Voters generally, and prosperous voters in particular, suffer from what I call the mother of all cognitive illusions: they believe that having to pay higher taxes would make it more difficult to buy what they want. Like many illusory beliefs, this one may seem self-evident. And yet, as I will explain, it is completely baseless.…
One of the good things about trading is that you have a lot of time on your hands and I mean a lot of time on your hands. As such you are free to engage in whatever pursuits you want. For me, this often involves exploring various scientific debates that are going on that might…
Imagine this, you’re at a cocktail party where everyone there is a past version of yourself. There’s a kid’s play area with all the little kid versions of yourself. There’s a TV room with your angsty teenage selves watching music videos and playing video games. Then there’s dozens of adult you’s walking around, sipping whatever…
…….Before we get to how to improve your self-talk, let’s first discuss why the way you talk to yourself is so important in the first place. While we’ve all got a conversation happening in our heads, it carries on so constantly that our minds have learned to ignore it for the most part. We might…
Performance anxiety is common in all fields where performers care about the outcomes of their performance. Before a big game, baseball, football, and basketball players may experience performance anxiety. The actor or actress before the play starts; the trader facing a volatile market–all can find that their stress levels get in the way of their…
One of the biggest mistakes I frequently see in market commentaries is the belief that an index is static, that its composition is fixed in time and place. This is a great little piece that shows the very organic nature of an index such as the S&P500 over time. The index of today is not…
Saw this snippet online this morning courtesy of The Age online edition. Pop quiz for the day – was the road toll in China for that day higher or lower than 97? Numbers without context or framing are meaningless.
One of my bugbears is historians who draw lines through history and present it as a linear narrative. As an example, the Treaty of Versailles, lead to the Weimar Republic whose collapse was inevitable which lead to the rise of Hitler which leads to the Second World War and all its associated horrors. It is…
Let me start with a general statement – t world is awash with cretins when it comes to any event that doesn’t involve watching reality TV, piss farting around on social media, waxing your genitals and shaving off your eyebrows and then drawing them 3cms higher than they were with a sharpie. There is no…
One of the side benefits of getting older is that you realise there is nothing new. This seems to be particularly true in regard to new traders who think they have made a new and novel mistake and market “experts” who think they have invented something new. I am not certain whether it is comforting…
t’s the final moment before an important endeavor—a speech, a performance, a presentation, an interview, a date, or perhaps a sports match. Up until now, you’ve felt good and confident about your abilities. But suddenly, something shifts. You feel a wave of self-doubt. You start questioning how well you prepared. The urge to run away…
……Consider a 2010 study of United States Air Force Cadets in which psychologists from the National Bureau of Economic Research tracked a cohort of cadets over 4 years. The researchers found that while there was variability in fitness gains/losses across all the cadets, there was hardly any variability within squadrons. Squadrons are groups of about 30 cadets…
