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Category Archives: Tools of the Trade

The Introspective Speculator: Vicious Cycle

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Lord knows I’ve been stuck in this vortex many a time.
Related reading:
Sleeping and Trading –Daily Speculations
Briefly Speaking, from Victor Niederhoffer –Daily Speculations
There are many speculators who have an inclination to trade during night hours. Such behavior exposes one to the possibility of premature death, according to a study of Penev et al "chronic circadian [...]

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The Introspective Speculator

Friday, May 30, 2008

How Fairness Is Wired In The Brain -ScienceDaily.com
Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology have discovered that reason struggles with emotion to find equitable solutions, and have pinpointed the region of the brain where this takes place. The concept of fairness, they found, is processed in the insular cortex, or insula, which is [...]

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Truth Trader: Market Psychology

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Talks Joshua Klein: The amazing intelligence of crows
Even crows succumb to ever-changing-cycles. Besides being a fascinating display of the crow’s intelligence, notice how once one learns a new trick, they all learn the trick, in some cases ruining a good thing for the inventor.
Gin, Sitcoms and the Cognitive Surplus
The classic example of cognitive surplus [...]

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Gambler’s Fallacy

Friday, May 16, 2008

Wikipedia
The gambler’s fallacy, also known as the Monte Carlo fallacy or the fallacy of the maturity of chances, is the false belief that the probability of an event in a random sequence is dependent on preceding events, its probability increasing with each successive occasion on which it fails to occur. If a fair coin is [...]

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Triumphs

Friday, May 16, 2008

There’s Triumph of the Optimists, a great book on the markets:

 
Triumph motorcycles kick ass:

 
Triumph the band rocks (rocked?), fight the good fight, yeahhhhh:

 
Now there’s Triumph of the Bullshit, a collection of oddities and, bullshit:
A few of my favorites

Dunning-Kruger effect The phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge think that they know more [...]

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Random Trading Thoughts

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Why are trading gurus always telling us to pore over our trading tickets and analyze our trading mistakes? Bullshit! Seriously, you should have a plan and a tested hypothesis before you ever make a trade. If you gotta look back at your trades to figure out what you did wrong, the thing you did wrong [...]

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Black swans spotted on the flyover

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

I happened on an article about black swans, as Nassim Taleb had recently been speaking at a CFA (Chartered Financial Androids) function and a reporter for the Financial Times was in attendance, blogging, not reporting, because as we all know the two are very different. I wondered with all the talk of recession, and [...]

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Early computer used to predict economy

Thursday, May 8, 2008

The computer model that once explained the British economy

A sensation when it was unveiled at the London School of Economics in 1949, the Phillips machine used hydraulics to model the workings of the British economy but now looks, at first glance, like the brainchild of a nutty professor.

Speaking of early computers I just happened [...]

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Will it work on day traders?

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Mad Science: A Chinese Cure for Internet Addiction

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Market Science, Psychology, and Psychosis

Monday, May 5, 2008

Learning from our mistakes? Flies can do it. Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better
It takes just 15 generations under these conditions for the flies to become genetically programmed to learn better. At the beginning of the experiment, the flies take many hours to learn the difference between the normal and quinine-spiked [...]

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But will they go with my Armani?

Monday, May 5, 2008

Authentic Baseball Stadium Seat Cufflinks

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What every self-respecting trader needs…

Friday, May 2, 2008

The well-appointed trader knows that one must have the right tools to keep them bears a dancin’.
For the Starbucks in Hong Kong, the new HP Mini-Note:

For the trading room, or the corner of your bedroom, whichever the case may be:

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