Hedge Funds and Financial Crises: 2007 - 2009 Performance Characteristics

Thesis advisor: Peter IrelandWe study historical hedge fund performance characteristics with a particular focus on the 2007 – 2009 Financial Crisis (the “Crisis”). Using the Credit Suisse Hedge Fund Indexes as proxies for broader hedge fund industry performance, we apply a factor model based on common investment strategies to determine if the broad industry or any particular hedge fund strategies have been able to deliver excess returns, or alpha. We find evidence that the broad hedge fund index did deliver statistically significant excess monthly returns of 0.39% (4.67% annualized) over the period January 1995 – January 2016, with seven of ten individual strategy indexes contributing. However, our results indicate that these excess returns were delivered primarily during the pre-Crisis period of January 1995 – November 2007. Over this period, the broad index delivered statistically significant monthly excess returns of 0.49% (5.93% annualized), with six of ten individual strategy indexes contributing. Our results do not indicate, however, that hedge funds delivered statistically significant monthly excess returns over the period December 2007 – June 2009 or over the period December 2007 – December 2012, which takes into account the uniquely drawn out recovery from the Crisis. We find that the broad index delivered statistically significant excess monthly returns of 0.23% (2.74% annualized) during the post-Crisis period, though these returns are less than half of the pre-Crisis period returns and only three individual strategy indexes contributed. We posit that this apparent shift in performance characteristics might be the result of a shift in the risk tolerances of hedge fund investors and managers following the Crisis. We conclude that, while hedge funds might certainly serve legitimate purposes in financial markets, they are not immune to financial crises, especially those as severe as the Crisis.Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2016.Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Arts and Sciences Honors Program.Discipline: Economics

Autonomous Monitoring of a Diverse Ground Station Network

Planet Labs owns and operates the largest commercial earth-imagery CubeSat constellation. Planet’s ground station network is responsible for the earth-to-space communication link that gathers health and telemetry data, keeps the spacecraft schedule up-to-date, and downlinks the payload data from the spacecraft. The ground station network contains fifteen geographically diverse sites with a combination of leased and owned equipment from multiple vendors. Across those sites, the team monitors over 1600 services on nearly 500 devices. The scale of the network and diversity of equipment present challenges for operations and network health monitoring. Planet’s Ground Station Operations team monitors assets through a combination of active monitoring scripts on timers, event-based monitoring feedback, real-time metric analysis, and periodic automated long-term metric analysis. Active polling by monitoring scripts and real-time metric analysis catch configuration, software, and hardware issues as they arise independent of contacts with satellites and enable operators to quickly fix problems with little to no loss of satellite contact time. Meanwhile, event-based monitoring flags issues when outcomes differ from the expected results based on deterministic actions and uncover issues that are either transient or hidden from an active polling script. Last, long-term metric analysis gives insight into the slow degradation of system components and can be used to schedule targeted preemptive maintenance to efficiently maintain high operational uptime. With this combination of monitoring approaches and through using a wide array of tools that feed back into specific operator “dashboards” for a fast top-level view of issues, Planet’s Ground Station Operations team is able to maintain greater than 99% uptime and less than 90 minute incident response time without continuous 24-hour staffing. In total, the network takes over 2800 contacts per day with Planet’s Low Earth Orbit constellations. The Ground Station Operations team emphasizes automation, fail-over, and targeted redundancy to give on-call staff tools to rectify or triage issues quickly, efficiently, and at scale

Planet High Speed Radio: Crossing Gbps from a 3U CubeSat

Planet is a vertically integrated aerospace and data analytics company that operates the world\u27s largest commercial fleet of remote sensing satellites. Our mission is to image the whole world everyday, and make change visible, accessible, and actionable. We have launched over 350 satellites and built up an automated mission control and ground station infrastructure to monitor and control the satellites, and download the imagery data. Historically, small satellite radios have been downlink limited because of tight size, weight, and power (SWaP) constraints. Rapid prototyping, iteration, and adaptation of the latest commercial-o_-the-shelf (COTS) technology has allowed for continuous improvements in data throughput on our high speed radio from a very low-cost cubesat platform. In this talk, we will report on our latest X-band radio and antenna solution which has achieved a data rate over 1.6 Gbps from a 3U CubeSat on-orbit. Planet\u27s High Speed Downlink 2 (HSD2) is the latest generation compact, low-mass, and low-power radio that was built and deployed on 3U form-factor imaging CubeSats in December 2018. This system operates at X- band and is built using COTS parts with a dual polarization antenna. The two physical channels represent the two polarization modes, right hand circular polarization (RHCP) and left hand circular polarization (LHCP) and each physical channel utilizes 300 MHz of total bandwidth. Within each physical channel, there are three logical channels spaced 100 MHz apart center-to-center frequency. The individual channel symbol rate is 76.8 Msps. Each physical channel has 1 W RF output power and 15 dBi antenna gain. The total DC power consumption of the radio including the processor and the FPGA is 50Wand the total volume occupied by the radio and antenna, including the mechanical deployment structure for the antenna is 0.25U. The commercial digital television broadcasting standard DVB-S2 is used for modulation and coding. An adaptive coding and modulation (ACM) scheme is used to dynamically change the modulation and coding for each channel individually based on the available link margin. Our ground station network includes 15 dishes (29 dB/K gain-to-noise-temperature) across 5 sites located around the world. The HSD2 is capable of providing downlink volume of over 80 GB during a single ground station pass

Erect Wing Facilitates Context-Dependent Wnt/Wingless Signaling by Recruiting the Cell-Specific Armadillo-TCF Adaptor Earthbound to Chromatin

During metazoan development, the Wnt/Wingless signal transduction pathway is activated repetitively to direct cell proliferation, fate specification, differentiation and apoptosis. Distinct outcomes are elicited by Wnt stimulation in different cellular contexts; however, mechanisms that confer context specificity to Wnt signaling responses remain largely unknown. Starting with an unbiased forward genetic screen in Drosophila, we recently uncovered a novel mechanism by which the cell-specific co-factor Earthbound 1 (Ebd1), and its human homolog jerky, promote interaction between the Wnt pathway transcriptional co-activators B-catenin/Armadillo and TCF to facilitate context-dependent Wnt signaling responses. Here, through the same genetic screen, we find an unanticipated requirement for Erect Wing (Ewg), the fly homolog of the human sequence-specific DNA-binding transcriptional activator nuclear respiratory factor 1 (NRF1), in promoting contextual regulation of Wingless signaling. Ewg and Ebd1 functionally interact with the Armadillo-TCF complex and mediate the same context-dependent Wingless signaling responses. In addition, Ewg and Ebd1 have similar cell-specific expression profiles, bind to each other directly and also associate with chromatin at shared genomic sites. Furthermore, recruitment of Ebd1 to chromatin is abolished in the absence of Ewg. Our findings provide in vivo evidence that recruitment of a cell-specific co-factor complex to specific chromatin sites, coupled with its ability to facilitate Armadillo-TCF interaction and transcriptional activity, promotes contextual regulation of Wnt/Wingless signaling responses

Merging Diverse Architecture for Multi-Mission Support

Planet Labs Inc. (“Planet”) currently operates the world’s largest commercial earth observation constellation with over 150 active on-orbit satellites collecting daily medium resolution imagery of the whole earth, and high resolution imagery of targeted areas of interest. In 2017, Planet combined the SkySat high-resolution satellite constellation with its own existing medium resolution Dove constellation to expand its ability to make global change visible, accessible, and actionable. While the two satellite designs use largely similar ground station architectures, nuances in implementation caused early operations to focus on maintaining separate, siloed ground station networks with unique software and hardware. As Planet looks to expand its on-orbit constellations and diversify orbits to meet customer needs, our Ground Station Operations team has begun work to combine software and hardware architectures to support multiple missions from the same stack. By enabling multi-mission support, we realize benefits in increasing daily average contact duration and minimizing per-satellite contact gaps. This in turn decreases our reaction latency on-orbit and increases our individual ground station utilization to increase our total possible throughput. In this paper, we will discuss our network modeling for coverage and access planning, our general strategies for combining architectures for multi-mission support, results thus far, and lessons learned along the way. Planet’s Ground Station Operations team has built out and operates a network capable of downlinking over 15TB of earth imaging data from our on-orbit constellations in a single day and looks forward to continued high-reliability and low cost support of Planet’s on-orbit assets in the future

Targetable Signaling Pathway Mutations Are Associated with Malignant Phenotype in IDH-Mutant Gliomas

Purpose: Isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH) gene mutations occur in low-grade and high-grade gliomas. We sought to identify the genetic basis of malignant phenotype heterogeneity in IDH-mutant gliomas. Methods: We prospectively implanted tumor specimens from 20 consecutive IDH1-mutant glioma resections into mouse brains and genotyped all resection specimens using a CLIA-certified molecular panel. Gliomas with cancer driver mutations were tested for sensitivity to targeted inhibitors in vitro. Associations between genomic alterations and outcomes were analyzed in patients. Results: By 10 months, 8 of 20 IDH1-mutant gliomas developed intracerebral xenografts. All xenografts maintained mutant IDH1 and high levels of 2-hydroxyglutarate on serial transplantation. All xenograft-producing gliomas harbored “lineage-defining” mutations in CIC (oligodendroglioma) or TP53 (astrocytoma), and 6 of 8 additionally had activating mutations in PIK3CA or amplification of PDGFRA, MET, or N-MYC. Only IDH1 and CIC/TP53 mutations were detected in non–xenograft-forming gliomas (P = 0.0007). Targeted inhibition of the additional alterations decreased proliferation in vitro. Moreover, we detected alterations in known cancer driver genes in 13.4% of IDH-mutant glioma patients, including PIK3CA, KRAS, AKT, or PTEN mutation or PDGFRA, MET, or N-MYC amplification. IDH/CIC mutant tumors were associated with PIK3CA/KRAS mutations whereas IDH/TP53 tumors correlated with PDGFRA/MET amplification. Presence of driver alterations at progression was associated with shorter subsequent progression-free survival (median 9.0 vs. 36.1 months; P = 0.0011). Conclusion: A subset of IDH-mutant gliomas with mutations in driver oncogenes has a more malignant phenotype in patients. Identification of these alterations may provide an opportunity for use of targeted therapies in these patients.Koch Institute Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center Bridge Projec