Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, National University of Singapore and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have shown that betting decisions in a simple competitive game are influenced by the specific variants of dopamine-regulating genes in a person’s brain. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter – a chemical released by brain cells to signal other brain…
Sir Francis Galton the creator of the concept of statistical correlation and the idea of regression to the mean also once wrote a paper on how to cut a cake scientifically. It turns out everyone has been doing it wrong – which is actually no surprise. Galtons original paper can be found here
A central tenet in modern economics is that crashes do not happen; we all know that they do . Therefore, the maxim should be restated as crashes are not supposed to happen according to the models we have. In fact modern economic theory be it the Efficient market Hypothesis or the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium are…
More cleverness by Michael Lewis – I’d like to start by making a confession: It’s never been easy being me. Managing billions of dollars of other people’s money, and countless millions of my own, has been highly stressful. There was a time when I thought my anxiety, not to mention the investigations of my affairs…
God I hope so…….. “We got interested in this idea because there is abundant evidence that higher socioeconomic status — higher income or wealth, higher education — does not boost subjective well-being (or happiness) much at all. Yet at the same time, many theories suggest that higher status should boost happiness.” Bugger…doesnt look like it…
Playboy: If life is so purposeless, do you feel its worth living? Stanley Kubrick: Yes, for those who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaninglessness of life forces a man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something…
Things were not looking good for Brian. He’d been kept from the affection of his mother—and all other women—and raised alone by his father, who sexually traumatized him. Normal social interactions were impossible for him. He couldn’t eat in front of others and required a series of repeated, OCD-like rituals before he’d take food. He…
As an intellectual pursuit trading is not a difficult endevour, the rules are quite simple and they revolve around the central tenet of cutting your losses and letting your profits run. This maxim has been with traders for generation and a failure to recognise its importance has even afflicted the greatest traders. The late Jesse…
Earlier this week I reinstated my longs on the Dow – the combination of a breakout to new highs and a low volatility is hard for me to resist and as fate would have it the market decided it would reverse. So what does this mean for this position? At present nothing, markets do…
I am speaking at the AIA Conference in August so if you have the misfortune to find yourself on the Gold Coast aka Bogan capital of Australia drop in and say hello. However, an invitation is not the point of this piece. I have been collating some of my notes from past presentations and came…
