1 million seconds is abut 11 days. 1 billion seconds is about 31.5 years. I cannot remember where I heard the example above but it is a wonderful example of peoples inability to understand scale particularly when it involves orders of magnitude change. In part it relates to why people cannot understand why a loss…
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In the past week a paper titled Dynamical Variety of Shapes in Financial Multifractality has been doing the rounds. The abstract of the paper states – The concept of multifractality offers a powerful formal tool to filter out a multitude of the most relevant characteristics of complex time series. The related studies thus far presented…
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You stand before three closed doors. The doors are evenly spaced and appear identical, aside from being numbered from 1 to 3. One of the doors conceals a car, while each of the other two doors conceals a goat. The host of this game, Monty Hall, asks you to select a door. If you select the…
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With equity markets performing reasonably poorly in the short term I thought it may be instructive to look at the YTD performance of a basket of markets. The snip below is from Finviz.com a handy little website that generates performance metrics over time. The unfortunate thing about being an equities only trader is that you are…
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Sports analogies often help us think about how we make investing decisions. Are there streaks in random data? Do past results affect future ones? And most importantly, if you know people have certain biases, what can you do to get a leg up? In this episode, hosts Dan Villalon and Gabe Feghali talk to AQR Principal and…
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It may sound weird but I really like playing with software that simulates distributions – it probably comes from when I had a semester free at Uni and simply took subjects that looked interesting. One of the ones I dropped into was Mathematical Ecology which is largely the mathematics of natural distributions. I found it…
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Apparently according to financial journalists the Shanghai Composite is now officially in a bear market because it has fallen the mandatory 20%. I do wish they would pay attention to what is actually happening. The first chart below shows my usual value of $1 invested i the index. As you can see the glory days…
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