The Long Marriage of Mindfulness and Money

Meditation, like yoga before it, has been fully assimilated into corporate America. Aetna, General Mills, and Goldman Sachs all offer their employees free in-office meditation training. In January, the Times reported on a packed panel at Davos where members of the global élite “professed that meditation gave them a competitive advantage.” Speaking to Bloomberg, a meditation instructor…

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Prediction

I have written often about how appalling the social sciences are at prediction and I include the financial markets within this soft science definition. The chart below shows that intriguingly this is not the case with other sciences – longer term weather forecasts are becoming more and more accurate. The interesting thing is that economists have…

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Our Gambling Culture

We tend to speak of short-termism as though it’s a problem that only afflicts investors or corporate leaders, but that’s not the case. Short-term thinking pervades our most important institutions, from government to households. We’ve created a gambling culture in which we tune out everything except the most immediate outcomes. If we’re going to meet our…

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What If Sir Isaac Newton Had Been a Trend Follower?

Interesting look at bubbles and the impact of timing upon them. Abstract:       Investment manias and financial bubbles have likely existed for as long as humans have been involved in financial markets. In this research piece we take a look at some of the more famous market bubbles in history and the extreme volatility…

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