A recently published NBER working paper shows that many public companies are changing how they communicate in order to appeal to algorithmic analysis of their financial filings and quarterly investor conference calls.
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We came across an interesting academic study in the NBER’s “Working Paper Series” titled “How to Talk When a Machine Is Listening: Corporate Disclosure in the Age of AI”. There is a link below (the paper costs $5 to download), but here are the 3 takeaways we found most thought provoking:
First, financial statement analysis has become heavily automated. This is a chart from the paper which shows the number of downloads from the SEC’s Edgar database since 2003 and the percent of those information requests which came from automated systems. In 2016, for example, there were over 100 million Edgar downloads and the vast majority were computer (not human) generated (ZH: it begs the question if humans even read 10Qs anymore).
Second, companies that see significant automated download interest in their SEC filings have been changing the language they use in these documents so the algorithms (presumably) like what they are “reading”. Back in 2011 finance researchers published a qualitative list of “good” and “bad” words commonly used in SEC filings. This has become the backbone of the algorithms that score how positive/negative these filings are in terms of management’s take on their company’s present and future.
The chart below shows that companies which are in the top quartile of machine downloads (the red lines represent the mean and 95 percent confidence intervals for these) have been using fewer of those “bad” words since the list came out in 2011. The y-axis scores their frequency of usage. The blue line shows the same data for companies that don’t see as much automated download interest in their filings. They, not illogically, have not bothered to change the words they use.
Finally, while there is no chart for this, the paper’s authors found that managements of companies which see high levels of download demand for their SEC filings also changed how they spoke on quarterly financial reporting conference calls. Simply put, they tried to sound more upbeat so voice analysis software listening to the call would read their emotions as positive.
Summing up: both written and spoken word public company financial disclosure is adapting to the disruptive innovation of algorithmic trading. Not surprising, we suppose, but interesting to see it quantified.
Nikola reported "earnings" on Monday this week after the bell, but the focus wasn't on the $117 million net loss (on $0 revenue) the company generated, but rather the litany of subpoenas the company disclosed in its Form 10-Q for the third quarter.
Nikola disclosed in its filing that five of its officers and employees had received subpoenas from the SEC on September 14, 2020, just four days after short seller Hindenburg Research released their now infamous report calling the company an "intricate fraud".
The SEC tacked on additional subpoenas to three more officers and employees, and the company's directors, on September 21, 2020 and September 30, 2020, respectively.
But it wasn't just the SEC doling out subpoenas: the company and its founder Trevor Milton also received grand jury subpoenas from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York on September 19, 2020. The New York county district attorney’s office also subpoenaed the company.
The subpoenas were related to “a fact-finding inquiry related to aspects of the company’s business” that the regulatory agencies began after Hindenburg Research's September 10, 2020 report, the filing says.
The company also disclosed spending $5.2 million in regulatory and legal matters for the quarter.
The company's potential deal with GM remains up in the air as of Monday, according to Financial Times. CEO Mark Russell said on Monday: “We are interested in doing the deal with GM, if we can get it done.”
The deadline to close on its partnership with GM is December 3, 2020.
Recall, among the bolder accusations made by Hindenburg Research in their scathing report about Nikola Corporation in September was the allegation that Nikola faked its Nikola One semi truck "in motion" video, which appeared to show a functioning big rig barreling through the desert, trailer in tow. Nikola later admitted that the video was simply a truck rolling down a hill.
We reported yesterday that Nikola may have used the customer deposits it was taking for the semi for "working capital" purposes, despite claiming in 2018 that it did not spend customer deposits.
Like many, I spent the last few nights waking up at 2:03 A.M., no reason, then looking at my phone for news, any news, that might be positive for President Trump. I survived on Rush, Bongino, Mark Levin. When the news continued to be ugly, I even checked in on ridiculous bloggers promising that ballots were watermarked and D.J. (our household name for a president we love) was actually launching a sting on the Deep State.
Enough already. Stop the madness.
Hey, I have a degree in statistics, and I have some level of critical thought. If there is such pessimism in my tribe, I am not going along.
So today, I started to dig into the numbers, and as I did, I fought my confirmation bias at every step.
I realized that I, like millions of others, had been numbed into despondency by the overwhelming press, media, social media push to certify President-Elect Biden. (I put that in there so you can see how repellent it is.)
Hey guys, this thing is not only not over; it is scary for Biden. I mean really scary, and most of all, the media know it. Thus, the rush to get everyone in line with the narrative that a 78-year-old, early-dementia former V.P., who could not draw a crowd larger than a dozen, just beat D.J. in a fair election.
Process that for a moment.
Start with Pennsylvania. Biden, as of this writing, is at 290 electoral votes. Pennsylvania is 20.
I read the Justice Alito opinion, and it is pretty clear that he wants the after election night at 8:00 P.M. votes separated for a reason. Biden is going to lose at the Supreme Court, and they know it. Four justices already said the Pennsylvania Supreme Court cannot adjust voting rules. A new arrival, Justice Barrett, says she is there to apply the rules in the Constitution. OK, wanna bet she does?
Remove the after 8:00 P.M. ballots, and Biden loses Pennsylvania. Biden 270.
Let's visit Nevada. I have lots of friends in California who have condos in Nevada to evade state taxes. There are not a couple of people doing this; there are tens of thousands. Everyone knows it, and California seeks them out.
Our old pal Harry Reid knows it as well, and he apparently has them voting in droves in this election. Probably not a big D.J. constituency. Within 72 hours of the election, the Trump team found, validated over 3,500 of them. I do not suspect that Trump's people stopped counting.
Every one of these is a ballot reduction for Biden
Nevada, as of now, is well within reach for DJ and the Trump team — particularly when the California crowd is reduced. And a few of them may testify since a false vote is a very bad thing, with jail time if convicted. Maybe a bigger story here.
Remember where we are, people. Biden is at 270 after a highly probable Supreme Court decision (read Alito and concurring opinions).
Lose Nevada, lose the election.
But wait: it gets better.
Let's visit Wisconsin. Right now, it is 20,000 votes in Uncle Joe's direction. Lots of stories out there, well below the Google fold, that there are way more Wisconsin votes than there are registered voters. OK, maybe the dead can vote up there — probably a Midwest thing.
Well, last night, we found that Wisconsin election clerks were told, and followed the direction, to modify mail-in ballots and fill in the blanks where witnesses left out critical info.
I am sure it was just a good customer service thing and they meant no harm. The problem is every such ballot is now toast.
There were "thousands" of such prima facie wrongful votes. Oops. Biden up 20,000 — now that number is in question. No more truckloads of votes coming in, so every ballot D.J.'s team eliminates gets President-Elect Biden on step closer to former V.P. Biden who lives in a basement. Not good here.
North Carolina. That one pretty much looks like as though it is over and D.J. won it. Fox News is rumored to call it for Trump around April 2021.
Remember where we are here. Biden is probably going to lose Pennsylvania, so if he loses even one state, even one Electoral College vote, ouch!
Either D.J. wins outright, or it goes to the House, which means that D.J. has four more years.
We're not done yet.
Michigan. Oh, yes, the land of the "glitches" in the voting machines. Six thousand votes for Trump given to Biden in one of 47 counties where that software is used. About 150,000 votes in Biden's favor right now.
Google the 130,000 Biden votes that showed up in the middle of the night, and you can see how the wonderful people at Google are fact-checking this "debunked" story. In fact, for fun, Google "Michigan voter fraud," and you get literally three pages of "this was fact checked and proven to be false." Why would Google be so assiduous?
They too see that if Amy votes with the four, Biden is one vote away from the basement.
Lawsuits in Michigan and the other states are being launched, and discovery will take place. Google will not be there.
Voter fraud is kind of like larceny. A little is OK. It is even kind of entertaining.
Dead people have been voting for a hundred years in Democratic cities. It is such a constant that one would think the Republican Party would consider a Dead Voter Outreach program to get their share.
But voter fraud on this scale is just not sustainable. It does not pass the common sense test.
We have bloggers with lots of time on their hands going through voter rolls and showing that person after person who voted in a swing state also fought in the Civil War or maybe the War of 1812. It was funny at first, but the overwhelming number now goes beyond humor and rubs our faces in it.
I think D.J. has to swing one state. Actually, one electoral vote. Not only is this thing not over, but the Biden team must be sweating bullets.
Voter fraud at scale seemed like a really cool idea until D.J. went to the mattresses. Now that he is fighting it out one voter at a time, with the Supreme Court likely to create the starting point at Biden 270, Biden has everything to lose.
Many of us see the data discrepancies, the hundreds of red flags (such as more votes than registered voters), but we don't know the how. We know the why, we understand the motives of the left. Here we're going to dig into the hows. My background is primarily a computer scientist, and systems engineer. As we explain in our book, the world is not as it seems.
Former NSA Senior Analyst Kirk Wiebe claims that the system being used here is called "Hammer and Scorecard" - and that the system is so intelligent, it can actually change the false number of votes in real time based on reporting of data on the internet. Reality is to 90% of the unwashed and unenlightened masses what they see on TV. This is done for a number of reasons but primarily to make the count 'very close' but always making the client candidate win.
It was widely reported first here on Zero Hedge that a software "Glitch" "accidentally" gave thousands of votes to Biden which were meant for Trump, pushing Biden over the edge and giving him a win in the state. Bottom line, Trump had more votes but their software incorrectly reported that Biden had more. The name of this company is Dominion Voting Systems. In 2018 Dominion was bought by Private Equity firm Staple Street Capital. Their all male team comes from groups like the Carlyle Group. But aside from looking at their Team page and googling the names of the people, it's going to be hard to find things like other relationships because Private Equity is well, private. Their leader is an ivy league Stephen D Owens, who previously worked for The Carlyle Group and Lehman Brothers, from Harvard Business School.
Both ES&S and its main competitor, Dominion Voting Systems, have released voting machines that security experts say can add votes to paper ballots after they are cast by voters. Together, these two companies sell and maintain 80 percent of U.S. voting systems. Despite long-standing reassurances by vendors and election officials that voting machines cannot be hacked because they are not connected to the internet, recent security reports reveal that many voting machines are connected to the internet and possibly have been for years. Security experts are alarmed at internet connectivity in voting systems because it can allow hackers to inject malware that disrupts or changes the outcome of an election.
Not ironically, the states which are using Dominion systems all swung blue, and produced statistically impossible voter statistics, such as 100% or 105% voter turnout (which dictators have not been able to achieve.).
It seems the world has been bought by private equity firms, including our Democracy. Perhaps the better title to this article is "The best results money can buy" or the "Dark side of Private Equity - how shadow power controls the results of elections."
Is Voter Fraud really a problem? See this research from the Heritage Foundation, with more than 1,000 + cases of Voter Fraud (this was before the 2020 Presidential election. But if you really want to see how to hack an election, the story about Andres Sepulveda is a must read. He was on the payroll of Juan José Rendón, a Miami-based political consultant who’s been called the Karl Rove of Latin America. Another good read on the subject is Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.
Since the end of World War 2, the US and it's allies have manipulated foreign elections. The CIA’s first-ever covert action program was an operation to manipulate Italy’s 1948 election. American intelligence officers spread incendiary propaganda, bankrolled their preferred candidate, and orchestrated grassroots initiatives. Those who are just learning about this must realize that it's not about politics - it's about money. It's important to understand that this is a BUSINESS, just like any other dark market. Take the most obvious example, such as in 1954 when a US backed coup was successful:
What did the USA get out of it? You guessed it, bananas. Lots of bananas, at very cheap prices. To this day, about 95% of Guatemalan bananas are exported to the United States. The United States currently imports more bananas from Guatemala than any other country.
In any country toppled by US forces, there is a 'prize' - that prize may be Oil, it may be access to consumer markets, it may be raw materials, minerals, or human capital. But there's always a prize. That's why Antarctica is not being seized and settled - there's no low hanging fruit there. The US has plenty of oil but in Libya the cost of extraction before the coup there was about $1 per barrel. When Rockefeller drilled his first wells in Texas, the oil was literally on top of the soil in pools. The US isn't looking for free resources, it's looking for cheap resources, that can be exploited without environmental or human rights concerns. What happens in China, stays in China (wink wink). That's part of the reason the Globalists so much hate Trump and so much love Biden. It's an unholy gravy train.
[Author anecdote, my friends in China are 'very happy' and 'partying' with a Biden win! I said 'yeah that's because Biden is controlled by China' friend 'exactly! hahaha' ]
As outlined in this documentary Shadow Gate, The US Military developed and then privatized a system to manipulate and control elections.
The system includes ballot tampering, but as the whistleblowers explain, it's much more complex than that. It involves a full 'information awareness' campaign including the physical world, social media, propaganda, as well as bribing corrupt political operatives. This is what's playing out now with Biden and the media - it's a complex computer program (AI) that basically tells them what to do. BUT the big but is that the simulation doesn't know how people will react. Although they have tested this in theater in many foreign countries, nothing like this has ever happened in the US.
Update Note: In researching this whistleblower's testimony, we found this book:
It seems to be based on testimony of conman Dennis Montgomery - This is not the raw source for this article.
Kirk Wiebe is a former NSA Senior Analyst who participated in the Trailblazer Project. Trailblazer was a United States National Security Agency (NSA) program intended to develop a capability to analyze data carried on communications networks like the Internet. It was intended to track entities using communication methods such as cell phones and e-mail.[1][2]
Kirk Wiebe is credible. J. Kirk Wiebe worked as a senior analyst at the NSA from 1975 to 2001. In the aftermath of 9/11, he was among a handful of NSA employees who stumbled upon a secret program at the agency to monitor the communications of millions of U.S. citizens. Wiebe and his colleagues decided to approach inspector generals at the Defense Department and Justice Department with what they found. He spoke to FRONTLINE's Jim Gilmore on Dec. 13, 2013.
