Using Causal Analysis to Prove a Business Plan Before Starting the Company — The popular notion of a startup is an entity built to create something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty [Ries 2011]. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, writes, “We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.” The…

Inspired by The Economist’s publication of the BigMac index, we at Estimand are building the Cost of Beer Index. Instead of measuring the strength of currencies like The Economist, we want to determine if the daily cost of making a bottle of beer is going up or down. …

The modern food supply chain is built upon global cooperation where crops are grown in areas with the most comparative advantage, moving them to the best places for processing and transporting them to areas of highest demand for consumption [Kingsmen 2019]. …

A detailed description of my Causal Influence Graph for Forecasting Market Volatility. Network Phenomenon is a deceptively simple yet powerful concept for many fields. Beginning with Larry Page’s (co-founder of Google) PageRank, we can see how to start from a complex problem and end up with a straightforward solution [Amine…

Commodities are unlike any other financial market. One does not simply buy and sell contracts. Instead, they buy a harvest, store it, and sell it at the most advantageous time and place. Sometimes, they sell as a raw product but usually transform these commodities into ingredients like flour or table…

In Genesis 40, Pharaoh was given a dream by God. The dream began with seven fat cows and seven gaunt cows. In a strange turn, the skinny cows turned and consumed the fat ones. After awakening, Pharaoh went back to sleep, where he had a second vivid dream of seven…

“In what appears to be a massively successful pump and dump scheme, cryptocurrency litecoin surged around 25% early Monday after a falsified news release said Walmart would begin accepting the payment for online purchases,” explains CNN Business. …

There may be a scientific explanation for the concepts of a hot or cold market. French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot draws a connection between time and market volatility during the 1960s. In 2021, Spanish physicist Marcus Huber revealed that a clock is a thermal machine. …

“One cannot help but marvel that the movement of security prices, the motion of molecules, and the diffusion of heat could all be of the same mathematical species,” boasts French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. According to American physicist Mark Buchanan, it most likely is. …