What Lies Behind Every Breakthrough Performance
In his new book, Atomic Habits, James Clear uses the example of an ice cube. Ice melts only when it hits 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Does that mean the energy required to raise the temperature of ice from 25 to 26 to 27 to 29 to 31 degrees doesn’t matter? Of course not. You may only see…
Neil Pasricha: Happy Habits
Here are a few highlights from our conversation: What I learned from my parents was the model of resilience. The idea that you can add a “yet” to any sentence. Meaning, when I talked to my mom growing up, she’d be like, “Well, dad would take me to the German club and I said to…
How Things Used To Be
With the inevitable demise of Holden it’s always fun to look back at how things were done. This ad from Ford could never be made today because of the fun police. Surely everyone wants to hang out the back of a ute going up Olivers Hill in Frankston.
Survivor Bias…..Again
This is a recent post that popped up in my Twitter feed. It follows the usual nonsense line of, if you had gone back in history and bought this stock and held it till today you would have X amount of money. It’s the same nonsense as saying that if you had invested in APPL…
Asset Managers’ BS — Decoded
A Translation Guide to Asset Manager-Speak Now is a good entry point = Sorry, we are in a drawdown We have a high Sharpe ratio = We don’t make much money We have never lost money = We have never made money We have a great backtest = We are going to lose money after…
The Mother of All Cognitive Illusions
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.…
Tinkering with the Irrelevant
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…
How To Let Go Of Your Regrets
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…
The 3 Simple Steps to Stopping Negative Self-Talk
…….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: The Most Common Psychological Problem Traders Face
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…
History of Companies and Industries Listed on the S&P 500
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…
Context…….Again
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.
