First a personal disclaimer – I am short gold and have been for sometime. However, something about the current market action intrigues me and my interest is catalysed by the comments that surround gold from both bulls and bears. Of late bearish articles regarding gold have been in the ascendency with predictions that gold might…
I have to admit that for some reason I find it hard to feel sorry for these people. It is a sad event that people are conned out of their hard earned money. However, you have to posses a remarkable naivety to believe that someone else can make you 1% per day on your capital.…
At the risk of sounding crass – f@3k yes…… It’s an age-old question: Can money buy happiness? Over the past few years, new research has given us a much deeper understanding of the relationship between what we earn and how we feel. Economists have been scrutinizing the links between income and happiness across nations, and…
I thought you may like to see a great article from my friend Rik Schnabel. If you like it, and you’d like to subscribe to his newsletter (where I swiped this article from – with his permission, of course… click here). ‘YES!’ Moves you ‘No’ doesn’t… It’s amazing how just one tiny, two letter word…
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.” – Mark Twain. “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain…
Got a dream of being a spectacular trader? Here are 5 signs you’re on your way to a bright future: 1) You know where you’re headed. You know why you’re trading and who you’re trading for. You have an image about what your life will look like when your trading results catch up with your…
I have been thinking about the marshmallow test and whether there was an equivalent that could be done in 2014 and I think there is. The protocol is simple, take an adult, lock them in a room with their smartphone and access to their Facebook account and see if they can resist taking a photograph…
Media portrayals of cancer as a battle to be fought, and its focus on ‘brave fighters’ beating the odds, can lead to feelings of guilt and failure in people with a terminal diagnosis, according to research. ‘War’ metaphors are commonly used to describe people’s experiences of cancer – by the media, by charities raising awareness…
The chart below is currently doing the rounds. It is from JP Morgans Guide to Retirement and it is being repeated without critical comment over various sites. It offers the standard line of the need to be fully invested in markets all the time because if you are not fully invested then you miss the best…
Throughout the late 1960’s and early 1970’s Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel conducted what became known as the marshmallow tests. This test looked at the phenomena of delayed gratification in children. as part of the testing protocol children were offered either a small reward immediately or a larger reward if they waited 15 minutes. Interestingly…
In 1999, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, my then graduate student Justin Kruger and I published a paper that documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize—scratch that, cannot recognize—just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands…
