Dive into the archives.
- A New Silk Road
Gradually it has dawned on me that the new Silk Road is rather like dream-time: with tracks everywhere and separate tribal dreamings singing songs with different lyrics but overlapping and similar tunes. OK: so I have Australia on the mind; and the upcoming trip with talks about investor psychology in light of all we know [...]
- June 2011: Depleted in America
It is lonely in America. Sometimes, of course, our loneliness is stuffed full of self-satisfaction; but it often plummets in depletion to despair and confusion. These too are lonely states. From Reisman’s “The Lonely Crowd” to Lasch’s “Culture of Narcissism”, a trajectory of social development was begun with two recent contributions weighing in from the [...]
- 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 [...]
- From Poetics at Changan to Business in Xian: Reflections on Desire and Aging
The Chinese poet, Du Fu, famously failed the civil service examination at Changan, present day Xian, some 1400 years ago. Scrambling, he found a calling in poetry (and a place in posterity), though continuing to bemoan throughout his life, the loss of a prestigious career and its benefits. Fittingly, by middle age, when he finally [...]
- Harmony & Asian Business Consultation
Consultation would not, could not, exist without workplace conflict at its root. Even under conditions of “harmony”— the Asian aesthetic ideal of concordant notes, tones, or contributions achieving a pleasing coherence. We are called to organizational assessment exactly because even within harmony, the sensitive ear detects dissonance. In consulting to multinational and regional organizations based [...]
