It was almost a flat year for Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) in 2016, as the stock was up roughly 5% over the year. In comparison, most of the Intel's competitors such as Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Qualcomm (QCOM) and NVIDIA (NVDA) delivered huge returns to stockholders. However, that does not means Intel is out of the game, as it still holds 80% market share in the worldwide microprocessor market mainly due to its leading position in the PC industry. The company has been generating huge profits by selling high-end desktop processing chips to data centers. It is highly likely that CPUs will continue to see reasonable growth in data centers, as the company requires huge computation power to make use of the big data they have gathered. According to marketsandmarkets.com, the data center market is projected to reach $32.30 billion by 2020 from $18.56 billion in 2015, which represents a compound annual growth rate of 11.7%.

So Brexit turned out to be the non-event for markets we expected with asset prices booming to record highs while support for remaining inside the single currency free-trade zone has risen within other European Union countries. As is often the case, the trade was to "fade" – or bet against – the apocalyptic hyperbole both before and after the referendum. Remarkably one boutique Australian quant shop did exactly this by leveraging academic studies of "blue green algae", which helped it generate enormous 32 per cent returns on the day of the vote. Taaffeite Capital Management (TCM) claim their "artificial intelligence" (aka computer code operating autonomously of humans) figured out that there were massive financial market mispricings that warranted shorts on equities and long positions on government bonds without actually knowing that a referendum was being held. The intellectual property underlying this "systematic" – or automated – trading strategy belongs to Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD Desmond Lun, who is a 36-year old Australian professor of computer science at Rutgers University in the US, and a Melbourne University alumnus.