Oct

27

really a sign for things to go other direction sometimes. eg, the moment Tchernobyl engineering team got awarded prize - 1 year before the disaster. your typical trader eventually buying his dream house or so and bragging about it to friends etc etc. maybe USD bulls brag now? or 30yr bond bears?

bragging is far more subtle than one imagines. most academics brag (via the number of articles they write), even in social groups they do (look how clever I am since I can do this or that or have this insight.)

sly traders don't brag as they prob have been alone in the trenches so many times, WW1 like trenches…its is cold there and dark and lonely :) so they kind of know.

Steve Ellison suggests:

There was a whole chapter about hubris, including statistics on underperformance of shares in companies that bought stadium naming rights, in Practical Speculation.

Stefan Jovanovich corrects the history:

The comparison of sly traders' adventures with WW 1 trenches has its own touch of hubris; it is also bad military history. The trenches were not "dark"; by 1915 both sides on the Western front had them electrified. They were not "lonely". That was the cause of the greatest slaughter.

Based on their experience in colonial wars, the general staffs assumed that packing men into dense line formations was the solution to holding ground. (Holding and retaking ground were the primary tactical objective for the Allies because they had already surrenders to much territory in Belgium and France. As much as the movies, then and now, want to picture the slaughter as a matter of men running upright across open ground and being mowed down by machine guns, that was the smaller part of the killing. 3 out of every 4 deaths and wounds on Western front were caused by artillery barrages against trench lines and rear assembly areas where troops were massed to rotate up to and back from the forward trenches.


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