A can't loose bet in an email

A year or so agao I got an email from a "financial advisor".  This one was in English and not marked from Nigeria so I opened it and read it.  Fascinating proposition.  The author pitched me thus:

"I'm going to send you an email a month with a market prediction for the next month - up or down. I'm willing to bet you that I can get this right for 6 straight months and as proof of my ability I'll give you a half a year's worth of predictions.  If I am ever wrong you  get a course in financial planning for free. If I am right 6times in a row you agree to buy my course for $xx" .

I've seen other propositions like this and really had to think it through...I mean how could anyone pick 6 things in a row and then it came to me...its the law of large numbers at work. No one responds to these things anyway and I didn't but in my email each month like clockwork I got the prognostication sure enough I got 6 for 6.

Here is how he did it.   He started with a purchased email list of 50,000 (about a $300 investment).  The first letter out he sent to 25,000 with an "market up" forecast and 25,000 with a market down.  He got 25,000 wrong and didn't send to them again.  The next month he split the 25,000 into an "up 12,500 and down 12,500". The third month he split the 12500 again and so on.

I got this amazing tally of 6 straight months of him being right as did about 80 people. Probably enough were impressed to buy his offering. 

Numbers are interesting.

How can there be such a diversity of opinion on the economy?

I heard a joke on CNBC this morning about a guy jumping out of a window and as he is falling down 50 floors, he passes a window and a guy shouts out "hey...wow how's it going?" to which the fallee replies "good so far". 

Around this little joke is a one guy who says that the sky is falling and things are going to get bad once more and another who is convinced the dark clouds are behing and we are bouncing up all over.  I wonder how this can be...how two market/economy figures can look at the same data and concluded 180 degrees from each other.

This kind of thing drives laymen like me crazy.  Its like investment broker types when the market goes south for a week saying its a good time to buy and when it is surging north its also a good time...so there is never a bad time?  How about saying its a good time to sell once in a while...although buy v. sell recommendations are about 8:1.   It must have been a good time to sell when the market was 14000 and everyone on the street knew there was trouble on the horizon.

I can't figure it out.

Letters from Nigeria

NPR ran a short segment on those famous Email Letters from Nigeria commonly called Cash Upfront letters that spring up in our email boxes ever so often.  I've gotten more than my share and when I do I usually respond with a suggestion of where the author "can put it" but was advised this morning on NPR just simply to delete the emails.  Don't be smart and respond as your email addresss simply gets sold to others and then the real spam starts (I'm talking 100 spams a day.

Also, in case you are wondering why Nigeria doesn't do anything about this cottage industry.....well it brings millions of US dollars into the economy there so why interrupt a good thing.

Oh my.

Sneaky Pete advertising....credit cards

I read the NYTimes editorial on credit cards this morning early just about the time I saw a new 'let us help solve your debt problems' on TV. 

The TV commercial isn't up on You Tube or I would link it.  But the core of the commercial wasn't one of those "we will negotiate you debt" but the thrust was advice to pay off those nasty credit cards and it reminded the audience that bankruptcy offers little protection....so it came to my brain that this could actually be a commercial sponsored by Visa and Mastercard.

Our household got rid of all its plastic 3 years ago and to tell you the truth our lifestyle doesn't need them.  We got into a thing with Providian Bank as they "adjusted" the due date causing us to be late 3 days although the check was mailed on time. Once 'late' our interest went from 5.9% to 28%, our credit limit dropped 3 grand and then as we carried a fairly good balance we were "over limit" so I said nuts, paid them, and melted the card.

The regulatory bill was given 15 months warning so they are trying everything under the sun to poke up the collection including I am fairly sure, fake TV commercials urging the consumer to pay off those nasty credit card people FIRST.

Do these companies really think we are that dumb?

Half a million of this and that

We are getting a bit freaky in our reactions to the horde of money in bonuses on the horizon on wall street.  With unemployment new claims bouncing north of half a million now for months the average Goldman bonus (also half a million but $s not potentially lost homes) looks amazingly out of place.

Part of me says hey free market and part of me says that particulary market cost us trillions in gifts and protections so it long past being free by any stretch of the word. 

The only part of it I really dislike intensely is the argument about "talent drain if we don't pay them enough". May I point out that nearly every company outside of Wall Street and the Financials has lost, by payroll reduction or termination, a "key employee" - someone they can point to the future with - so what makes these guys any different.  You loose, you loose. Although tell me where a broker at the low end of a Goldman bonus - say a million bucks - is gonna go find another job that pays as well.

My guess is that few are willing to leave a job with benis so you can kiss that argument goodby.

Was Shakespeare a trader?

No I didn't write this but you should read it:

Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
For then my thoughts--from far where I abide--
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
Intend a zealous pilgrimage to thee,
And keep my drooping eyelids open wide,
Looking on darkness which the blind do see:
Save that my soul's imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head
To work my mind, when body's
Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous, and her old face new.
Lo! thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind,
For thee, and for myself, no quiet find.
 
I think that things that are constants are very reassuring.  That when involved with mental work we do that all day and then lay awake at night thinking about what we have already done and what we will do tomorrow.  Traders seem to be like that.  When the market is open they are on high alert and instead of walking away, most seem to think and plan.  Just my impression.  By day my limbs, by night my mind, for you and me there is no solitude.

Some Monday Morning Odds and Ends

After a Sunday shut in during awful storms on Long Island (two days worth actually), I was hammered constantly by sportscasters over and mis-use of the word legendary.  This a sore spot and pet peeve.

A legend is a story or collection of stories and according to the dictionary (not Wiki) but a real dictionary, "a nonhistorical or unverifiable story handed down by tradition from earlier times and popularly ( accepted as historical."  Simply urban fiction becomes tomorrow's fact.  A legend is just that....a story.  A lengendary running back is a much storied running back whose  story may not have much real fact in it.

In this day of blogging and 24 hour news, emails and  text messages we play a constant variation of the game of telephone, creating legends right and left.  Some are purposeful and others are just whole cloth.  Trouble is that truth is in short supply and usually so obscured by legend and spin that one can't find the the pony in the proverbial pile (but it must be in there somewhere).

What does this have to do with trading? A lot.  How to find the pearl in the oyster is a never ending challenge and actually the best traders are usually the best research scholars.  They are satisfied when they can sort out fact from legend.

I come away with one over riding observation as an historian.  The amount of fact that is around us is small but constant.  The amount of legend that clouds our field of view has never been greater.  The work needed to find fact from legend is in ration to fact:legend.