A weekly thread to discuss financial matters - from personal all the way up to global.
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Notes -
This sounds interesting but I'm not sure I grok your idea. Please say more?
One thing I've definitely noticed in my own learning process is that the instincts and intuitions and emotions we developed on the savannah are very poorly suited for investing. It's a very unnatural country to travel in, and you have to learn the customs, leaving any prior conceptualizations behind.
There's also lots of possibly well-intended misinformation that we carry around. It can be a case of 'some knowledge is worse than no knowledge'. We hear BS like 'timing the market is impossible' (a bunch of fund managers failed at doing it in the 1980s and wanted to believe no one else could do it, and their refrain got stuck in the collective unconscious) despite the fact that we are not trying to be an uninvolved person who just DCAs into a passive index fund. It gets in the way when we're trying to take investing as an active interest.
We hear of 'market efficiency', as if this is some hard fact that tells you where a stock will or won't go, because supposedly everything is priced in immediately. If that's the case, why did NVDA go from 200 to like 700 in 3 months - was the market efficient at 200 or was it not?
We hear 'what goes up must come down' (a law of physics, not necessarily markets) which might well keep us from buying the strongest stock just because it has shown strength already. The Monte Carlo effect plays a trick on us here - we think that if 'up' has happened, then 'down' is more likely to happen next. But the reality is that the strongest stocks make new All Time Highs 100 times while the price is on the way from 100 to 200.
We hear 'past performance does not guarantee future results' and variations of this legal disclaimer, despite the fact that history rhymes in the markets like in most fields and precedents in previous successful stocks can help equip our perception. Etc etc. Many such things.
Everyone likes to believe themselves high status, despite the fact that, definitionally, only a small fraction of everyone can be high status. Conveniently, there's no simple metric that we can measure in any human by which we can determine their status. There's not even a set of metrics that we can input into a formula. But there are some metrics that are better than others, and money and looks are two of the better ones. They're gendered, but also, we've been taking that gendered-ness away for quite a few decades by now.
One's savings is obviously related to money, and weight is obviously related to looks. Managing either well tends to require learning a lot about the underlying systems in which these things exist, which inevitably also comes with it realization of one's own place in that system relative to others. Which translates to knowing more about one's own status. Which means risking learning that one is lower status than one believes oneself to be. Which is really unpleasant. So many people opt not to take the risk.
Managing my own weight was one of the harsher examples of this in my life. I was easily intelligent enough and educated enough about biology to know how to do so, but I didn't do so until my early 20s, when the simple painful physical reality of living as a
big fat fattyperson of obesity was too overwhelming for me to ignore anymore. I believe that my avoidance of doing the basic research on this topic was primarily due to trying to minimize my own knowledge about how ugly and low-status I was turning myself through my decisions about diet and exercise.There's also the more generic "people hate taking responsibility for their own future" that's just common among everyone in every context, which I think is synergistic to this. If you learn more about how to properly manage your savings, you might learn that you have more control over it than you thought. And with control comes responsibility. And who likes the idea of failing and then having no one to blame but oneself? So why risk thinking that way, when you can just use your ignorance to blame [the system] for your failures?
I know exactly what you mean now. Thank you for elaborating.
We (the human mind) spend so much time avoiding truths, even though it's typically just the contortions and denials and delusions around truths that really cause lasting trouble. The truth itself can be painful but that's typically temporary, while it sets us on a direction to making real change, instead of being somewhat comfortable inside an illusion while living in some sort of quiet desperation underneath. "One day my time will come", one day I will emerge from the cocoon a beautiful butterfly. Then suddenly you're 80 and forced to soon pass on. Well, you've then successfully avoided the truth and the most sensitive inner work long enough, so you kinda passed that test, but you'll have missed out on a fully lived life, too.
POOs carry a heavy weight. Once you're over that treshold of starting to lose weight though, it becomes easier and easier. Notice how the body positivity movement lost steam after those new drugs made it much easier to lose weight. Those people didn't have the fortitude to get over the treshold, but then the drugs helped them and their BS copes built around the problem weren't so necessary anymore.
It's definitely terrifying to take responsibility, or just realize that you always had it, over your own savings and everything you did or might do with them in a market. There are strong fears involved. Even greed/FOMO is a fear of not having enough. Learning to invest becomes way harder than it 'should be'. There's not all that much to learn, simply knowledge-wise, but the way to get there is like walking through deep mud, and you'll be convinced to go backwards or in the wrong directions at times, adding to the time and willpower needed to pull through and become a consistent winner.
It may be partially because of what I mentioned with the counter-intuitive nature of it, but perhaps also because being in charge of stored up resources for future survival was a (more) deadly serious thing back a few thousand years ago. If you somehow messed up or destroyed or gambled away the tribe's resources, you'd probably get killed or exiled to likely die in the wilderness. So taking full, personal, singular responsibility for what to do with the resources, rather than sharing responsiblity or blaming some one some thing else, is very fear inducing.
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