Michael Covel take in WSJ: Read.
Year: 2008
The Funnymentals
Fannie and Freddie looked so good on paper (the fundamentals), but oh what secrets they were masking. As usual though the charts were always telling the truth even when the CEOs were not.
“Pimping Risk”
This article and excerpt caught my eye
“The [mutual fund] industry sets targets that are far too high and then says, ‘Gee let us help you hit that target — put your money in stocks,'” he says. “It is true that the probability of making your target will go up, but the probability of having a really bad outcome — like losing your principal — will also go up, and so will the fees charged for management.”
Its never about just putting your money in any asset “long only”. Once you decide on the asset class you need a plan for buying and selling before you ever lay one dollar on the table at risk.
Turtle Tom Shanks on “Boots”
I received an email from Turtle Tom Shanks today that adds more “color” to the story:
This is mainly a clarification of the fourth paragraph on page 33, beginning “Shanks and Svoboda . . .”. This is a fuller account, to the best of my recollection, that you may use any way you see fit:
I first met George [Svoboda] in San Francisco, through Blair Hull. George had a brilliant way of getting right to the core principles of any subject he approached, and he was investigating trading at the time. He quickly learned of Blair’s prominence in the field and flew to San Francisco to meet with him. I was working for Blair (had met him through Blackjack), and Blair knew that George had an extensive blackjack background as well. Since we all had that in common, Blair invited me to join them for lunch. I don’t remember much about that meeting, but a couple of months later Blair sent me to Chicago to research sources of commodity price data that he could add to his Options Research service. During that trip, I ran into a friend of mine named Ron Cohn, whom I had known in San Francisco. I had no idea Ron was working in Chicago; he walked into an office I was in to drop off some keys at the end of a project he was doing for the company, we recognized each other and decided to have dinner that night. I knew George was in Chicago doing more research and I didn’t think he knew anyone socially there so I called George and invited him to join us. We went to a Greek restaurant, I remember, and during the catch-up conversation, I learned that Ron had applied to the first C&D ad that had run the year before, which is the first time either George or I had heard of that opportunity. I returned to San Francisco, looked up the ad in the file of old WSJs we kept, procrastinated for a while and finally applied. After I got the application package, I phoned George to discuss it. In his inimitable way he had cut right to the heart of the matter and told me that he had gone to the library to research RJD to get an idea of how Richard might like to have the questions and essays in the application answered. I thought that was a great idea and did the same in SF. There were 20 interviews granted that year, two a day for two weeks. George and I were scheduled on the same day, he in the morning and I in the afternoon. The rest, as they say…Hope you are well. Best, Tom
PS: In the next paragraph, there is a reference to Dingo boots. There never were any Dingo boots. The boots we used were all made by hand by a Mexican shoemaker in San Francisco. The essence is correct, however: I was tired of boots.
Thanks Tom.
Richard Dennis: Prince of the Pit
The father of the Turtles Richard Dennis was very wise even back in the day. From an article circa 1976 wholly relevant to today.
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Larry Hite: Life is a Bet
A comment from trader Larry Hite:
“Life is nothing more than a series of bets and bets are really nothing more than questions and their answers. There is no real difference between, “Should I take another hit on this Blackjack hand?” and “Should I get out of the way of that speeding and wildly careening bus?” Each shares two universal truths: a set of probabilities of potential outcomes and the singular outcome that takes place. Everyday we place hundreds if not thousands of bets – large and small, some seemingly well considered and others made without a second thought. The vast majority of the latter, life’s little gambles made without any thought, might certainly be trivial. “Should I tie my shoes?” Seems to offer no big risk, nor any big reward. While others, such as the aforementioned – speeding and wildly careening bus – would seem to have greater impact on our lives. However, if deciding not to tie your shoes that morning causes you to trip and fall down in the middle of the road when you finally decide to fold your hand and give that careening bus plenty of leeway, well then, in hindsight the trivial has suddenly become paramount.”
More.
Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman Explains Intuition
A reminder that never goes out of style:
The lone word “VOMIT” appeared on the screen as Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman described how audience members would involuntarily react to the stimulus, including raised hairs on the back of the neck, increased sweat gland activity, and heightened sensitivity to other unsettling words.
Kahneman, who is a professor emeritus at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, specializes in the psychological underpinnings of economic decision-making.
The exercise in priming was part of Kahneman’s talk on judgment and intuition yesterday in Yenching Auditorium.
Despite being a psychologist—and never having studied economics—Kahneman received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work’s impact on the field. Tuesday’s presentation was the first of three talks to be given by Kahneman this week as part of the Mind/Brain/Behavior Interfaculty Initiative’s 2008 Distinguished Lecture Series.
Kahneman opened the evening by presenting a series of examples of persistent flaws in intuition. In his “Linda” scenario, for example, Kahneman revealed the tendency for people to misjudge probabilities.
Respondents frequently estimate that the likelihood of a woman named Linda being both a bank teller and active in the feminist movement was greater than the probability of her just being a bankteller, simply because of the way Linda is described. But base-rate probabilities make it impossible for this to be true.
In a later slide, Kahneman displayed two identical multiplication problems on the screen in reverse order and showed that a person’s estimate of the answer depends on whether the numbers are arranged in ascending or descending order, with higher estimates predicted when larger numbers come first.
Kahneman explained that much of the success of his work has come from its narrow focus. “We did not try to make a general model of what we found because much of its meaning would have been lost,” he said.
Although the work may be narrow in its focus, it has proved widely applicable, he said, especially in the fields of social psychology and economics.
“We did not anticipate a response to our work and certainly did not expect to be talking about it 35 years later,” Kahneman said, in reference to his work on rapid judgments based on available and salient information, which he began in 1969.
Economics professor David I. Laibson ’88 provided post-lecture commentary, describing the major impact of Kahneman and other psychologists on the field of economics. To prove his point, Laibson presented a 2006 issue of The Economist with a cover story on “Happiness” and a 10-page report about the brain.
“We’re losing on every dimension,” Laibson joked, referring to psychology’s gaining influence on economics. In a more serious tone, Laibson described Kahneman as unique even among other Nobel Laureates in the field of economics.
Instead of exporting ideas from economics to other fields like many of his fellow laureates, he exported ideas into economics, Laibson said.
Psychological concepts that Kahneman has applied to economics include prospect theory, heuristics and biases, hedonics, and the two-system theory of intuition and reasoning.
After the presentation, Laibson described Kahneman as “among the handful of most influential economic contributors in the 20th century.”
For the two remaining lectures, Kahneman will speak on decision-making and rationality this evening and on evolving notions of well-being tomorrow.
More on Daniel Kahneman.
How can you move forward immediately to Trend Following profits? My books and my Flagship Course and Systems are trusted options by clients in 70+ countries.
Also jump in:
• Trend Following Podcast Guests
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Performance
• Research
• Markets to Trade
• Crisis Times
• Trading Technology
• About Us
Trend Following is for beginners, students and pros in all countries. This is not day trading 5-minute bars, prediction or analyzing fundamentals–it’s Trend Following.