Research Articles

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.

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.