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Geometry of Turbulence
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,…
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Wish, intution and counter-intuition
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…
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Bad is stronger than good
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…
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Navigating through another lost decade?
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.
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The Benner Dow
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…
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Tragedy of Commons
Elinor Ostrom died recently. Her work on the tragedy of the commons earned her the Nobel Prize. The tragedy of the commons is a term coined by scientist Garrett Hardin in 1968, describing what can happen in groups when individuals act in their own best self-interests and ignore what’s best for the whole group. A…
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The doomed outlier
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…
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The Rational Exuberance
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.
