Sentiment & Psychology

Sentiment & Psychology

Ain’t Nobody Knows Nuthin’

Robot-48x48Back on April 1 I wrote an article titled Deprogram Yourself.  I was fed up with both promoters and robotic followers in the financial markets.  All markets have promotions and those who lap up said promotions, but the gold “community” of honest money advocates (code for a casino patron who thinks he is more righteous than other casino patrons) is the most dogged and belligerent of them all.  Into this mix come the promoters, gurus, pitch men (and women) and con artists to ply their trade, always tugging at the emotions of all too human financial content consumers.

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July 4, 2016
Sentiment & Psychology

G7 (and Fed), Right on Cue

I have had a lot of fun with the centralized policy making over the years.  Recall the Outer Limits theme? There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not…

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June 24, 2016
Sentiment & Psychology

VIX Too Pumpy? Think Again…

We noted in NFTRH 399 that the VIX had made a big move on Friday but that it had rammed right up to the resistance at which bulls had owned…

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June 13, 2016
Sentiment & Psychology

Memo to ‘Resource’ Exploration Geniuses

That backwater mine that you hope to make your retirement on, exploding upward on hopes, dreams and a lot of good old fashioned Canadian promotion, is actually nothing special. Subscribe…

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April 20, 2016
Notable Public Posts / Sentiment & Psychology

Deprogram Yourself

Robot-48x48The title of this article is not an assumption that you, astute reader, are little more than a robot following the direct and implied commands of other robots when trying to make logical sense of the state of modern financial markets.  Personally, I have found that I need to stay on a path of post-deprogramming maintenance in order to stay right with a complex market backdrop.

On an inward-looking basis, we as investors and traders are faulty humans going up against robots (Ref. Rise of the Quantitative Robots) that are much smarter than we are with numbers, with data mining and with extrapolation.  What do we have, puny little human brains with all associated biases, ego distortions and other faults?  Yes, that is us.

We can mitigate these things by committing to double check our egos, first and foremost making sure we realize that we will err, we are not the best there is and the market does not care even one little bit about us.  We can commit to being the best ‘me’ we can be.

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April 1, 2016
alice
Sentiment & Psychology

A Bullish Headline!

Woeful earnings threaten to intensify stock-market bloodbath Got to hand it to MarketWatch, they don't discriminate.  When trends are bullish they pound the point home while players are at max…

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January 18, 2016
Gold / Sentiment & Psychology

Tilting at Golden Windmills

As posted at Biiwii this morning…

dq.windmillsThere is a writer we’ll call Don Quixote who is tilting at something that no longer really exists… the evil gold promoters that used to be taken seriously by innocents to the tune of near total destruction of their portfolios.

Don once went on about the gold cult and I even highlighted his post because I had been going about the gold cult as well. The cult-like aspect of the gold “community” (← a dead giveaway) was real, and the group-think that the 2001-2011 bull market fostered was very strong and really damaging to those who did not question its tenets until it was too late.

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March 3, 2015
Sentiment & Psychology

Market Sentiment Hideously Over Bullish

Folks, with the SOX hovering just below target, the Biotech sector arcing upward, the Russell 2000 having broken to the upside, the VIX back near its lows, Nasdaq 5000 headlines...…

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March 3, 2015