Dive into the archives.
- Waiting on Investments
Retail investment requires two kinds of trust: one monetary and the other, a trust in expectations. Together, their demand for fulfillment is that the investor must wait. Necessarily, the investor spends a lot of time waiting: waiting for a good market entry point; waiting for a target exit point; waiting for market trends to turn; [...]
- Duncan Donuts’ Linguistic Step Too Far
It had happened before, but this morning I decided to discuss it with management: how my request for a “medium” coffee is met with the counter-person’s translation into “large”. It turns out that the 3 model cups on display are NOT small, medium, and large; but rather: medium, large, and extra-large. What happened to small? [...]
- Waiting for Salvation or Damnation in a Stock Downturn
Remember the sound of a falling tree in an un-peopled forest? Watching its price as a stock plummets in the absence of corporate explanation might echo the same sound: if the clamor from retail investors were not so loud! Recently, I’ve been studying equity message-boards in relation to investors’ management of anxiety as stocks descend [...]
- Online Equity Message-Boards as Virtual Workteams
To paraphrase Tolstoy, all buoyant stocks are the same; while the issues sinking fast are all different. Two types of decline are notable: the first is cacophonous— in which too much information and noise are continuous, as with BP stock during the 2010 Gulf oil spill. The other is silent: with the stock’s initial drop [...]
- Emotions, Expectations, and Equity Message Boards
Given that the annual trajectory of individual equities describes a bell-shaped price-curve reflective of aggregated emotions and expectations, there is a fascinating local development as passions and prices approach the tantalizingly underpriced (or overpriced) tails: the online message boards dedicated to individual stocks become the setting of passionate argument and diatribe reflecting the blood-sport of [...]
- Equities and the Time Value of Emotion
A commonplace in Finance I is the “time value of money”- the idea that future worth may be discounted to the present moment. But looking at the oscillation of stocks over a given time-period, spanning a universe of daily volatility unknowable in any discrete “present”, it makes you wonder about an equity’s present “value”. What [...]
