Trying and trying again.

So what about Facebook? Like Blackstone, a great company and a leader in its field. Also a beneficiary of scarcity value given that there isn’t a public company quite like it that represents an opportunity for institutional or retail investors. And while its principals might not be the market-driven sharks like those running Blackstone, their investors firmly fall into this category. And while its business is indisputably powerful, the multiples being applied to its revenues and cash flows stress the imagination. Might it grow into its IPO price? Certainly. Are there significant risks to achieving this? Absolutely.

Writing appears more forgiving because there is no compiler or interpreter catching your its and it’s issues or reminding you of the rules regarding that or which. Here’s the rub: there is a compiler and it’s fucking brutal. It’s your readers. Your readers are far more critical than the Python interpreter. Not only do they care about syntax, but they also want to learn something, and, perhaps, be entertained while all this learning is going down. Success means they keep coming back - failure is a lonely silence. Python is looking pretty sweet now, right?

Manually RT-ing praise to “reply” to a follower/fan is the single most masturbatory way to receive a compliment. You think it makes you look receptive, modest, and kind, but it actually makes you look like a self-obsessed lunatic. It is the sort of thing Genghis Khan would have done, if he had survived into the Twitter ages.

A guy called Ray Kurzweil said a kid in Africa with a smartphone has access to more knowledge than the president of the United States 20 years ago. His words resonated with me because that’s absolutely true. Google is the most important teacher in my life. You can learn about anything. Free. And you get amazing results. You get 16-year old programmers. You get musicians without ever taking a lesson. You get innovators. This kind of power didn’t exist a decade ago.

The aspiration of this blog is not cure the world of cognitive biases. Rather, by trying to put global macro issues and markets in a more behavioral context, the hope would be that we might be able to better recognize situations in which our biases are likely to surface so that we—whether as analyst or risk taker—can make that extra effort to try to avoid the systematic pitfalls inherent in the human condition. Not everything will have a behavioral angle to it either; I intend to splash down ideas wherever I think my background might lend itself to insight into current economics, finance, or politics.