The Illusion Of Skill

Because our impressions of how well each soldier performed were generally coherent and clear, our formal predictions were just as definite. We rarely experienced doubt or conflicting impressions. We were quite willing to declare: “This one will never make it,” “That fellow is rather mediocre, but should do O.K.” or “He will be a star.”…

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Email Of The Month

Occasionally at blog central we get an email that requires us not to wait till the end of the month before awarding our email of the month. Sometimes some fucknut is so far above the competition that we have to go off early as no doubt our winner this month has on many occasions. Louise…

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Positive Contagion

I am not certain of its application to trading but I am certain there is one somewhere. Putting Like a Pro: The Role of Positive Contagion in Golf Performance and Perception Abstract Many amateur athletes believe that using a professional athletes equipment can improve their performance. Such equipment can be said to be affected with…

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Risk

A mate of mine in the medical profession lobed this in my inbox. I believe Jobs also tried acupuncture, herbal remedies, psychics and colonic irrigation – all of them profoundly unsuccessful and basically bullshit. In reading about Steve Jobs’ death, I was disappointed to learn that after his carcinoid tumor (a rare type of malignant…

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How David Beats Goliath

I am not normally a fan of Malcolm Gladwell – I find his writing quite simplistic and often wide of the mark. I found his last missive Outliers to be particularly trite. Steven Pinker the noted psychologist wrote – The themes of the collection are a good way to characterize Gladwell himself: a minor genius who…

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Its Friday

I was trolling through the online version of Rolling Stone the other day and came across their poll of the 100 Greatest Singers So I immediately went to see who was numbers 1 and 100 and found Aretha Franklin and Mary J Blige respectively and thought no argument there. Then I looked a little further…

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Black Monday

Twenty four years ago in 1987 the Dow suffered its worst one day decline in history losing  508 points or 22% closing at 1738.. This was the final nail in the markets coffin as it had dropped 1010 points from its August peak. The bull market that followed was extraordinary in its gains. By the…

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