Why do we bother with stock market forecasts?
Brilliant opening quote…. “Forecasting: the attempt to predict the unknowable by measuring the irrelevant; this task employs most people on Wall Street.” The words of Jason Zweig, author of the Devil’s Financial Dictionary, are particularly apt at this time of year. We hear a lot from financial forecasters every January, as strategists prognosticate on what’s in store…
Psychological States Underlying Excellent Performance in Golfers
It always struck me that golf and trading were closely related in that in a golf tournament the person who wins is the one who makes the fewest catastrophic errors. And when they make those errors it is the person who manages their mental state afterwards who wins…
Its That Time Of The Year Again….
Around about now Wall Street and others begin to trot out what their predictions for the coming year are. The latest round of such crystal ball gazing can be found here in an article by Bloomberg called Here’s (Almost) Everything Wall Street Expects in 2019 You can peruse this sort of nonsense at your leisure.However, before…
Can More Information Lead to Worse Investment Decisions?
It is without question that investors now have easy access to more information than ever to guide decision making; optically, this surfeit of data appears to be a positive – who doesn’t want more ‘evidence’ to inform their judgements? Yet there are a number of potential drawbacks, most notably the challenge of disentangling signals from…
Odd Things I Have Heard 1
In finance you get to hear all sorts of odd things – it must be the type of people the industry attracts. However, some stick in the mind more than others. Some time ago LB and I had a meeting with a group and we discussed numerous ideas, none of which went anywhere, the reason…
To Profit Take Or Not
Recently on LinkedIn I saw a piece that was extolling virtues of profit taking, a strategy I am vehemently opposed to. The piece used words such as greedy to try and generate some form of emotional response in the reader – as if being greedy is a bad thing. In trading it is the only…
Governments, Economies and The Market
In yesterdays video I talked briefly about eliminating the noise that seems to be so predominant today. Part of this noise tries to generate a cohesive narrative that mixes politics, the economy and the market and to impose a relationship where there is probably none. Governments come and go economies travel in fits and spurts…
Here’s Why the 2019 Mercedes G-Class Is the Coolest New SUV
Its big, loud, German and stupid…….what more do you need?
Kind or Hostile
I was recently listening to the 100th episode of the Michael Kitces podcast with Joe Duran to learn about how Duran used data analytics to help build and scale a $24 billion wealth management firm. However, it wasn’t the machine learning or the data-driven decision making that stuck with me the most. It was something Duran said at the end of…
What can we learn from people who succeed later in life?
When, at the age of 50, John Fenn joined the faculty at Yale, he was old by academic standards. But then again, he was an inveterate late starter. He published his first research paper at 32, a decade after leaving graduate school. He was 35 when he got his first academic appointment, at Princeton, where he started working…
If You Feel Thankful, Write It Down. It’s Good For Your Health
…..And noting your gratitude seems to pay off: There’s a growing body of research on the benefits of gratitude. Studies have found that giving thanks and counting blessings can help people sleep better, lower stress and improve interpersonal relationships. Earlier this year, a study found that keeping a gratitude journal decreased materialism and bolstered generosity among adolescents. In another study from August, high school…
Scale
1 million seconds is abut 11 days. 1 billion seconds is about 31.5 years. I cannot remember where I heard the example above but it is a wonderful example of peoples inability to understand scale particularly when it involves orders of magnitude change. In part it relates to why people cannot understand why a loss…
THE LONGEST RUNNING REPEAT-FOR-FREE TRADING MENTOR PROGRAM IN THE WORLD
Want to be an exceptional trader? Learn from the best. Chris and Louise have found the way to take the guesswork out of share trading.They can teach you how to do this too!
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