Jan

29

1. The key bellweather these days is the Dax.

2. The reason The Knicks won 3 in a row was that they got rid of Smith. He was the rotten egg that ruined the barrel. After losing 16 in a row they won 3 in a row. The market went down 5 in a row then up 4 in a row. The market learns from sports team.

3. Every situation in baseball and basketball including whether a fielder should have made a put out is captured on video and quantified these days. The book Mathletics by Wayne Winston uses regression analysis to find the value of each player and each play in the major American games. A better technique would be montecarlo simulation. Often Winston makes the part whole fallacy of fitting many variables to an outcome and then reporting an improvement from a naïve strategy. The pythagorean theorem gives good results in baseball, and basketball, and it could do the same in market. Use the ration amount gained in rises /divided by amount lost on losses to predict the % of wins. But there is the part whole fallacy in it. Naturally given the distribution of gains and losses, if you know how many points gained and losses there were, it's going to give you a great estimate by simulation of the games won, that will do much better than the squares of James et al.

4. I've given up on dealing with the big low priced broker as they now add a risk fee to the regular commissions, but it seems like a great stock to buy, as they leave no contingency unopened in order to make a profit at the expense of their clientele. Good bye to any thought of option trading also as I recently had a position with $1,000 of premium with a few days to expiration where the required margin was close to 1 big. The thought too smart by half comes to mind.

5. The main reason that stocks go up more than bonds and the explanation for the dimsonian 70,000 fold a century multiple you make is the power of compounding on a base of the return of capital. It has nothing to do with dividends. However, the differential between earnings price ratio and 10 year rates continues to rise, and that is extraordinarily bullish for stocks for much the same reason as above.

6. Reading Roman history, one sees the wisdom of Nock's idea that the only thing worth studying in history is the Roman and Greek history because everything happened there that will happen again. The prelude to the Crusades is particularly relevant today.

7. The Nasdaq refused to go down with every other equity down on Friday.

8. Gold is now playing footsie with the round of 1300 the same way it did with 1200 last year. But of course everyone was bearish last year so it went up a fast 100 bucks in 2015 proving the old adage that the things that go down the most in 1 year go up the most the next year. However, I stopped trading gold except in small quantities because one can only predict a day or so, and you can't get in or out of a position with poise when your numbers tell you to do so.

9. The Asian markets amazingly go down even more on each meaningless survey than the US or European markets. Of what significance is it that the growth rate in China forecast is lower by 0.1 % from time to time from 7.6% to 7.5 %.

10. One should never forget that once the Fed changes a qualitative rate, the average run in the same direction is 10 or 12 further changes, i.e. a run of 10 in the same direction.

11. I can never read a text on chemistry or physics without getting a million ideas as to how their foundations and findings and experiments provide vast insights into our field.

12. How much does supply have to go down in the oil industry for oil to start moving up again.

Anatoly Veltman writes: 

On 10. The upcoming FED rate hikes: yes, historically, it has been observed that once official hikes or cuts got rolling, they wouldn't stop for that many counts to come. And of course, it is VERY advisable to position yourself in advance for another re-run of the scenario. Curiously, that's exactly where the profit will be made: on an anticipatory position. Because once the first hike occurs, I'm not at all sure that history will play an infallible guide this time around. Why? Because what we've had in the current cycle with ZIRP was unprecedented, and thus this time may be different: after a hike or two and a market upheaval, the FED may reverse back to manipulation.


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