Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions
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:…
How I feel About Trading Some Days
Spotted in the physics department of Ohio State University.
The Psychology and Neuroscience of Financial Decision Making
The Psychology and Neuroscience of Financial Decision Making from Trading Game Pty Ltd
What A Difference A Day Makes
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…
Venezuelans Give Up on Counting Piles of Cash and Start Weighing Them
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…
Its Good To Be Number One
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…
Starting Dates
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…
The Weird Economics Of Ikea
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…
Another Day Another ETF System
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.…
How To Get Rich
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…
