The other afternoon, in an effort to avoid doing my work, I picked up Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. It turned out to be a fitting choice, as Thoreau has quite a bit to say about wasting time. “The cost of a thing,” he wrote in Walden, “is the amount of what I will call life which is required…
If you have ever wondered why the NBN rollout consigns us to internet speeds that are slower than that of the economic powerhouse of Trinidad and Tobago or why our vaccine rollout resembles a fire in a chook shed then look no further than our ranking in the following league table of sovereign wealth funds.…
One of the things that intrigues me about the finance industry is that people don’t seem to fully think through the implications of the statements they make. For example, someone popped up on my LinkedIn profile yesterday claiming that their people were making 10%pm using a given platform. There are several things that are interesting…
Abstract In this paper I report the discovery of neurons which showed a neural correlate with ongoing fluctuations of Bitcoin and Ethereum prices at the time of the recording. I used the publicly available dataset of Neuropixel recordings by the Allen Institute to correlate the firing rate of single neurons with cryptocurrency price. Out of…
For generations, the standard way to learn how to ride a bicycle was with training wheels or a tricycle. But in recent years, many parents have opted to train their kids with balance bikes, pedalless two-wheelers that enable children to develop the coordination needed for bicycling—a skill that is not as easily acquired with an extra…
One of the things that is always interesting about financial markets is the role that hyperbole plays in people’s decision making. For example, my LinkedIn page is for some reason littered with people who are obsessed with gold and this is a topic I have touched on before. For many investors, their decisions are based…
Investors spend a great deal of time thinking, writing and talking about the fair or intrinsic value of equities, whether it be an entire market or individual company. This is a critical issue. There is probably no greater determinant of the long-run returns we make than the price that we pay. The obvious challenge is…
I find the notion of being a persistent short seller to be an interesting one. It is interesting because of the following reasons. Equity markets in particular have an upward bias. Short selling offers very limited profitability but theoretically unlimited risk. In this respect, it is similar to writing options. In times when short selling…
“Time perception matters because it is the experience of time that roots us in our mental reality.” More here – brainpickings
Commencement season is just around the corner. Whether in person or over a live-stream, graduates and their families will follow the long-honored tradition of listening to speeches studded with unoriginal chestnuts like following your dreams, shooting for the stars, and believing that you can do whatever you set out to do. But that message doesn’t seem…
With the usual seasonal bleating about the RBA it is worth revisiting some wise works from Messers Clarke and Dawe.
