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The title of this article is not an assumption that you,
astute reader, are little more than a robot following the direct and implied
commands of other robots when trying to make logical sense of the state of
modern financial markets. Personally, I have found that I need to stay
on a path of post-deprogramming maintenance in order to stay right with a
complex market backdrop.
On an inward-looking basis, we as investors and traders
are faulty humans going up against robots (Ref. Rise of the Quantitative Robots) that are much smarter than we are with numbers, with data mining
and with extrapolation. What do we have, puny little human brains with
all associated biases, ego distortions and other faults? Yes, that is
us.
We can mitigate these things by committing to double
check our egos, first and foremost making sure we realize that we will err,
we are not the best there is and the market does not care even one little bit
about us. We can commit to being the best 'me' we can be.
This leads me to a more outward-looking issue that I have
noted with much gall over my nearly 16 years in this public realm. I
often make fun of the clown show that is our main
policy-making body, but I reserve the real displeasure for the charlatans,
quacks and promoters who make a business out of manipulating other peoples'
viewpoints to the tune of financial gain.
Indeed, the idea for this post came into my head this
morning while I was accepting a LinkedIn connection invitation and was
treated to a menu of other people I might like to connect with. Up
popped a young lady who works in the marketing department of "XXXXX
Financial". XXXXX is a vast financial newsletter empire that
I am sure most of you have heard of, and I have seen scores of company
employees pop up in the past. I had two thoughts; 1) 'Why are there
multitudes of employees from this newsletter company on LinkedIn?' and
2) 'Why are so many of them in the marketing department?'
The answers are obvious, I agree. It takes a lot of
people power to constantly get in front of new marks,
err, prospective clients. This marketing muscle comes in the form of
those alarming bulk emails we all get teasing us to click a link and find out
how we can protect ourselves from the ultimate doom that the forces of evil
have in store for us and it comes in the form of legions of proof readers,
copy writers and editors finalizing the work of the analysts in
order to make it fit the mold of what sells most readily. I know this
because I saw a job ad on LinkedIn for an editorial opening from this company
with a job description that included fixing sometimes illegible grammar,
muddled analytical conclusions and forming the work into marketable, easy to
understand formats.
The stuff noted above is real cartoon stuff. I
don't think many readers of nftrh.com, biiwii.com (it's back by the way) or most sites you may read my work on take
such dullard but effective marketing techniques seriously. But a wise
individual will double check not only herself, but also anyone who would
profess to be worthy of disseminating financial advice or other
information. That includes old friend Biiwii/NFTRH because I myself
have put a premium on trying to get myself clear of my biases over the
years. It is an evolving thing, you don't just change who you
are. You take your best, most skilled and most honest attributes and
don't be shy about them, and you (sometimes very publicly) admit your
failings, wrong-headed assumptions and flat out weaknesses.
I first came into public financial market writing because early last
decade I was near-traumatized by someone who had worked on Wall Street, had
doom and gloom to burn and held views so extreme it altered my perception of
reality. In short, it felt like I was in the grips of a cult so I got
out of there. This individual demanded I buy gold, eliminate debt and
prepare for very hard times because the system's gonna blow!
Well, it's 12 years later and that would have been an inconveniently long
time to be in a bunker. I am thankful that even then I took some good
advice but also filtered out what I did not need. I started biiwii.com (but it is what it is) in 2004 as a
way of stating 'reality over bias' and while at first I thought that
would be in reference to negative financial realities (they were and still
are, in my view) a big part of it ended up being the reality that the world
was not ending, the stock market was bulling and an even keeled attitude was
needed.
To this day I am sure I bore some NFTRH subscribers by going on about
patience, perspective and emotional balance. But these are the things
I've learned and any of us, if we are being honest, are only the sum of what
we have learned. The markets are a patience play, for we non day
traders at least. The opportunities will come but they appear only
after careful analysis has brought us intact to a point where that
opportunity can be realized.
Too much public analysis either sounds alarm bells, tugs at emotional
greed or worst of all, goes all robotic in plying its trade within a certain
set of assumptions that should have been acknowledged as wrong long before
(ref. gold bug denial at the behest of sloganeering, propaganda and even confidence,
well into the bear market).
Hi, my name is Gary and I have been wrong before; publicly so.
"Hi Gary, get over it and move forward trying to learn
from your mistakes and give a straight scoop even if you are not the most
interesting writer, don't offer the most tantalizing prospects and are
perhaps a little too conservative for this business that respects risk-taking
heroes."
Okay, thanks guys. That is who I'll be.
This gives some background about why I may sometimes come off like a. dick,
as we say in Boston. I literally want to throw up in my mouth every
time I see material billed as financial analysis pulling at peoples'
emotions, like greed and fear. You know, the two oldest and least
manageable human faults in play where financial markets are concerned.
I also get disturbed when analysis comes off like it's got all the answers
and that readers should be professed to.
All I can tell you at the end of this thought exercise is that each of us,
you me and the guy down the street, need to deprogram and reset on occasion
because the macro market backdrop like the world itself, is in constant
motion and subject to change. The 'quants' in the 'Robots' article
linked above have code that can change with events. You and me?
All we've got is bullshit detectors, analytical tools of our choice and a
hopefully honest orientation.
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