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.
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.