I was watching survivor last night with my mom and my mind was blown when the person who got kicked out said this:
I was very confident that whether we won or lost [the challenge] things would work out for me. I really don’t know what happened that made my tribe want to vote me out tonight. I don’t think the numbers lied to me, it’s the people that lied to me and when you count fictitious promises you get a fictitious total.
She was saying that she got kicked out because of the people, not the “numbers”, but the people are the numbers. They are who vote. Just like saying you don’t lose money because of what the market does, you lose money because of what other people do to make the market go up and down. Just trying to blame your loses on the “people” rather than “the numbers.” It’s all the same thing. The game is made up of people who make up the numbers.
You know, if we’re going to argue about the 1990’s instead of talking about the future, which I’d much prefer because I think every election is about the future, and you all deserve to know what we will do to help you have a brighter future — but, if we are going to talk about the 1990’s I think it’s only fair to say that at the end of the 1990’s, after two terms of my husband’s presidency, the unemployment rate in Michigan was 4.4 percent.
The 1990s were the biggest stock market bubble in USA history. And now 16 years later, via slight of hand and a fantasy timeline, shes brag about the then great economy that magically only concluded at the tail end of her husband’s Presidency.
Bottom line, politicians are never the path to wealth and their words never tell anywhere close to a full story. Here are the 1990s in Nasdaq chart form:
Please enjoy my monologue The Mob Rules with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio. This episode may also include great outside guests from my archive.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio:
Bombay cotton market 1865
Bubbles and mania
Profiting from the speculation
Having a plan in place
“All speculative follies go down the same path. The players involved look the same. They act the same. They talk to same. The only thing that is different are the names. It’s always a new technology. It’s always an innovation.” – Michael Covel
You might not be willing to devote the time and energy to understand how electricity actually works, or the mechanisms of your democracy, or the insights behind irrational decision making. More likely, you don’t want to expend the emotional labor to push through feeling dumb as you dig deep on your way to getting smart.
That’s always been an option. You can just use the tool without understanding it, copy the leader without realizing where she’s going, follow instructions without questioning them.
You can choose to be a cog in a machine you don’t understand.
If that’s working for you, no need to change it.
It made me ponder: trust the Fed, trust buy and hold, etc. If it’s working for you, no need to change it.
My guest today is Jim Rogers, an American investor and financial commentator based in Singapore. Rogers is the chairman of Beeland Interests, Inc. He was the co-founder of the Quantum Fund and Soros Fund Management. He was also the creator of the Rogers International Commodities Index (RICI). Rogers does not consider himself a member of any school of economic thought, but has acknowledged that his views best fit the label of the Austrian School of economics.
The topic is central banking system.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:
Negative interest rates
Central banking systems
Market crashes
The impact of unintended consequences
Preparing for the future
“For the last 30 years look at who we have had down there [as the head of the Federal Reserve]. They have all been academic and political hacks.” – Jim Rogers
…this is exactly how chess players improve most effectively…by studying the games of grandmasters, trying to reproduce them move by move, and, when they choose a move that is different from what the grandmaster chose, studying the position again to see what they missed. [Ben] Franklin [known chess fan) could not apply the same technique to chess because he had no easy access to the games of masters. Almost all of them were in Europe, and at the time there were no books with their collected games for him to study. If he had had some way to study the masters’ games, he might well have become one of the best chess players of his generation (Source: Peak).
Great thought. Exactly why I put pro trend following performance in my books. His wisdom is also the background foundation of turtle trend following success.
Barry Ritholtz pushed along the notion that Ted Williams was the first quant.
But what is so great about being a quant?
The edge.
Having an edge is what a game of numbers is all about.
Consider the controversy with Stephen Curry. The older retired players don’t see the quant aspect of his play:
Stephen Curry is not, in fact, unguardable. The plays he makes can be stopped or contained if a defense dedicates itself fully to those particular ends, much in the same way that any action on a basketball court can be. The distinction lies in the cost. Curry operates in a fashion that makes the necessary means of defending him counterproductive to the very enterprise—a spatial frustration that makes the reigning MVP, for all practical purposes, impossible.
This was apparently lost on NBA great Oscar Robertson, whose context-deaf response seemed to ignore the fact that Curry poses a greater threat farther from the hoop than any player in basketball history. So fearless is Curry and so trusting is Warriors coach Steve Kerr that shots well beyond the arc have become standard. Curry will pull up giddily from 30+ feet if left to his own devices. NBA defenders are learning how lonely that depth can be, and how hopeless the effort to deny Curry has become.
Concluding:
The openings he finds aren’t due to some lack of ingenuity in scheme or lack of pride on the part of the defenders. Curry merely has a way of creating quandaries without the slightest hope of a satisfying conclusion. There comes a point at which players and coaches would rather lose to a 28-foot pull-up than a compromised interior. It’s then that the best player in basketball has his opponents right where he wants them—conceding, hopeless, and in their own way, defeated.
He has found a new edge…and he is exploiting it. He is riding that trend.
What is the worst action opponents can take? To live in denial of the Curry trend!
A great example of denial can be seen when Nokia CEO ended his speech saying “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost.” Consider:
During the press conference to announce NOKIA being acquired by Microsoft, Nokia CEO ended his speech saying this “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”. Upon saying that, all his management team, himself included, teared sadly. Nokia has been a respectable company. They didn’t do anything wrong in their business, however, the world changed too fast. Their opponents were too powerful. They missed out on learning, they missed out on changing, and thus they lost the opportunity at hand to make it big. Not only did they miss the opportunity to earn big money, they lost their chance of survival. The message of this story is, if you don’t change, you shall be removed from the competition. It’s not wrong if you don’t want to learn new things. However, if your thoughts and mindset cannot catch up with time, you will be eliminated.
Conclusion: The advantage you have yesterday, will be replaced by the trends of tomorrow. You don’t have to do anything wrong, as long as your competitors catch the wave and do it RIGHT, you can lose out and fail. To change and improve yourself is giving yourself a second chance. To be forced by others to change, is like being discarded. Those who refuse to learn & improve, will definitely one day become redundant & not relevant to the industry. They will learn the lesson in a hard & expensive way.
The dots connect and connect and connect. And plenty will never see that connection, but perhaps they just don’t want to see.
