Vanguard Group founder Jack Bogle, who died on Jan. 16 at age 89, ushered in an era of low-cost investing for the many. He launched the first index mutual fund for individual investors at the end of 1975 for the purpose of passive investing: Skip the stockpicking, save on fees, and simply ride the ups and downs of the overall market. His fringe idea has become mainstream. Sometime this year, analysts at Morningstar Inc. say, assets in passively managed U.S. equity funds are likely to surpass assets in actively managed ones. By pushing down fees across the industry, Bogle may have saved American investors $1 trillion over his lifetime, calculates Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Eric Balchunas.

On the Thursday, January 24 edition of Bloomberg Baystate Business we spoke with Bloomberg Intelligence gaming and lodging analyst Brian Egger about MGM-Springfield, the latest on the Wynn saga, and sports betting. Rob Almeida of MFS stopped by to talk about the markets. Bloomberg News endowments reporter Michael McDonald joined us to talk about his story on Baupost Group’s Seth Klarman, who sees opportunity in the markets. Boston Business Journal real estate editor Catherine Carlock talked about the commercial real estate market in Boston. Finally, MIT’s Andrew Lo talked about technology, finance and investing. Hosts: Peter Barnes, Janet Wu and Pat Carroll. Producer: Dan Pierce.

The MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering (LFE) and Informa Pharma Intelligence have launched an initiative to provide timely and accurate estimates of the risks and benefits of clinical trials to the entire life sciences ecosystem.

Project ALPHA (Analytics for Life-sciences Professionals and Healthcare Advocates) aims to help investors, payers, regulators, and biopharmaceutical companies better evaluate the opportunities of biomedical research and development.

Project ALPHA’s first project will be the further development of clinical success rate metrics, based on algorithms developed by MIT researchers and published in Biostatistics in January 2018.

The MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering (LFE) and Informa Pharma Intelligence announced Project ALPHA (Analytics for Life-sciences Professionals and Healthcare Advocates), an initiative to provide timely and more accurate estimates of the risks and rewards of clinical trials to the entire biopharma ecosystem. The goal of Project ALPHA is to accelerate biomedical innovation by helping investors, regulators, payers, and biopharmaceutical companies better assess the opportunities of biomedical R&D, allowing all stakeholders to manage their investments more efficiently.

"More accurate risk metrics will eventually lead to fewer big failures, faster approval times, cost savings to the entire healthcare system and more investment capital for developing breakthrough therapies," says Andrew W. Lo, Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of the LFE, "all of which means more, and better, therapies to patients sooner."

A new generation of philanthropists, whose wealth was created via entrepreneurship in technology-driven fields, has the unique opportunity to make a real difference in speeding the pace of progress in the fight against cancer. Not content with having hospital pavilions named for them or with giving large, open-ended gifts for academic research, they want to use their wealth to have a direct and visible impact on patients’ health. Research we have conducted has revealed a variety of new, highly impactful investment approaches that can help accelerate the pace of the development, approval, and commercialization of new cancer therapies. By embracing these new approaches this new generation of philanthropists has the opportunity to truly help cure cancer.

People tend to fear the wrong things when it comes to indexing and exchange-traded funds. Take the recent hand-wringing over an Index Industry Association report that there are now 3.7 million market indexes, an increase of about a half a million from last year. The Twitter commentary was predictable, with observations such as “peak passive” and “smells like CDOs.

Sanford C. Bernstein — the firm that famously compared passive investing with Marxism in a research note and then proceeded to make two indexes and launch two ETFs tracking them — was so triggered by that number they wrote a satirical story mocking the quixotic quest for the perfect index.

BOSTON — Cold weather this week didn’t matter to the crowds at the AI World conference here, as activity around artificial intelligence continues to heat up. Over three days, more than 2,200 attendees learned about the latest advances in machine learning, deep learning, and the industries being affected by AI.

While most of the conference focused on AI’s impact on the healthcare, pharmaceutical, and enterprise software markets, a few sessions discussed industrial automation efforts, including the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), manufacturing, and autonomous vehicles.

Here are six themes from this year’s AI World, as observed by Robotics Business Review editors attending the event:

Andrew W. Lo é um autor prolífico. Professor de finanças na Sloan School of Management, do Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), ganhou reconhecimento do público, por causa de seu livro A non-random walk down Wall Street ( Uma caminhada não aleatória por Wall Street , sem edição em português), e dos profissionais, por seus artigos em periódicos importantes de finanças e economia. Lo conquistou muitos prêmios em sua carreira.

Annual Reviews, MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy (GCFP) and New York University Stern School of Business (NYU Stern) convened for a two-day conference, “2008 Financial Crisis: A Ten-Year Review,” spotlighting the perspectives of those with expert vantage points of the crisis. New review articles focused on the 2008 financial crisis in the Annual Review of Financial Economics Volume 10 were presented. The conference program covered topics including bailouts and their consequences, accounting issues that impact financial stability, trust and the future of finance, asset pricing, leverage and systemic risk.

Thus far, 2018 has proven to be a prosperous year for many in the industry, thanks in no small part to the strength of the U.S. economy.

And while economists are predicting a slowdown in growth next year, the next 12 months, barring unforeseeable incidents, should remain strong, with few signs of a pullback on the horizon.

"The economy is clearly strong," said Andrew Lo, a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management and director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering. "We've got pretty low unemployment, very reasonable inflation, and all eyes are on the stock market, which has done quite well. I think, overall, both in the United States and more broadly around the world, things are going quite well. In that kind of an environment, it's no wonder people are confident about the future and willing to spend money on things like vacation and travel."

At the height of the credit crunch in 2008, academics at the London School of Economics were infamously caught off guard when the Queen of England asked why no one saw the financial crisis coming. Now, 10 years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. on Sept. 15, 2008, economists, regulators, policymakers and finance industry insiders are asking themselves where the next financial crisis could come from, and what danger signals they should watch for, to avoid being blindsided again.

While there are several areas of potential concern, industry experts broadly do not believe a systemic collapse on the same scale of 2008 is on the horizon.

If your house is on fire, what is the plan? Head for the exit, naturally. But if a market crash is burning a big hole in your investment portfolio, selling out may not be the best course of action. The very same emotions and biases that can lead to good decisions in many areas of daily life can lead us astray in matters of money, experts say.

The p-value.

Statisticians use it. Non-statisticians have heard of it (likely in the context of the standard threshold of p = 0.05). While it’s not the only component of a clinical trial design, the p-value helps determine the maximum acceptable level of uncertainty associated with clinical evidence and, in a way, the fate of patient access to a new medical device.

But, is the traditional 0.05 threshold too restrictive for the patient populations willing to accept more uncertainty, depriving them of treatment options? Is it too permissive for other patient populations? Can we optimize clinical trial design by considering patients’ urgency for new therapeutic options, as well as their willingness to accept uncertainty?

Artificial intelligence will reshape the world of finance over the next decade or so by automating investing and other services—but it could also introduce troubling systematic weaknesses and risks, according to a new report from the World Economic Forum (WEF).

Compiled through interviews with dozens of leading financial experts and industry leaders, the report concludes that artificial intelligence will disrupt the industry by allowing early adopters to outmaneuver competitors. It also suggests that the technology will create more convenient products for consumers, such as sophisticated tools for managing personal finances and investments.

But most notably, the report points to the potential for big financial institutions to build machine-learning-based services that live in the cloud and are accessed by other institutions.