You might guess there wouldn’t be much psychological research on belief in fate, destiny, or purpose, but you’d be wrong. There is a surprisingly deep vein of studies on these topics in both children and adults. A recent poll found that 38 percent of Americans believe natural disasters are signs from God, but more abstract…
This piece got sent to me yesterday and I have to admit I have only scanned it. But my take way from it is the belief that momentum investing in Australia is rife because stocks can move by very large amounts. My off the top of my head feeling might be that this is a…
I came across this piece the other day. It is a good bit of work because it highlights neatly the interplay between returns, risk and drawdown. This triumvirate holds sway over the trajectory of our investing but it is continually ignored by most, as all traders in some way shape or form seek the biggest…
WTF?……. The Monty Hall Dilemma is a probability puzzle that is notorious for eliciting suboptimal decisions from humans. A participant is given a choice from among three doors, one of which conceals a valuable prize. After an initial selection, one of the remaining, nonwinning doors is opened, and the participant is given a chance to…
In 1978, Wilson had a disastrous experience shorting the Resorts International casino company. Forbes dubbed it “the most catastrophic short play in modern times.” Wilson reasoned that gambling wouldn’t catch on in Atlantic City in the 1970s. Jet travel was picking up and people could easily fly to Las Vegas instead. Ironically, he has since been proven…
It is interesting to note that the FTSE 100 has made a new all time high (yet another market doing better than our own). The FTSE presents an interesting lesson in how markets can behave and how long it can take for a market to recover. The FTSE made a new all time highest close…
Ever since the U.S. presidential election, Ed Dahlberg has pretty much had a smile on his face. He brokers the sale of private jets, and already he’s seeing interest pick up and used-aircraft prices starting to firm up. The sale of a single-engine turboprop aircraft that he recently handled went for about 5 percent more…
Since it is the season for both looking backwards in an attempt to explain the past and make predictions as to the future I thought I would add my own meaningless contribution. There is an old adage that January predicts the course of the coming year and a variation of the chart below has been…
It is that time of the year when everyone involved in this business looks in the rear vision mirror and attempts to make sense of what happened. And of course to everyone involved everything is so obvious and predictable. What is worse is that they take this data and attempt to make some form of…
The term “wellness” — which seems to encompass everything from yoga to detox teas to crystals — is very hot right now. Earlier this year, New York magazine dedicated an entire, incredulous month to figuring out what wellness was, producing such articles as “How Algae Went From Horse Food to Wellness Trend” and “The Real…
