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Email this12:48 pm
October 21, 2013
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There was an interesting interview on the radio today with the author of this book:
Weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy
http://www.torontopubliclibrar.....;R=3461635
She is a Harvard PhD in math, former Wall Street quant, and math professor and is very concerned about how more and more significant decisions are being made on the basis of algorithms. In her view, many of these decisions are ill-considered, in a wider context, to put it mildly. This affects many more things than bank rates and the stock market, but definitely includes them. She left Wall Street because of this concern apparently.
Many of us have expressed concern about whatever is going on in the "mind" of Tangerine, so this may be of interest to some. It would be interesting to see someone raise some of these questions at a BNS AGM and hear what they have to say for themselves. As AltaRed suggested in another thread, it may not even be good for business, but we don't know because it's all secret.
2:15 pm
December 23, 2011
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While I was never an Ing or Tangerine customer. After reading all of the inequalities of Tangerine I never will be. If you atract some customers while you shun others, that to me is a place NOT to invest (unless you can always be on the "attract" list 
). Kinda sounds like the Airmiles scam all over again!!! And Loonies algorithm article may have hit the nail on the head for sure!!!!
Ps. I am a customer of iTrade, another BNS product, and have dealt with them from when the TFSA program started. My wife and decided to phase out and we pinned a number that we want to clear. 10% more than we put in and I don't want to extrapulate that, to figure out what the annual interest rate would be! It is likely a 3 year process to phase them out. We bought some blue chip and ETFs always reinvested dividends. Some buy/sells were free and some were $25. The TFSA account itself had no fees. I was just thinking the other day that I should pull all of our statements to see how much iTrade made off of our accounts in buy/sell fees!! Was I an algorithm victim?? If I had put those funds into GIC rates at the time, would I have been further ahead? Very likely!!!
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