tumble. One potential solution is to use stop-loss orders that ensure you exit your position when the price falls below a designated point. Do stop-loss orders work? Can they help investors sleep better at night by cutting back on risk? Or are stops a trader’s tool, best left to those who nip in and out of markets rather than investors with multiyear horizons?

Economist Andrew Lo talks to the FT's John Authers about his adaptive markets hypothesis, the idea that markets develop and adapt over time and should be modelled using concepts from biology instead of physics. It's the subject of his recent book, Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought.

Companies are going public without revenues and the stock market is jittery. It feels like we’ve been here before, but there are some important differences.

Andrew W. Lo, director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering and the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at MIT, describes his research on artificial intelligence and financial markets at the launch event for the MIT Intelligence Quest, an Institute-wide initiative on human and machine intelligence research, its applications, and its bearing on society.

Their mission is to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and to generate ideas that advance management practice.

Derek Lowe's commentary on drug discovery and the pharma industry. An editorially independent blog from the publishers of Science Translational Medicine. All content is Derek’s own, and he does not in any way speak for his employer.

How do you drive investors to spend money on cutting-edge cancer treatments? One idea, according to economist Andrew Lo, is to sell securities in a megafund of research projects. Economics correspondent Paul Solman explores how financial engineering could be the starting point for curing cancer.

Andrew W. Lo was named winner of the $10,000 Harry M. Markowitz Award for his paper, "Moore's Law Vs. Murphy's Law in the Financial System: Who's Winning?" The award was announced Thursday by the Journal of Investment Management and New Frontier Advisors in a joint statement. The paper provided examples of technology capable of adapting to the "foibles in human behavior" so users can employ all the recent breakthroughs in computing hardware and software, data analytics and telecommunications that have changed the financial industry "safely, effectively and effortlessly," according to an abstract on the paper.

Nicht nur die Welt der Finanzdienstleister ist im Umbruch, auch die Kapitalmarkttheorie gerät in Bewegung. Dirk Elsner über zwei Autoren, die das Modell des Homo Oeconomicus infrage stellen

מפגש מבהיל בגן החיות חשף בפני פרופ' אנדרו לוֹ את ההיגיון האבולוציוני ששולט בשוק ההון, ושלח אותו למסע שהסתיים ברב־מכר פורץ דרך. עכשיו הוא מסביר ל"כלכליסט" מהי תורת השווקים המסתגלים, איך מבדילים בין זנים שונים של משקיעים ולמה בג'ונגל הפיננסי שולט עקרון הישרדות העשירים

Murphy’s Law says that anything which can go wrong, will go wrong. Moore’s Law says that computing power will double every 18 months or so. Technology drives financial innovation and activity. Andrew Lo, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has merged these ideas into a map of today’s financial system, a world where the speed of innovation is fast outstripping the ability of regulators to keep pace. As he told an audience of politicians at a New City Agenda event in the Palace of Westminster last month, the speed and complexity of financial markets increases by the day; human understanding does not.