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Often overlooked, not the reasoning behind decision, yet the point of origin for that decision. It is through corroboration and “evidence” that decisions are crafted and defended from ambidextrous viewpoints. These viewpoints often clash and are agreed upon as the reasoning for certain price movements or catalytic events in free markets (how do they clash yet agree on a singular conclusion?). By offering the logical and likely through headline statements and fraudulently qualitative articles (more on this later), we reinforce the simplicity of financial markets and grow ignorant towards the quantitative truth.
By no means is this “article” meant to express truly original ideas, as that claim would be both foolish and contradictory. Examine this instead as a theoretical framework for future thought or post-analysis on existing thought. Contrarily, completely ignore these ramblings as it would deter the burden of information.
We unintentionally market the “best-case scenario” as the most likely scenario preemptively, and then potter around these ideas, slightly adjusting to reality through fruition of the origin idea. The problem being, the separation between expectation, promise, reality, and hindsight. When supplying information becomes monetized, the supply becomes distorted, while not necessarily intended to be deceiving in nature, it is guaranteed.
“an event is not newsworthy in itself, but is accorded its newsworthiness by discursively ascribing news factors through language, image, and typography to sell an event to an audience as news”
“Conceptually, news factors are assumed to be qualities of a text rather than inherent characteristics of an event itself, and are applied by the media to heighten the legitimacy of an event becoming news”
~Mark Boukes, Natalie P Jones, Rens Vliegenthart
While challenging the media is by no means a novel mission or witty investment advantage, the conceptualization of the importance of said matter is essential in avoiding common misapprehension. A simple hatred for the media, no matter how rooted within, is not adequate for breaking habits that are unfortunately ingrained in society, and distinctive in human nature (yes, biologically).
Just how distorted is media information by the time you are exposed to it, and to frighten you more, how distorted was the information when the author wrote it, before auctioning it off to you? Describing media as a relative endpoint (relative to you) for information, rather than an origin for information will help this idea settle. Information, as anything else, is passed down an indescribably incessant chain before it reaches you. At each “relative endpoint” (which defers between each person as well) additional anecdotes and opinions are concocted into a narrative (passed off as “fact”). At this point, the individual decides whether to refute or accept these particulars. Lamentably, the “falser” the news, the more accepted it becomes, and almost unhesitatingly so, as we can see by the study below:
“The study provides a variety of ways of quantifying this phenomenon: For instance, false news stories are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories are. It also takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories to reach the same number of people. When it comes to Twitter’s “cascades,” or unbroken retweet chains, falsehoods reach a cascade depth of 10 about 20 times faster than facts. And falsehoods are retweeted by unique users more broadly than true statements at every depth of cascade.”
~Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, Sinan Aral
While this study is applied specifically to twitter, we will refer to it as the singular and priority media “source” for this writing. (yes, you probably got to this commentary through twitter)
To reiterate, the main focus and motive of this farcical paper is to identify origins of information. (be the first to laugh at yourself)
Accomplishing this feat is not done with ease, nor is it instantaneous, if it was, there would be no need for this amalgamation of trivial phrases. Arguably, there is no need regardless, referring to the burden of information addressed earlier. Targeting your focus towards extracting information will prove to be a fool’s errand, instead, aim solely to disentangle truth from deceit.
Where does the truth reside?
The ability to filter and sort truth from lie on its own is an exhaustive measure (more so than you imagine), crafting the distinction between misinformation and disinformation proves to be exponentially more challenging. Oftentimes, the first motion is to scrutinize the motive behind information, or the spread there of it. While motive proves to be important from origin, I argue that motive is decoupled from information quite swiftly. The disassociation can (nearly promised) occur within the first transition of words from the origin party to the next relative endpoint (you, or whoever). Each endpoint of information falsely aggrandizes and compounds the weight (reputation, relative importance) of said information, and in most cases incidentally so.
“By sidestepping questions of motives, we open the conversation up to unexpected sources of pollution. These sources spread toxicity through messages that wouldn’t qualify as mis- or disinformation, yet can be just as potent and just as damaging. In the offline world, unintentional pollution takes many forms: washing your hair and sending globs of petrochemicals swirling down the drain, for example; or driving an old car and leaking oil all over the driveway; or fertilizing the lawn just before a rainstorm, trickling chemicals into the street. People aren’t trying to pollute when they do these things, so they don’t call themselves polluters. Yet the water supply still ends up tainted. Online, everyday actions like responding to a falsehood in order to correct it or posting about a conspiracy theory in order to make fun of it can send pollution flooding just as fast as the falsehoods and conspiracy theories themselves.”
~ Whitney Phillips
I add this excerpt above, as I believe it beautifully describes the incidental pollution and solidification of fraudulent “fact” in media. In a market where the action(s) of a few can trump the action(s) of the masses, the defect lies where information resides and where the truth is believed to reside.
I would be witless to attempt and point you even in the direction of truth, accepting that reality has, through time, diverted truth into a concealed and, more often than not, untraveled realm. Under the assumption I myself have found such a source of definite truth, by no means would I be inclined to share in any event. Determination is futile in such matters if the strategy at hand is to discover a singular root of static legitimacy. In a free market with fractious and erratic dynamics at play, there is no singular source on which to rely upon, one must rely on themselves and thought from within.
Dealing With Extremities
Simply put, profitability occupies the extremes, deviating from the mean. Exploratory and advanced topics, when under speculation, provide the extremes of profitability, arguably inversely so (inverse to the work of Gauss). While it is not some novel idea to avoid the most probable or the middle curve, exploring the extremes on both ends of said curve is crucial when optimizing perspective. Perspective, must, waver from the generally accepted, in a gyratory and non-narrow way. Exploring, however, is far from adequate in regards to capitalizing on those opportunities which lie in extremities. Even in cases of exposure to the uncertain and the unknown, most disregard their findings and brush them off as “impossible”, how is it that you are exposed to and aware of such events, yet, concluding impossibility in the same breath? I then ask you the following:
What would your PNL look like, had you taken only twenty of the “impossible” investments into fruition?
Reframed, how many of those investments would you have explored more in depth had you found them yourself, had you been the point of origin, rather than the relative endpoint on the incessant chain mentioned earlier?
Under no circumstance is the goal to be underexposed to readily available information, logically, the goal is to be exposed to both the available and the unavailable. Accessing the unavailable seems contradictory in nature and improbable statistically, though not impossible. Unavailability in regard to information, is subject purely to your own investigations. Meaning what may be currently unavailable to you, is not necessarily unavailable to others (others, who will exploit this advantage).
I offer a mere piece of the blueprint by suggesting the exploration of non-traditional speculations and information sources, but amplify that your main source must be yourself.
“‘The major fortunes in finance, I would speculate, have been made by people who are effective in dealing with the unknown and unknowable. This will probably be truer still in the future. Given the influx of educated professionals into finance, those who make their living speculating and trading in traditional markets are increasingly up against others who are tremendously bright and tremendously well-informed. By contrast, those who undertake prudent speculations in the unknown will be amply rewarded. Such speculations may include ventures into uncharted areas, where the finance professionals have yet to run their regressions, or may take completely new paths into already well-traveled regions. It used to be said that if your shoeshine boy gives you stock tips it’s was time to get out of the market. With shoeshine boys virtually gone and finance Ph.D.'s plentiful, the new wisdom might be:
When your math whiz finance Ph.D. tells you that he and his peers have been hired to work in the XYZ field, the spectacular returns in XYZ field have probably vanished forever.
Similarly, the more difficult a field is to investigate, the greater will be the unknown and unknowables associated with it, and the greater the expected profits to those who deal sensibly with them. Unknowables can’t be transmuted into sensible guesses, but one can take one’s positions and array one’s claims so that unknowns and unknowables are mostly allies, not nemeses. And one can train to avoid one’s own behavioral decision tendencies, and to capitalize on those of others.”
~ Richard J Zeckhauser
To source information from oneself requires creative thinking, which in its purest form, is what drives forward movement as a whole within society. Creative thinking at its essence however, can be misleading and inadequate for producing positive results. Creativity, when regarding crafting information, entails not only “new” abstraction, but divergent interpretations of existing “truths” as well. Discovering the root of an idea allows you to interpret the reasoning behind future events, the farther in the past you are able to travel down the chain of information (specifically the truths, and the identified, now-known lies), the more you are able to discover about the reasoning for potential future events. If instead, you are to predict and speculate potential investments based on your own referential endpoint of information, which constantly and abruptly alters with time, how are you expected to capitalize on a single point?
If you aim to make final decisions at an optimization point which you derive based on the constant new influx of “information”, you will soon discover that the point of optimization has already passed you. While you may notice the point has passed, you will foolishly define that point as recurring and wait for the exact opportunity to echo (it will not). Although, at that point of optimization, your sources of information will not be claiming it as such, as profitability is not aligned with abundancy.
I argue that withholding information induces the creation of information. If one is restricted from outside sources of information, they are able to avoid the lies and narrative which get homogenized with said information. Instead, they must create information, which in financial markets, stems from the quantitative realm. By essentially avoiding the pre-determined motive behind information and forging your own motive (to be truthful) you are able to detect optimization points in your own strategies, which may not be the optimization point in terms of totality, but the optimization point in terms of what you are subjecting yourself to (to the extremities). Reinforcing that this is feasible through becoming your own origin point of information, the truth lies where you formulate it to be so, bypassing skewed motive, and deflecting narrative.
Talk is cheap, words are fragile, and both tend to expire quite quickly, yet permeate our thought and resonate past their expiration. We associate stories and headlines with truth, as they are excellent in providing reason and simplicity, the ease of storage (mentally speaking) results in the misconception that we should retain these stories. These temporary truths however, when altered (which happens at each relative endpoint), expire (rendered useless), and the weight of the truth diminishes rapidly. Tragically, we ignore this aspect, as perpetually revaluating the narrative involves complication, which goes against our cerebral nature to simplify and accept (rather than refute, which takes effort).
The quantitative however, disregards your emotional habits. A single quantitative measure will adjust to a global truth, not catering to any one single endpoint (again you are the endpoint) and the associated rationale.
With respect to extremities, it is crucial to ascertain that quantitative measures are the most subject to extremities and anomalies (at least we call them anomalies). Built into numbers, is the inarguable truth that they are infinite, attach the narrative of your choice and they will abide by this truth. There is no escape from this facticity, while these numbers mutate with time, the originally correlated narrative will lose credibility, as words can not keep pace with numbers. While one singular guarantee can not be extracted from a quantitative measure, the improbable are given a guarantee of existence. In order for the quantitative to exist and be of importance, the highly improbable must exist somewhere, with a guarantee of occurring in some capacity. The paradox births from the fact that while an improbable event is occurring (quantitative event, such as extreme and unexpected price movement), there is a combination of quantitative metrics which are forcing that current truth to exist (making the improbable the most probable). Identifying where those metrics originate from becomes increasingly difficult as your internal need to simplify with narrative blockades your acceptance of truth (lying directly under your nose in most cases). Building and framing strategies, exposing yourself to profitability, and identifying optimization points for those strategies will come more frequently so in the case that you disregard motive, reason with yourself purely quantitatively, and traverse the extremities of probability.
Concluding this paper would be an inept attempt at simplification, I leave with this.
