Every once in a while, a friend attends therapy for the first time and starts breathlessly reporting all the revelations she’s learned. In many of these circumstances, it’s all I can do to stop myself from yelling that I, or any of her other friends, could just as easily have told her these same “discoveries.”…
A piece in the Fairfax press today referenced a book by economist Professor Paul Frijters called Game of Mates. In essence the books looks at both the political connnectness of billionaires, how this affects their wealth, the wealth of a country and their contribution to innovation. In short it found that billionaires in Australia are…
As an seven year old in about 1983, in the days before First Class Lounges at airports, I was with my grandad in Nice Airport and saw Roger Moore sitting at the departure gate, reading a paper. I told my granddad I’d just seen James Bond and asked if we could go over so I…
Whilst sitting at my local this afternoon enjoy a cuppa and a Kit Kat I spied someone reading a piece about a company called SurfStich which to be honest I had never head of as it doesn’t sit within my universe of tradeable stocks. To save you the trouble of reading the article I can…
This little rant has nothing to do with trading so if you are not interested tune out now. I came across the article below whilst looking for something else and I thought it would be a good primer piece for people who wanted to know a little bit more about statistics since it uses neither…
On Sunday we had the middle meeting of our Mentor Program and one of the topics that always creeps up is the desire for complexity within trading. There is a belief that the more complex your system the better it will be In part this is due to the illusion of control that such approaches…
I was mucking around on the Valuer Generals site the other day searching for historical bits and pieces relating to my property when I noticed that the VG kept historical records on their estimation of the median house price in Melbourne. One of the things I have always found difficult in real estate is not…
From the good Dr Joe – Join us for a three-day driving adventure across Southern Germany for an exceptional Art of Living experience with Aston Martin. Cruise along alpine roads, wind your way around mountainous hairpin bends, and feel the unrivalled performance of an Aston Martin. Along the way, discover the rich heritage, culture and…
Every so I often I am party to an email from someone who should know better. This particular email was around the topic of returns that could be expected from a novice trader. This email asserted that they were looking at the order of 1,000% pa, which in anyone’s language is a tall order. I…
So says this piece in the Fairfax press this morning. The headline contains two interesting assumptions. That the market has become more volatile and that this volatility leads to the potential for profit. I will state at the outset that the linkage between profit and volatility that is often asserted by both some members of the…
….The theory of cognitive dissonance—the extreme discomfort of simultaneously holding two thoughts that are in conflict—was developed by the social psychologist Leon Festinger in the 1950s. In a famous study, Festinger and his colleagues embedded themselves with a doomsday prophet named Dorothy Martin and her cult of followers who believed that spacemen called the Guardians…
Good performance, mediocre results or even downright ugly returns. When it comes to hedge funds, it scarcely matters. Even as some investors begin to sour on these high-priced stock pickers, the top fund managers still haul in enormous paychecks. The 25 best-paid hedge fund managers earned a collective $11 billion in 2016, according to an…
We live in an age of unrelenting change. That, at least, is what we are told by a consulting industry that thrives on a gospel of disruption, and journalists who overgeneralise from the earthquake in their own profession. Anecdotal evidence of volatility is easy to find: the financial crisis; the cultural dominance of inventions such…
