What Do Traders Have In Common With the Japanese Navy and Golfers?
One of the things that is interesting about trading psychology is the notion that it is idiosyncratic, that is the psychological processes that afflict traders are only found within the realm of trading. This is a somewhat narrow dogmatic view and in many ways is simply an attempt to distinguish the filed of trading psychology…
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NASDAQ 100 Performance
I came across the chart below this morning which looks at the performance of what you would term large or dominant stocks within an index. What these sorts of charts do is educate you about the history of markets but they also reaffirm that there is nothing new under the sun. As the article that…
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Subcriticality, Spread, and Future of Now
Much has been written about how life will be after we are done with COVID-19 – some of it sensible, some of it mere hyperbole but one of the more thoughtful pieces I have come across is this one by Paul Kedrosky a venture capitalist who jotted down some thoughts in one of his in…
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Darwin – The Brilliant Plodder
Charles Darwin is ever with us. A month seldom passes without new books about the man, his life, his work, and his influence—books by scholars for scholars, by scholars for ordinary readers, and by the many unwashed rest of us nonfiction authors who presume to enter the fray, convinced that there’s one more new way…
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How Isaac Newton Turned Isolation From the Great Plague Into a “Year of Wonders”
In 1665, “social distancing” orders emptied campuses throughout England, as the bubonic plague raged, killing 100,000 people (roughly one-quarter of London’s population), in just 18 months. A 24-year-old student from Trinity College, Cambridge was among those forced to leave campus and return indefinitely to his childhood home. His name was Isaac Newton and his time…
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More Fun With Numbers
Whenever I see a report on the spread of coronavirus it is generally accompanied by a variation of the graphic below. Giant red circles encompassing massive areas of the globe. People see this and quite naturally freak out because it appears as if the world is engulfed in a runaway contagion. What is being shown…
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Relative Versus Absolute
One of the things that scream incompetent is the inability to distinguish between what is a relative figure and what is an absolute figure. You most often see this sort of idiocy in the reporting of the risks associated with various events such as diet or drug interventions. For example, consider this statement – eating…
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