Another Day Another Strategy

One of the difficulties that new investors face is the extraordinary range of investing strategies that are presented to them. These strategies are often presented as gospel from what new traders would perceive to be sources of authority. One of the oldest chestnuts that I absolutely abhor is the notion of dollar cost averaging which…

Details

Benoit Mandelbrot’s Ideas about Investing and Markets

Benoit Mandelbrot was a Polish-born, French and American “mathematician with broad interests in the practical sciences.” I met him only once at a lecture at Microsoft Research before he passed away in 2010. Mandelbrot and Richard Hudson are the authors of the influential book The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence. I suggest you…

Details

THE DISMAL SCIENCE REMAINS DISMAL

WHEN HRISTOS DOUCOULIAGOS was a young economist in the mid-1990s, he got interested in all the ways economics was wrong about itself—bias, underpowered research, statistical shenanigans. Nobody wanted to hear it. “I’d go to seminars and people would say, ‘You’ll never get this published,’” Doucouliagos, now at Deakin University in Australia, says. “They’d say, ‘this is bordering on libel.’”…

Details