Maybe A Small Silver Lining
Whilst it is difficult to see anything that is positive coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic in years to come we may look back and say at least we were spared Russia’s entry into the Eurovision 2020 Song Contest. What has been seen cannot be unseen……
Confirmation Bias And the Power of Disconfirming Evidence
Confirmation bias is our tendency to cherry-pick information that confirms our existing beliefs or ideas. Confirmation bias explains why two people with opposing views on a topic can see the same evidence and come away feeling validated by it. This cognitive bias is most pronounced in the case of ingrained, ideological, or emotionally charged views.…
Buy and Hold – How Is That Working Out For You
Imagine we have a way back machine and we wander into your broker or financial planners office in 2007 and ask them to generate a portfolio for us. I can guarantee you that your portfolio will have at least two of the local big four banks in it. The argument for including them will include…
The Market Doesn’t Give A Shit About Your Opinion
Whilst having lunch this headline from the Melbourne Age lobbed onto my screen. I was going to write a piece on narrative fallacies, false beliefs, postdictive errors, and general incompetence. You know all the usual stuff I go on about when I play whack-a-mole with analysts heads but I decided to opt for the old…
How the Veil of Ignorance Helps Test Fairness
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or…
I Love A Good Conspiracy Theory
One of the things that has always interested me in humans is the desire to partition the world into little segments that are easy to understand, my view has always been that most of these dichotomies are false and are simply a mechanism of delineating groups into good and bad. Of course, everyone who splits…
Richard Feynman On Believing What Isn’t True
In the South Seas there is a Cargo Cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for…
The Things You Get Sent On Social Media
A little while ago I wrote a piece on whether adding information to a trading system increased its fidelity and in one of those happy little coincidences that sometimes occur in life the following arrived courtesy of Facebook.
S&P500 Yearly Returns
I haven’t generated an updated set of yearly returns for the S&P500 so with nothing better to do in lockdown.
The Definition of a Trader
I came across the following definition of a trader the other day and it has been bouncing around the back of my mind ever since. Trader/ˈtreɪdə noun: a person who loves problem solving and the challenge of competing against others The first part I find some common ground with – there are some functional problems…
The Worst Ever….Yeah Not Even Close
Sometimes you see comments that make you put your head on the side and develop a quizzical look, much like a labrador contemplating the origin of calculus debate….was it Leibniz or Newton? The comment that caused this was a throwaway line saying that this was the worst market depression we had ever seen, I immediately…
One Trader Started The Day With $77,000 In His Account; By The End He Owed $9 Million
Well, doesnt this suck. That will teach you to try and be a clever dick…. The April 20 historic oil price crash that sent the prompt May WTI contract plunging to the unheard of price of negative $40 per barrel now seems like ancient history with oil back in the $20s (at least until the…
