Daily Speculations The Web Site of Victor Niederhoffer & Laurel Kenner Dedicated to the scientific method, free markets, deflating ballyhoo, creating value, and laughter;  a forum for us to use our meager abilities to make the world of specinvestments a better place.

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Department of Connections

The study of interrelations between markets, and between trading and other fields, may lead to fruitful inquiries. Our efforts along these lines are memorialized in "Education of a Speculator" (Niederhoffer, 1997) and "Practical Speculation" (Niederhoffer and Kenner, 2003). We continue to explore such interrelations in our own work and with members of the Old Speculators' Association, and are pleased to present:

A Bunch of Stuff, by Bonnie Lo

• When faced with odds where a guy outweighs me and is most likely stronger, the first and safest thing I know to do is run. Failing that, if grabbed, go for most force to get away, whatever, use keys etc then run. I wish I ran away earlier this year when market bore down on me.
• The lone dog, husky, I saw in January during a snowfall, in a field, solitary as the snow fell and the loneliness yet seeking for the right direction.
• Casson's "Fog Rising" - a print copy of the painting I walk by so often with the grey-blue fog lifting off and revealing the red and green hills (or valleys?) beneath.
• "Poison Dragon," the translation of the more direct "letting the fire out and the monster in" when one practicing martial arts tries to shortcut or overtrains and the body has no appetite, energy or will.
• My other half trying to explain his thesis to me and the different properties of super and subsonic air flows and the effect of changing the surface area of which such air goes through -- the different regimes.
• My trader fish ate the last shrimp, letting him get plump, molt the shell (self-peeling food...hmm) and I would not have noticed except that the pattern of the tail sticking out of my fish's mouth was too symmetrical for it to be anything else...the timing and the pattern left behind!
• I see the game of eye contact where a guy or girl looks at the opposite sex, then turns before the other looks back but the uncertainty of do we know that when we are checking the other out if they turn back? Just as we try to catch the market's eye and turn away before she looks but then we look and then she turns away and on the game goes each time we transact.
• And finally when it's just not good (too often, I'm afraid) I act like her, the market lady, like to wander here and there aimlessly looking at the bright and new things, then change my mind and think of getting food and then I meander around store windows and decide to stare a little while at pretty gold and silver things, go down a floor, explore sideways, go down some more and look at things there before I finally find a direction and go back to work up a level.

That pretty much sums up what I've been thinking/doing the last two-three months when not working, studying or finding data.