So you want to be a fund manager, sit on a pile of money, move it from here to there and from there to here. Wear a suit everyday to work, a silk tie and maybe have one of those heavy Swiss watches on your wrist. Sounds nice, right? Well I have good news for you.…
Something different for the day and my favourite web series. Click image for the redirect to the video.
What would be your perfect day? How would you look, feel, and what would you be doing? Strangely, when I’ve asked this to civilians (people outside our close-knit trading community), they don’t even know the answer. But I’ll bet you, if you think about it, you’ll know what you perfect day looks like. You know…
I was talking to my friend, Alan Furlong, on the phone the other day. He’s a loyal follower of the positive psychology movement. I asked him “Alan – what should someone do if they really don’t like their job?” Without hesitation, he said “Quit”. I have to admit, his answer freaked me out. But the…
For those of you who hold BHP, my commiserations.Unfortunately, you have not seen much growth for almost a decade and have been underwater for the bulk of that time. The trajectory of BHP is interesting because it points directly to the fact that we have not had a mining boom – we have had…
I thought it would be interesting to see how the domestic market has performed over various times frames relative to a grab bag of foreign markets. the charts below are in the following order – one year, six months, three months and one month. On the longer time frames we are rubbish but over the…
An interesting interview with Marc Adreessen the inventor of Netscape and venture capitalist. He makes the following poiint – What did you do? I just went to college. I did my thing. I came out here in ’94, and Silicon Valley was in hibernation. In high school, I actually thought I was going to have…
Your feelings don’t just LAND on you. You generate them. And if you generate sad feelings, you can also generate energising, happy and exuberant emotions. Take responsibility for the way you’re feeling right now. If you are ‘losing hope’ it means that you haven’t chosen to generate hope in your life. It means that you…
I gave a little it talk last night on complexity within markets and the question arose in the chat afterwards as to how do you know when a trader/advisor/etc is starting to panic about the market. I have a short quick and very complete answer which is based upon my own observation over the past…
The planning fallacy is related to optimism bias (think Lake Wobegon—where all the children are above average) and self-serving bias (where the good stuff is deemed to be my doing while the bad stuff is always someone else’s fault). We routinely overrate our own capacities and exaggerate our abilities to shape the future. Thus the…
It may seem liberating to live in a land of infinite choices, but research in decision-making suggests otherwise. In a classic study, Stanford researchers set up shop at an upscale grocery store chosen for its “extraordinary selection” of items, including 300 types of jam. One Saturday afternoon, they set up a sampling booth with 24 jams;…
