The long knives have been out for TED Talks for some time. Benjamin Bratton called them “middlebrow megachurch infotainment.”Evegny Morozov called the TED publishing arm the “insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering.” The gist of these arguments is that TED Talks are vapid, culty mass-selfies that fetishize technology for every solution. It is “placebo science” meant to…
I make no secret of the fact that I think that the local market is very short on opportunities for trend followers. In this day and age there is no excuse for not utilising the ability technology gives you to diversify internationally – to not do so is simply lazy. To highlight my point consider…
Over the weekend through simple poor management on my behalf I was exposed to two articles purporting to tell me what 2014 had in store for me. The first was in the Age which I spotted over toast and vegemite whilst out enjoying breakfast. Grandiosely titled What the charts predict for 2014 – technical analysts…
If to enjoy even an enjoyable present we must have the assurance of a happy future, we are “crying for the moon.” We have no such assurance. The best predictions are still matters of probability rather than certainty, and to the best of our knowledge every one of us is going to suffer and die.…
I was going through my article archive and came across this old study that I hadn’t read in a long time which is a pity since it neatly encapsulates almost everything most traders do wrong. I have highlighted the bits that I think are important. He is both an aggressive investor and an active gambler.…
In the little excursion I had into the notion of the market being overvalued I visited the idea of the percentage of stocks above certain moving average being a sign of the market being overheated. The thinking behind this is that if a substantial number of stocks are above a given moving average then this…
This is a curious little malady that makes you believe that you are much better at a task than you actually are but you lack the either cognitive power or self perception to realise how bad you are. Consider of the HRF Hedge Fund Index versus the S&P500. As you can see a simple index…
I subscribe to an online newsletter All About Alpha that looks at alternative investment and like most of these online newsletters they seem to be cheerleaders for the hedge fund sector. So it was with some interest that I scanned the article 10 Top Hedge Fund Industry Trends for 2014 – interestingly not one of the…
Consider the chart below. Leaving aside my thoughts about organic food the chart deliberately confuses causation with correlation. Such confusion is the bane of statistician lives and it plays a role in our investing since in many ways it is the bedrock upon which people build their stories or rationalisations about he market. During…
If you are struggling to find metals prices, particularly some of the more obscure ones such as cobalt, magnesium and molybdenum check out InvestmentMine – it has a good collection of free charts and prices.
I have always been a fan of Muay Thai both as spectator sport and an endevour. It seems odd to say but there is something quintessentially Thai and Muay Thai – it is such a reflection of the people and so deeply engrained in their national psyche. Attending a Muay Thai fight in Thailand should…
