New research published in the inaugural issue of the academic journal Collective Intelligence suggests that evolutionary forces may be fueling collective tendencies to discriminate.

Retirement investors have never had it so good. For a decade now individual retirement accounts and company 401(k) plans have been booming thanks to the stock market’s giddy rise.

But before we start to get complacent, or think this is normal, here comes a timely new warning. And it comes from beyond the grave, from the late, great Vanguard founder Jack Bogle—one of the champions of the Mom and Pop investor and buy-and-hold index investing. Bogle died in 2019.

“The parallels between video games and day trading is becoming closer and closer,” says Andrew Lo, a finance professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “For many gamers, particularly the younger ones who are not used to trading and don't fully understand the impact of significant losses and gains on their psychophysiology, it could have some significant adverse consequences.”

The markets and investing have been compared to Darwinian selection and evolution by a number of observers (e.g., Jonathan Burton, 2009; Chris Dillow, 2014; Andrew Lo, quoted by Peter Dizikes, 2017; Charles Munger, quoted by Lee Kuan Yew, 2017; Justin Kuepper, 2019). Andrew Lo of MIT's Sloan School of Management has written a thorough and illuminating book on the subject, laying out an argument for a behavioral investment theory that can serve as a better explanation of market behavior than mere random walk theory alone (Andrew Lo, 2017; Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought; Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 483 p.).

On the Thursday, January 24 edition of Bloomberg Baystate Business we spoke with Bloomberg Intelligence gaming and lodging analyst Brian Egger about MGM-Springfield, the latest on the Wynn saga, and sports betting. Rob Almeida of MFS stopped by to talk about the markets. Bloomberg News endowments reporter Michael McDonald joined us to talk about his story on Baupost Group’s Seth Klarman, who sees opportunity in the markets. Boston Business Journal real estate editor Catherine Carlock talked about the commercial real estate market in Boston. Finally, MIT’s Andrew Lo talked about technology, finance and investing. Hosts: Peter Barnes, Janet Wu and Pat Carroll. Producer: Dan Pierce.

Thus far, 2018 has proven to be a prosperous year for many in the industry, thanks in no small part to the strength of the U.S. economy.

And while economists are predicting a slowdown in growth next year, the next 12 months, barring unforeseeable incidents, should remain strong, with few signs of a pullback on the horizon.

"The economy is clearly strong," said Andrew Lo, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management and director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering. "We've got pretty low unemployment, very reasonable inflation, and all eyes are on the stock market, which has done quite well. I think, overall, both in the United States and more broadly around the world, things are going quite well. In that kind of an environment, it's no wonder people are confident about the future and willing to spend money on things like vacation and travel."

At the height of the credit crunch in 2008, academics at the London School of Economics were infamously caught off guard when the Queen of England asked why no one saw the financial crisis coming. Now, 10 years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. on Sept. 15, 2008, economists, regulators, policymakers and finance industry insiders are asking themselves where the next financial crisis could come from, and what danger signals they should watch for, to avoid being blindsided again.

While there are several areas of potential concern, industry experts broadly do not believe a systemic collapse on the same scale of 2008 is on the horizon.

If your house is on fire, what is the plan? Head for the exit, naturally. But if a market crash is burning a big hole in your investment portfolio, selling out may not be the best course of action. The very same emotions and biases that can lead to good decisions in many areas of daily life can lead us astray in matters of money, experts say.

Andrew Lo, a professor of finance at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, dialled in from Boston to talk about regulation, markets and the future of machine learning.

Lo pioneered the adaptive markets hypothesis, which describes markets as a complex evolutionary ecosystem, populated by different stakeholders that adapt to changes on the basis of certain behavioural traits and biases.

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.

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.

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

There are two popular schools of thought when it comes to how markets work. There's the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) which says that it's basically impossible to beat the market, because all information is completely priced in at all times (more or less). On the other side is an increasingly popular behavioral view which argues that various human emotions and biases are always creating situations that aren't justified by the data. On this week's episode of the Odd Lots podcast, we speak to Andrew Lo, a professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management about his own theory, which he calls Adaptive Markets. The theory attempts to bridge the behavioral approach with the efficient markets view. He argues that the proper way to view the market is through an ecological lens, examining the players as flora and fauna of a complicated system, to help determine who's thriving, who's dying, and where asset prices will go.