In 1827, Robert Brown saw a random movement of pollen particles in water. This was called Brownian motion, also the drunkard’s walk. In 1902, Einstein proved this and confirmed the presence of atoms and molecules. This was 100 years after the atomic theory was proposed by John Dalton and was the first attempt to reconcile wave and particle theory. The debate has taken another form, as classical physics can’t be reconciled with quantum entanglement, which meant free will does not work, a particle can’t make its fate by hard work and awareness, its fate was predetermined.
Just like we don’t need to understand inflation for it to trouble us, we really don’t need to be able to spell statistics for it to rule us. The realization of an average lifespan could have pushed many saints towards the spiritual path, but for us simple material investors, our life moves around a statistical average.
The phenomenon in which one regular cycle locks into another is called entrainment, or mode locking. Entrainment explains why stock market components are like flocking birds and herd behavior of land animals
Christmas is about making wishes. However, some wishes are not reasonable. For example, wishing for a universal database is wishful thinking, as such a database would need a lot of server space. I am not speaking of a smart stock market database but a database for every organic data from the stock markets to the stars. Scientists know the limitations connected with cosmic data. What the data astronomers are capturing, on occasion, comes from the past, from a few million years back in time.
Before he died, physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg had two questions for God. These were “Why relativity? Why turbulence?”. Heisenberg also felt that God knew the answer just for the first question. Turbulence was beyond God. It’s strange the conviction Heisenberg had regarding turbulence also known as fluctuation, noise, divergence, extremity, fat tail, chaos, black swan, etc.
There is nothing wrong with metals. It is we who don't have a real perception of them. The regular investor who is so equity-focused, a bit fixed income-focused is a bit aware of gold and oil prices and that's where it stops. When it comes to commodities or say metals, one has to cross the bridge.
A friend asked me how I could differentiate my wish from my intuition. She made me think, how there was a thin line when it came to defining what we wish and what we assign a certainty, too; an intuition. The human thinking was based on subjective patterns, which either we understood (intuition), or wished to comprehend.
When I saw this research paper, it attracted me like a headline. It had a catchy headline. The decade-old paper by Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer and Vohs goes about explaining how life is full of bad and good instances and how bad was predictive, underestimated, more lasting, more pervasive, elicited more processing, got more attention, was more unusual, was connected to speedy decision making, universal and simply stronger than the good.
I was in Budapest for a market conference. The theme was based on Martin Pring’s recent book, ‘Investing in another lost decade'. Pring is the second generation of technicians along with John Murphy and Robert Prechter. Pring’s generation followed the generation of J. Welles Wilder, Joseph E. Granville and Ralph N Elliott.
Many Physicists assume TIME to come from Einstein’s space-time geometry. Space-time is at the heart of string theory, which is connected to supersymmetry and which leads us to HIGGS, the Goddamn particle rechristened as ‘The God particle’. The particle we have almost found.
Benner’s Prophecies – Future up and down in prices was written in 1875. Samuel Benner was a prosperous farmer wiped out financially by the 1873 panic. He turned to wheat farming in Ohio and took up the statistical study of price movements as a hobby to find, if possible, the answers to the recurring ups and downs in business. He noted that highs of the business tend to follow a repeating 8-9-10 yearly pattern.
Elinor Ostrom died recently. Her work on the tragedy of the commons earned her the Nobel Prize. The tragedy of the commons is a term coined by scientist Garrett Hardin in 1968, describing what can happen in groups when individuals act in their own best self-interests and ignore what’s best for the whole group. A group of herdsmen shared a communal pasture, so the story goes, but some realized that if they increased their own herd, it would greatly benefit them. However, increasing your herd without regard to the available resources brings unintentional tragedy through overgrazing and destruction of the common grazing area, an unintentional tragedy.
A friend took me out for coffee and gifted me Gladwell’s Outlier at the 2009 bottom. “This is dedicated to your doomed outlier”. During those murky times, the negative outliers were moving to a positive polarity (worst stocks were becoming potential outperformers). Three years later and many outliers later, Gladwell’s lucid narrative on the history of success started shining brightly in my heap of books. It was time for me to read it and explore the connection between price performance and success.
In the age of information, quotes become books and books religion, almost. Robert Shiller’s Irrational Exuberance was a voice of caution that appeared in March 2000, before the start of a decade-long sequence of negative fluctuations. The book itself was written about economic bubbles and investor psychology.
I was invited to deliver an inspirational speech at the Start-up Weekend for the global Jade network. KJ, a friend of mine, an international expert on e-gaming and netpreneur could not avoid a smirk: “Mukul and inspirational talk?”. He knew me well and was much updated about the contrarian me and our idea of glorifying the worst. Unmindful of KJ’s demotivation, I went ahead and delivered the following speech.
Odysseus has traditionally been viewed in the Iliad as Achilles’ antithesis. Unlike Achilles whose anger is self-destructive, Odysseus is renowned for his self-restraint and diplomatic skills.
I revisited a friend at his Balaton lake house last weekend. Balaton is the largest lake in Central Europe also known as the Hungarian sea. Just 500 kilometers away and the weather was warmer than the snow-packed Cluj. I had the sun, the view and more than a stack of books at his lakeside house. And as chance would have it, next to Taleb’s signed copy of Black Swan was a book, ‘Riding the waves of culture’ by Fons Trompenaars. The book had a complete chapter on Time. This is the chapter abstract with my interpretation for you.
Do you know how many times you use “Probably” in a day? The word is a part of our colloquial expression because society embraces uncertainty, disorder, and randomness as natural. Whether it’s a rolling die, a tossing coin, or an event, uncertainty is everywhere. This is why the society believes that a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas.
The Dreyfus affair was a political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. It involved the conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason in November 1894. He was sentenced to life for allegedly having passed French military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. What happened? In 1906, Dreyfus was exonerated and reinstated as a major in the French Army. He served during World War I, ending his service with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
The societal quest for value is continuous, repetitive, similar, connected with cooperation and patterned. I don’t know who is better, Clint Eastwood or Rajkumar Hirani. I saw two films back to back — 3 Idiots on Thursday and J Edgar on Friday. Though this non-confirms my (self-proclaimed) film buff status, I took a while to catch up on these top-grossing cinema creations.
