Archive
Category: Black Swan Thinking
- May 27, 2012The Median Isn’t the Message by Stephen Jay Gould
A nice reminder from a great thinker: If a little learning could ever be a dangerous thing, I had encountered a classic example. Attitude clearly matters in fighting cancer. We don’t know…
- March 25, 2012“Torturing the Data” Is the Siren Scream of a Coming Looter
Fred Munger once said: “If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything.” When you hear market cons talking of data mining, endless optimization, & torturing data, etc., check to…
- December 12, 2011“Play Calling Is About Probability, Not Certainty”
Take two traders who win 40 percent of the time with their winners being three times as large as their losers. One has a history of 1,000 trades and the other has…
- November 27, 2011Striking Out Is Part of Winning
I put this great quote in my bestseller Trend Following: “What is striking is that the leading thinkers across varied fields–including horse betting, casino gambling, and investing–all emphasize the same point. We…
- October 25, 2011Understanding Your Relationship to Risk: Rolling the Dice and Loss Aversion
Stephen Horan writes: Everywhere we turn, psychological tests are available to help us better understand ourselves and our own behavior. But often these tests fail to shed light on a person’s relationship…
- January 27, 2011Trigger Your Thinking: Jim Simons
An excerpt from: The Secret World of Jim Simons by Hal Lux: Like all quantitative money managers, Renaissance aims to find small market anomalies and inefficiencies that can support profitable trading on…
- January 18, 2011Sports Betting: Billy Walters the Trend Follower
Insights on Billy Walters: As a society we have been conditioned to believe that there is a difference between gambling and investing. Of course, this partially true, however, the degree to which…