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Q Anon: 08/11/19 Trust Trump’s Plan ~ Vol.169, Q Day 653
8/14/2019, 4:44:16 PM · 1,524 of 1,546
KitJ to TEXOKIE
Too long. Didn’t read.

[heh]

I’ll be a while getting through that. Did the Borgenson dude pop up anywhere?

Thanks so much for the (loooooong) post! :)

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MOAR ON BORGERSON:
from 2016 -
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b14z9qvl205nh2/cargometrics-cracks-the-code-on-shipping-data
[APOLOGIZING IN ADVANCE - IT’S ANOTHER LONG ONE - electing to post it here for archiving purposes - and I am realizing my “mini-dig” isn’t. *sigh*. I’ll be breaking this one article up as answers to KitJ’s post.]

CARGOMETRICS CRACKS THE CODE ON SHIPPING DATA
SCOTT BORGERSON AND HIS TEAM OF QUANTS AT HEDGE FUND FIRM CARGOMETRICS ARE USING SATELLITE INTEL ON SHIPS TO IDENTIFY MISPRICED SECURITIES.

Fred R. Bleakley
February 04, 2016

One late afternoon last November, as a ping-pong game echoed through the floor at CargoMetrics Technologies’ Boston office, CEO Scott Borgerson was watching over the shoulder of Arturo Ramos, who’s responsible for developing investment strategies with astrophysicist Ronnie Hoogerwerf. AT RAMOS’S FEET SAT HELIOS, HIS BRINDLE PIT-BULL-AND-GREYHOUND MIX.

[I’ve seen mention of people saying the dog at his home is Ghislaine’s. I don’t recall the description, so here might be a possible clue. Is the dog described as GM’s his dog, or hers?]

All three men were staring at a computer screen, tracking satellite signals from oil tankers sailing through the Strait of Malacca, the choke point between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea where 40 percent of the world’s cargo trade moves by ship.

CargoMetrics, a start-up investment firm, is not your typical money manager or hedge fund. It was originally set up to supply information on cargo shipping to commodities traders, among others. Now it links satellite signals, historical shipping data and proprietary analytics for its own trading in commodities, currencies and equity index futures.

There was an air of excitement in the office that day because the signals were continuing to show a slowdown in shipping that had earlier triggered the firm’s automated trading system to short West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil futures. Two days later the U.S. Department of Energy’s official report came out, confirming the firm’s hunch, and the oil futures market reacted accordingly.

“We nailed it for our biggest return of the year,” says Borgerson, who had reason to breathe more easily. His backers were watching closely. They include Blackstone Alternative Asset Management (BAAM), the world’s largest hedge fund allocator, and seven wealthy tech and business leaders. Among them: former Lotus Development Corp. CEO Jim Manzi, who also had a long career at IBM Corp.

Compelling these investors and Borgerson to pursue the shipping slice of the economy is the simple fact that in this era of globalization 50,000 ships carry 90 percent of the $18.5 trillion in annual world trade.

That’s no secret, of course, but Borgerson and CargoMetrics’ backers maintain that the firm is well ahead of any other investment manager in harnessing such information for a potential big advantage. It’s why Borgerson has kept the firm in stealth mode for years. In its earlier iteration, from 2011 to 2014, CargoMetrics was hidden in a back alley, above a restaurant. Now that he’s running an investment firm, Borgerson declines to name his investors unless, like Manzi and BAAM, they are willing to be identified.

“My vision is to map historically and in real time what’s really going on in economic supply and demand across the planet,” says the U.S. Coast Guard veteran, who prides himself and the CargoMetrics team on not being prototypical Wall Streeters. “The problem is enormous, but the potential reward is huge.”

ACCORDING TO BORGERSON, CARGOMETRICS IS BUILDING A “LEARNING MACHINE” THAT WILL BE ABLE TO AUTOMATICALLY PROFIT FROM SPOTTING ANY PUBLICLY TRADED SECURITY THAT IS MISPRICED, USING WHAT HE REFERS TO AS SYSTEMATIC FUNDAMENTAL MACRO STRATEGIES. HE CALLS THE FIRM A NEW BREED OF QUANTITATIVE INVESTMENT MANAGER. IN UNGUARDED MOMENTS HE SEES HIMSELF AS THE STEVE JOBS OR ELON MUSK OF PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT.

Though his ambitions may sound audacious, one thing is certain: Borgerson doesn’t lack in self-confidence. Over the past six years, he has secretly and painstakingly built a firm heavy in Ph.D.s that can manage a database of hundreds of billions of historical shipping records, conduct trillions of calculations on hundreds of computer servers and systematically execute trades in 28 different commodities and currencies.

For his part, Borgerson seems an unlikely architect of such a serious, ambitious endeavor. Easygoing and fond of joking with his colleagues, he is a hands-off manager who credits CargoMetrics’ investment prowess to his team. His brand of humor comes through even when he’s detailing the series of challenges he had starting the firm. After using the phrase “It was hard” several times, he pauses and adds, “Did I mention it was hard?”

Although Borgerson declines to provide any specifics about CargoMetrics’ portfolio, citing the advice of his lawyers, performance during the three years of live trading apparently has been strong enough to keep his backers confident and his team of physicists, software engineers and mathematicians in place. “Hopefully, it won’t be too long before we can make a more significant investment,” says BAAM CEO J. Tomilson Hill. Former Lotus CEO Manzi is optimistic about the firm’s prospects: “It has an unbelievable edge with its historical data.”

CARGOMETRICS WAS ONE OF THE FIRST MARITIME DATA ANALYTICS COMPANIES TO SEIZE THE POTENTIAL OF THE GLOBAL AUTOMATIC IDENTIFICATION SYSTEM. Ships transmit AIS signals via very high frequency (VHF) radio to receiver devices on other ships or land. Since 2004, large vessels with gross tonnage of 300 or more are required to flash AIS positioning signals every few seconds to avoid collisions. That allows CargoMetrics to pay satellite companies for access to the signals gleaned from 500 miles above the water. The firm uses historical data to identify cargo and aggregation of cargo flow, and then applies sophisticated analysis of financial market correlations to identify buying and selling opportunities.

“We’re big-data junkies who could not have founded CargoMetrics without the radical breakthroughs of this golden age of technology,” Borgerson says. The revolution in cloud computing has been instrumental. CargoMetrics leverages the Amazon Web Services platform to run its analytics and algorithms on hundreds of computer servers at a fraction of the cost of owning and maintaining the hardware itself.

BREAK