Fall Newsletter 2014: Fill & Download for Free

Searching MIT's online subject evaluations (which have data all the way back to Spring 1999) gives one result: 24.S95 (Special Seminar: Linguistics), in Fall 2014. Chomsky is listed as a Lecturer for the class.I found a page on MIT Linguistics' weekly newsletter here that describes the course in more detail.

Let me explain what happened between February 20 and March 23 (of 2020)From what I heard from the fund managers I know, when the market crashed in February 20, it was led by large funds selling their positions.Because more than 80% of trading is done by computers nowadays, these algorithms would buy or sell at a target price.During that time, the coronavirus had already been spreading, and because it wasn’t priced in, large funds set a strike price for them to mass-sell their shares, should it reach that target price.Note, when a large fund like Fidelity or Goldman sells, each fund can typically account for ~10% of the volume per day.Once the snowball starts rolling down, funds who didn’t sell begin to lose money.Consequently, these funds start getting margin calls, which forces them to sell so they can have liquidity (cash) to meet margin requirements.As all this is happening, retail investors are in a panic.And because most retail investors typically operate on emotion, they sell, too.And on the snowball rolls…So, what would be the best way to profit from the next market crash?If you want to gamble, I’d buy some SPXU and VXX calls. I must admit, while I did 15x my capital with VXX calls in February and March, I got lucky with timing.But remember, options are all about timing and direction, and they can expire worthless. So this is the high-risk, high-reward option.For the low-risk, high-reward option, I’ve been investing in gold, silver, and uranium. Commodities, basically.Commodities cycles tend to have wild (and predictable) swings because of lack of actionable data and the long lead time required to ramp-up or slow down mining operations.And as you can see in the chart, the price of commodities relative to the S&P 500 is at historical lows.Commodities is a when-not-if scenario, meaning it’s only a matter of time before it reverts back to the mean and overshoots to the upside.If you allocate capital at the cyclical bottom of a sector as predictable as commodities, it’d be hard NOT to multiply your capital over the coming years.Truth is, the next 10 years can either be a time of wealth creation or a time of wealth destruction, so this is the time to educate and position yourself to get lucky over the long term.If you’re interested in learning more about asymmetric investment ideas that are at cyclical bottoms (targeting 5–10x+ returns), I highly recommend reading Chris MacIntosh’s weekly newsletter.Over the years, Chris invested in…New Zealand real estate for a 64x return over 5 years, cashing out in mid 2006 just before Lehman Brothers got destroyed.The venture capital space where he built and then sold a VC firm which deployed around $30m of capital (too early to accurately predict his returns) selling out in 2015 when valuations had gone crazy).Bitcoin (bought in 2014 at ~$600, haven’t sold; we wouldn’t be surprised if it goes to $60k—trust me, we’ve done the math).And he’s currently sharing what his thought process and research in his newsletter.Chris has over 20 years of experience in analysis of geopolitical macro trends, so who better to learn from than someone who’s turned pennies into pounds many times over?Good luck out there!PS - If you found this helpful, feel free to upvote this answer so it can help more people!

I have lived 70 years and spent a good deal of time marveling at the beauty of the night sky, and I have never witnessed such a phenomenon. We colloquially call meteors shooting stars, but they are definitely not stars. Our Sun is a star, and if such a massive and hot object were to ever enter Earth's atmosphere, it would burn everything here to a crisp. Most meteors are small particles of dust, stone, or stone and ice. They generally burn up in the atmosphere due to frictional heating, as they usually approach Earth at very high speeds relative to us. The few that are large enough to make it all the way to the ground without burning up are called meteorites. You can thank your lucky stars if you find one, because they can fetch prices way higher than an equal sized chunk of gold.A distant rocket launch might give the impression of a meteor shooting upwards, as its early ascent would be blocked from your view by the curvature of the earth. It could be traveling quite fast by the time it rises into your field of view. Also, if a meteor was fairly large and distant, and if it was moving nearly tangent to your position on Earth's surface, heading directly over you, then as the perspective changed with its approach, it might well appear to be shooting up instead of down. Did you actually see such a thing, or are you just asking out of curiosity.This video was featured by EarthSky in their Dec. 31, 2014 newsletter. Shot over Puerto Rico on Dec. 28, 2014 from several locations, it's a long, slow-moving fireball and the first viewpoint makes it appear to be moving up whereas the others clearly show it is approaching Earth. Given its slow rate of descent, it is thought it was space junk falling back into the atmosphere.And of course, here's the spectacular explosion of a large meteorite that rattled homes and blew out windows in Chelyabinsk, Russia on Feb. 15th, 2014.