WTF?……. The Monty Hall Dilemma is a probability puzzle that is notorious for eliciting suboptimal decisions from humans. A participant is given a choice from among three doors, one of which conceals a valuable prize. After an initial selection, one of the remaining, nonwinning doors is opened, and the participant is given a chance to…
In 1978, Wilson had a disastrous experience shorting the Resorts International casino company. Forbes dubbed it “the most catastrophic short play in modern times.” Wilson reasoned that gambling wouldn’t catch on in Atlantic City in the 1970s. Jet travel was picking up and people could easily fly to Las Vegas instead. Ironically, he has since been proven…
It is interesting to note that the FTSE 100 has made a new all time high (yet another market doing better than our own). The FTSE presents an interesting lesson in how markets can behave and how long it can take for a market to recover. The FTSE made a new all time highest close…
Ever since the U.S. presidential election, Ed Dahlberg has pretty much had a smile on his face. He brokers the sale of private jets, and already he’s seeing interest pick up and used-aircraft prices starting to firm up. The sale of a single-engine turboprop aircraft that he recently handled went for about 5 percent more…
Since it is the season for both looking backwards in an attempt to explain the past and make predictions as to the future I thought I would add my own meaningless contribution. There is an old adage that January predicts the course of the coming year and a variation of the chart below has been…
It is that time of the year when everyone involved in this business looks in the rear vision mirror and attempts to make sense of what happened. And of course to everyone involved everything is so obvious and predictable. What is worse is that they take this data and attempt to make some form of…
The term “wellness” — which seems to encompass everything from yoga to detox teas to crystals — is very hot right now. Earlier this year, New York magazine dedicated an entire, incredulous month to figuring out what wellness was, producing such articles as “How Algae Went From Horse Food to Wellness Trend” and “The Real…
About the only joyous thing about Christmas is that there is a marked slowdown in the amount of junk mail that hits my inbox. And to be honest I do miss the emails telling me that people have the ideal job for or that Svetlana from Kokshetau in Kazakhstan is desperate to send me pictures of…
What you allow to leak into your head is immensely important. Increasingly, we’re filling our heads with soundbites, the mental equivalent of junk. Over a day or even a week, the changes, like those to our belly, are barely noticeable. However, if we extend the timeline to months and years, we face a worrying reality…
One of the joys of experience is experience – you get to see all manner of things and from these these observations you can generalise a series of rules about life in general. A subset of these observations naturally relate to trading and what they have enabled me to do is to with a high…
As followers of the blog will know I have been using my copious free time to experiment with building a new system from the ground up and then testing it live. There is no point testing new theories and ideas within the electronic purity of a computer program unless you are going to put actual…
Bloomberg have been busy – click the image below to be taken to the full infographic.
I was digging through my archive of data related junk when I came across the regular (yearly) series called Perils of Perception by Ipsos MORI I was going to include one of the slides from the 2016 deck but the resolution was quite low so I decided to reformat it to make it clearer. The slide I…
