When referring to why some people are successful I often think of the analogy of a stone in the shoe. It seems to me that some people just have a stone in their shoe that keeps them moving forward, something inside them irritates them away from contentment with whatever they are doing, so they move…
Recently I had a look at the distribution of returns for a system I run – the aim of this was to give a sense of how systems trading works. The rules of systems trading are very simple and are based around the concept of ride the losses, pump the winners and allow time to…
Perhaps this is why people dont like to train with me…. Click the pic for the full video. PS: For those interested in this sort of thing Google what is known as the Tabata Protocol. This is based upon work done by Prof Izumi Tabata whose original work laid the basis for much of the…
I have posted this before in a different format but it just occurred to me when seeing it again that Jim Simons is supposed to be retired. He is not doing too badly for someone who is spending his days either gardening or down at the local bowls club. More here – Washington Post
Tom Basso who was profiled in Market Wizards was interviewed on Talking Trading this week. Click the image below to be taken to the interview.
I wrote a little while ago about the need to be aware of the history of markets and their propensity to go nowhere for significant periods of time. This sort of saga is unfolding in the US with their markets making no real gain for some 18 months. The US seems to be range bound…
I have cobbled together a few dodgy sources to build a 35 year graph of the total returns (includes dividends) for the ASX 200. The S&P/ASX 200 only came into being in 2000 so some of the data is of a composite nature. The thing that is always interesting about this is how little damage…
I was mucking around with the yearly returns on the S&P500 – I wanted to see how the returns were distributed and I got the graph below. The graph covers almost a century of data and told me something very interesting – there are actually fewer down years than I had imagined. I didnt really…
The most unusual coincidence in my life took place when I flew from Boston, my home, to Chicago to meet Scott Isenberg, the new editor assigned to revise a statistics textbook I had authored a few years earlier. We were having dinner at a restaurant overlooking Lake Michigan, and Scott began to talk nostalgically about…
I am somewhat of an evangelist on this topic. Click the image below to be taken to the show.
I am in no way a fundamental analyst – in fact as a skill set for investing I regard it as irrelevant and an example of being seduced by your own narrative fallacy. However, I am in business and I am intrigued as to why some businesses stall, whither and die. I came across the…
McCartney has worked so hard at seeming an ordinary bloke that it is easy to miss the least ordinary and least bloke-ish thing about him: the magnitude of his melodic gift. A genius for melody is a strange, surprisingly isolated talent, and doesn’t have much to do with a broader musical gift for composition; Mozart…
Kindt, 48, has devoted her career to understanding human fear and memory. She has built her own laboratory, published in the most prestigious scientific journals, and developed a simple treatment she hopes might one day help millions of people who suffer from PTSD, phobias, and other anxiety disorders. In her clinic, she has seen it…
Last week I wrote about the problems people had drawing an item they were often intimately familiar with. The study I cited was used as a mechanism to highlight the fact that we actually know less than we think we do. Coincidentally Gianluca Gimini an artist has been collecting images of bike drawings since 2009 and…
