Category Archives: Psychology

Liberty, Policy, Psychology, Tyranny, War and peace

The balloon hysteria is about war preparations

A MAJOR war escalation may be imminent.

For the past ten days, the American media has been almost saturated with nonstop news coverage about the mysterious balloons and unidentified flying objects crossing into U.S. airspace. The intensity of coverage escalated during the last five days with leading politicians, commentators, military analysts and media figures pitching in to stoke the alarm.

A distraction or something more than that?

It all reeks of a psyop intended either as a distraction, another case of mass-formation psychosis in the making, or both. If it’s a distraction, the powers-that-be would clearly like to divert our attention away from a whole range of embarrassing developments:

  • The empire’s imminent defeat in Ukraine,
  • Revelation that the Biden Administration orchestrated the Nord Stream pipelines terror attack,
  • The environmental disasters unfolding in Ohio and Texas (in both cases cargo train derailments),
  • Yet another pandemic emergency that’s in the works or,
  • Something entirely different that we are yet to find out about.

More likely however, the hysteria is being created to psychologically prepare the nation for war, this time a full on military engagement against China.

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Health, Mystery, Psychology

Alcohol and humanity’s evolution

Quick update – in the hours after I published this article I stumbled across these words from W. B. Yeats and which struck me as relevant:

“The World is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

Over the years and almost against my conscious will, my body has been rejecting alcohol. For someone who used to love wine, there is a regrettable side to this rejection. But there’s also a mystery about it, perhaps relevant to our collective evolution – a process that’s likely happening even as you read these lines.

The drunken excesses of youth

I started consuming alcoholic drinks when I was 14. At that time my friends and I began to socialize in bars and night clubs. There was no age related restrictions in former Yugoslavia so it was easy for us to get drunk as badly and as often as we wanted to.

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Children, Mystery, Psychology, Real life, Truth

Merica

This is a personal story, and it may seem a strange one to share given the difficult days we are living through. But I think it could not be more relevant. Here goes:

Years ago I read “The Hiram Key” by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas. Not a memorable book, but one thing I vaguely remembered about it was the authors’ alternative explanation for where the name “America” came from. Over the last few weeks, a very remarkable experience unfolded in relation to this question… Continue reading →

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Attaining mastery, Children, Mystery, Psychology

To attain mastery… a surprising discovery

Many years ago, quite by accident, I noticed something amazing about the human brain. Although I’ve read many books on psychology and how the brain works, I never came across anything that prepared me for what I encountered. I believe this discovery can help anyone greatly improve their skills at whichever pursuit they wish to master. I’ve followed my accidental discovery with a ‘home-cooked’ science experiment that beautifully confirmed the original finding. This insight could help parents, teachers and coaches in the way they cultivate young talent. It should also be an encouragement to such talent: whatever your skill level at this moment, you ain’t seen nothing yet – mastery may be fully within your grasp, even if you can’t quite fathom it at present. Here it goes… Continue reading →

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Psychology, Something completely different

The magical power of “I can’t.”

Words can be very powerful – especially the words we tell ourselves.  I recently made a startling discovery about this.

One of the things I told myself through life was that I couldn’t draw. I can doodle – make geometric shapes on paper, circles, squares, etc… But I couldn’t draw – this I knew about myself.

One day however, I was unable to tell myself this.

That day my son asked me to draw him something. Hmm… I’m his dad. I can’t tell him that his dad can’t draw. I’m supposed to be the strongest, smartest, most capable man in the world. Tellinig him that I couldn’t draw was out of the question. Continue reading →

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Policy, Politics, Psychology, Real life, Social development, Truth

Freedom of speech should be sacred

“There is no god higher than truth.” – Mohandas Gandhi

Update: just hours after I posted this article, Amazon.com sadly de-listed my book, “The Killing of William Browder.” (I assure you, there was no trace of hate speech in my book)

Across the Western world, government bureaucracies and large media corporations like Amazon, Google, Twitter and Facebook have been increasingly proactive in suppressing “hate speech,” always with bestest of intentions. However, these efforts are unnecessary and will likely prove counterproductive.

Warning about the danger of “disastrous rise of misplaced power” in our societies, Dwight Eisenhower said in his January 1961 farewell address that, “Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry” can curb the power of the state, “so that security and liberty may prosper together.” Freedom of expression is the essential means of keeping the citizenry alert and knowledgeable. As such it should not be suppressed under any pretext, but encouraged and cultivated. Continue reading →

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Psychology, Real life, Social development, Something completely different, Truth

Regarding the virtue of “hard work”

In the Western world, the idea of “working hard” is usually treated as a virtue in its own right. Any time I thought to question this “virtue” I’d invariably find myself on the defensive, as though my questioning of hard work was an affirmation of its opposite, laziness.

Whatever worthy objectives you want to achieve in life, the chances are, you have to work hard to attain them. Many objectives justify such hard work, like wanting to set the world record in some athletic discipline or to become a virtuoso musician or dancer. The same could be said about wanting to write a book, circumnavigate the globe, or any number of such feats. But people inclined to such endeavors do not need to be taught the value of hard work, so its cultural affirmation as a virtue would be superfluous and silly. Continue reading →

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Asset management, Behavioral finance, Commodity price, Commodity risk, Market psychology, Market trends, Psychology, Risk management, Trading, Trend following

Lessons in asset valuation: the great warrants bubble of China

Investors exert a great deal of intellectual effort to determine the correct valuation of securities. Economic value is central to our decision making and it plays a major role in our intuitive psyche. In daily life, when we buy a loaf of bread or a tank of gasoline, we tend to have a good idea about what we think is cheap and what’s expensive. We like bargains, don’t enjoy being ripped off, and in the same way we’re inclined to shop for value as consumers, we find value investing intuitively appealing. But here’s the critical difference between buying goods and investing: shopping for investments is speculative while buying stuff isn’t, and speculation activates the part of our mental circuitry that can heat up to a boiling point and overwhelm any rational consideration of value. Continue reading →

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Asset management, Behavioral finance, Bitcoin, Commodity price, Market psychology, Market trends, Psychology, Risk management, Trading, Trend following

Of Bitcoins and bubbles

In my book, “Mastering Uncertainty in Commodities Trading” I argued that security prices “are driven by human psychology and its self-stoking collective action that can sustain major trends spanning many years.” That’s because in speculative decision making, our views about the actions of others can entirely override our rational appraisal of the underlying asset value.

The most recent example of this is the price of Bitcoin that has surged from below $400 in January last year to $4,300 this week. When we set up the Altana Digital Currency Fund several years ago, many people thought that digital currencies were just a strange fad and investors continued to show little interest in them – until very recently. Continue reading →

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Asset management, Behavioral finance, Commodity risk, Complexity, Hedging, Market psychology, Market research, Market trends, Psychology, Risk management, Something completely different, Trading, Trend following, Uncategorized

Speculation in the natural world

Nature has … some sort of arithmetical-geometrical coordinate system, because nature has all kinds of models. What we experience of nature is in models, and all of nature’s models are so beautiful. – R. Buckminster Fuller

Nature’s survival strategies that bear the most similarities to activities of market speculators are those of predators. To live, predators must hunt and this activity includes elements of speculation. Like trading, predation requires knowledge, skills, judgment and decision-making. It also entails risk and uncertainty. A predator can’t be sure where her next meal is coming from. Each hunt is an investment of resources; it involves the risk of injury and loss of energy expended in failed hunts, which tend to be more frequent than successful ones. To survive and procreate, predators must consistently generate a positive return on this investment. Too much of a losing streak could turn out to be fatal. In his book, “The Serengeti Lion: A Study of Predator-Prey Relations” George B. Schaller painstakingly documented the details of hundreds of hunts by large cats in the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. We have all seen wildlife television programs showing lions and cheetahs hunting, but Schaller’s work offers a much richer account of the life of predatory cats including their hunting behavior.

The anatomy of a hunt Continue reading →

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