1. Intelligence increases the ability to fool yourself with elaborate stories about why something happened. Average people can often learn faster than the superintelligent, because the superintelligent try to cram the real world into the theories they’ve been taught, while average folks are better at accepting the real world at face value. Here’s the thing:…
Spotted in the physics department of Ohio State University.
The Psychology and Neuroscience of Financial Decision Making from Trading Game Pty Ltd
I was going to post the chart below as candidate for the most boring chart of the year alongside the USD/CHF but a wee bit can happen in 24 hours. The S&P 500 has had no net effective gain since 06/2015 which does make it a long time between drinks for long equity traders. When I…
I did not know this, although there are historical precedents such as Germany in the 1920’s. At a delicatessen counter in eastern Caracas, Humberto Gonzalez removes slices of salty white cheese from his scale and replaces them with a stack of bolivar notes handed over by his customer. The currency is so devalued and each…
Whilst I was recently in Toronto I noted that there was a degree of hand wringing about the current state of the property market in Canada and the resultant increase in household debt that had accompanied this. Curious about where we stood I looked up the league table of household debt as a function of…
When I was banging on about EFT’s last week I made the point in passing that when you are looking at trading systems that the start date is everything and it is the point at which most of the fudging of results occurs. As an example I took a hypothetical passive system and began to…
Ikea is a behemoth. The home furnishing company uses 1 percent of the planet’s lumber, it says, and the 530 million cubic feet of wood used to make Ikea furniture each year pulls with its own kind of twisted gravity. For many, a sojourn to the enormous blue-and-yellow store winds up defining the space in…
It does seem as if every time I open my junk mail folder I get another invocation to partake of yet another magic trading system. I should note that this sort of thing has been around forever, the only thing that changes is the vehicle which alters in order to capitalise on whatever topic is hot.…
In Guns, Germs, and Steel I asked why history has unfolded differently over the last 13,000 years in Eurasia, in the Americas, in sub-Saharan Africa, and in Aboriginal Australia, with the result that within the last 500 years Europeans were the ones who conquered Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians and sub-Saharan Africans, rather than vice…
I came across this piece this morning. It claims that traders are taking up huge short sale positions in Tesla and they are paying a hefty penny in fees for the privilege of doing so. There are a few points in this that interested me. Whenever a financial journalist claims something is happening it is…
