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----- Original Message -----
From: "Joe Duffy" <joeduffy@xxxxxxxxx>
To: <realtraders@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, October 29, 2000 7:42 AM
Subject: Re: [RT] Why rats and pigeons might make better investors than
people do
> The difference between science and science fiction is that real science
> should be based on facts and evidence. Science fiction starts with a
flawed
> premise which it accepts as fact, then applies solid science all along to
> make it look like its "real" science. This is certainly a cae of the
latter.
> Tell it to Marty Swartz that he has been "lucky", that he "can't predict
the
> market", and that "buy and hold investors are certain to outperform" him.
> Really??!!!!!
Hi Joe,
Good to have you back. I think the article was very interesting and
given some caveats and reservations, I think it had a great deal of merit.
I think the study applies in general to the field of investments. Of course
there are some exceptional cases. Another aspect of this is that some of
the best traders couldn't forecast their way out of a brown paper bag. They
are very good at quickly processing, adapting, and responding to market
conditions as they see them. Others that do have some forecasting ability
would tell you that they aren't all that smart, they just happened to find a
good forecasting model and follow it accordingly. In fact, there is a full
spectrum of market participants and I agree that most fall into the middle
as described by the rat - pigeon study.
Frankly, I am trying to figure out if I would be a better rat or a pigeon?
<G>
Norman
P.S. The point about not obsessing about the market is very valuable for the
full time traders. I recommend to my students that they find a hobby to
pursue during market hours so they don't feel compelled to trade just for
the sake of trading. If properly distracted, one will only trade when the
opportunity is compelling.
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: J W <inbox@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <realtraders@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Sunday, October 29, 2000 5:28 AM
> Subject: [RT] Why rats and pigeons might make better investors than people
> do
>
>
> Interesting article with strong application to technical trading...
>
> JW
> -------------------------
>
> http://www.money.com/money/depts/investing/fundamentalist/archive/0011
> html
>
> November, 2000
> The trouble with humans
> Why rats and pigeons might make better investors than people do.
> By Jason Zweig
>
> . The man with two brains
> . The dance of happenstance
> . Mind over matter
>
>
> Humans have a remarkable ability to detect patterns. That's helped
> our species survive, enabling us to plant crops at the right time of
> year and evade wild animals. But when it comes to investing, this
> incessant search for patterns causes more heartache than anything
> else.
>
> We see that value funds have stunk for years, so we dump them and
> pile into fashionable growth stocks like Intel and Cisco--right
> before they hit the skids.We buy a stock because some guy at a
> barbecue recommended it, and everything he talks about seems to go up-
> -but this one plunges. We put every dime in stocks after hearing that
> they've trounced bonds forever--only to see bonds zoom past stocks
> this year.
>
> Our incorrigible search for patterns leads us to assume that order
> exists where it often doesn't. Many of us believe, for example, that
> it's possible to foresee where the market is heading or whether a
> particular stock will continue to rise. In reality, these things are
> far more random and unpredictable than we like to admit.
>
> Remarkably, scientists are now finding that this tendency to look for
> patterns is hardwired into the human brain. Psychologists have long
> known that if rats or pigeons knew what the Nasdaq is, they might be
> better investors than most humans are. That's because, in some ways,
> animals are better than people at predicting random events. If, for
> instance, you set up two lights in a laboratory and flash them in a
> random sequence, humans will persistently try to predict which of the
> two lights will flash next. Stranger still, they'll keep trying even
> when you tell them that the flashing of the lights is purely random.
> Let's say you flash a green light 80% of the time and a red one 20%
> of the time but keep the exact sequences random. (A run of 20 flashes
> could look something like this: GGGGRGGGGGGGRRGGGGGR.) In guessing
> which light will flash next, the best strategy is simply to predict
> green every time, since you stand an 80% chance of being right.
> That's what rats or pigeons generally do in a similar experiment that
> rewards them with a crumb of food whenever they correctly guess the
> next outcome.
>
> But humans are apparently convinced that they're smart enough to
> predict each upcoming result even in a process they've been told is
> random. On average, this misguided confidence leads people to get the
> right answer in this experiment on only 68% of their tries. In other
> words, it's precisely our higher intelligence that leads us to score
> lower on this kind of task than rats and pigeons do.
>
> The man with two brains
>
> A team of researchers at Dartmouth College, led by psychology
> professor George Wolford, has been studying why it is that we think
> we can predict the unpredictable. Wolford's team ran light-flashing
> experiments on "split-brain patients"--people in whom the nerve
> connections between the hemispheres of the brain have been surgically
> severed as a treatment for epilepsy. Here's the group's key
> discovery, which was recently published in the Journal of
> Neuroscience: When the epileptics viewed a series of flashes that
> they could process only with the right side of their brains, they
> gradually learned to guess the most frequent option all the time,
> just as rats and pigeons do. But when the signals were flashed to the
> left side of their brains, the epileptics kept trying to forecast the
> exact sequence of flashes--sharply lowering the overall accuracy of
> their predictions.
>
> Wolford's conclusion: "There appears to be a module in the left
> hemisphere of the brain that drives humans to search for patterns and
> to see causal relationships, even when none exist." His research
> partner, Michael Gazzaniga, has christened this part of the
> brain "the interpreter." Wolford explains: "The interpreter drives us
> to believe that 'I can figure this out.' That may well be a good
> thing when there is a pattern to the data and the pattern isn't
> overly complicated." However, he adds, "a constant search for
> explanations and patterns in random or complex data is not a good
> thing."
>
> The dance of happenstance
>
> Trouble is, the financial markets are almost--though not quite--as
> random as those flashing lights. On CNBC and countless websites,
> investment strategists and other so-called experts scan the momentary
> twitches of the market and predict what will happen next. Far more
> often than they're right, they're wrong--and the Dartmouth discovery
> about the interpreter in our brains helps explain why. These pundits
> are examining a chaotic storm of data and refusing to concede that
> they can't understand it. Instead, their interpreters drive them to
> believe they've identified patterns upon which they can base
> predictions about the future.
>
> Meanwhile, the interpreters in our own brains impel us to take these
> seers more seriously than their track records deserve. As Berkeley
> economist Matthew Rabin has pointed out, just a couple of accurate
> predictions on CNBC can make an analyst seem like an ace, because
> viewers have no way to sample the analyst's entire (and probably
> mediocre) forecasting record. In the absence of a full sample, our
> interpreters take over and lead us to see the analyst's latest calls
> as part of a pattern of success.
>
> The interpreter also helps explain what's called the gambler's
> fallacy--the belief that if, say, a coin has come up heads several
> times, then it's "due" to come up tails. (In fact, the odds that a
> coin will turn up tails are always 50%, no matter how many times in a
> row it's come up heads.) The gambler's fallacy is as common on Wall
> Street as hairballs under a couch: Some pundits will say emerging
> markets are sure to rebound because they've been doing badly for
> years, while others say tech stocks will crash because they've risen
> so much. In reality, the market makes mincemeat out of most of our
> predictions; apparent trends often foretell little about the future.
>
> In its constant search for patterns, the interpreter also tricks
> investors into believing that hot performance streaks are sure to
> persist. Based on a few months of scorching returns, investors piled
> into Internet stocks late last year--and are now sitting on returns
> as cold as liquid nitrogen. What's happening here is simple: As soon
> as a pattern seems to emerge in the market, the interpreter in our
> brains sees it as part of a predictable trend--rather than a random
> happenstance that may never be repeated.
>
> Finally, I think the Dartmouth research helps solve another puzzle.
> Even when we have only a small sample of our own performance at risky
> tasks--a few yanks on a one-armed bandit or a handful of big scores
> on tech stocks--we tend to decide either that we know what we're
> doing or that we're on a lucky streak. We almost never conclude that
> our success is the result of chance alone. Dutch psychologists Willem
> Wagenaar and Gideon Keren have found that professional gamblers, when
> accounting for their wins and losses, greatly overestimate the role
> of skill, attributing just 18% of the outcome of each bet to random
> chance.
>
> Similarly, when a day-trader makes a fat profit off a stock after
> doing no research and owning it for only seconds, he's likely to
> conclude that he's an analytical genius or has an uncanny feel for
> the market. In truth, that profit is probably an accident--but his
> mind won't allow him to see things that way.
>
> Mind over matter
>
> So how can you keep your brain from giving you a garbled view of the
> investment world? You could disable your interpreter once and for all
> by having a neurosurgeon separate your brain's two hemispheres, and
> then by scrutinizing investment information in the leftmost part of
> your field of vision. That way, only the right half of your brain
> would be able to process investment data, and the interpreter would
> be shut down. However, it won't be easy talking a surgeon into
> carving your cranium open for this, and watching CNBC out of the far
> corner of your eye might be a pain. So here are some less drastic
> options.
>
> Don't obsess. In one of his most startling findings, George Wolford
> of Dartmouth says people in his experiments earned higher scores when
> they were distracted with a "secondary task" like trying to recall a
> series of numbers they'd recently seen. In other words, interruptions
> improved their performance by preventing the interpreter in their
> brains from seeking spurious patterns in the data. Likewise,
> continually monitoring your results will probably make them worse--as
> you fool yourself into seeing trends that aren't there and trade too
> much as a result. If you're spending more than a few hours a month on
> investing, you're not only taking valuable time away from the rest of
> your life, but you're almost certainly hurting your returns.
>
> Remember what's at stake. John Staddon, a professor of psychology at
> Duke, says rats or pigeons will generally bet on the option that has
> had the highest probability of success over time. But, notes
> Staddon, "humans will consistently do that only when the stakes are
> large and the consequences really matter." So you'll make better
> financial decisions if you convince yourself that there's no such
> thing as a small or casual investment. Just think of the thousands of
> dollars you could squander--and the blissful retirement you could
> jeopardize--with a few careless stock picks.
>
> Track your forecasts. Whenever you've got a strong opinion about
> where a stock, or the market, is headed, jot it down and note the
> date. This will keep you from conveniently forgetting your failed
> forecasts and may provide you with a humbling reminder of your
> limitations as a soothsayer. And whenever some analyst seems to know
> what he's talking about, remember that pigs will fly before he'll
> ever release a full list of his past forecasts, including the
> bloopers.
>
> Defy the chaos. Not everything about investing is chaotic, however; a
> few things really are predictable. On average, over time, investors
> who keep costs low (either through index funds or buy-and-hold stock
> portfolios) are mathematically certain to outperform in- vestors who
> trade too frequently or buy funds with high expenses. So before you
> focus on your returns--which are entirely unpredictable--make sure
> that your investments are not overpriced.
>
> Diversification is another principle that defies chaos. Consider the
> danger of investing almost exclusively in tech stocks. Many investors
> who bet heavily on the sector in 1982--the last time it was this hot--
> loaded up on market darlings such as Alpha Microsystems, Commodore,
> Tandy, Vector Graphic and Wang Laboratories, which later tanked. If
> you diversify--by owning a wide range of U.S. and foreign stocks and
> bonds--you virtually eliminate the chance that a few duds like these
> will ruin your financial future. Broad diversification is still the
> best insurance against the risk of making an investment mistake. And
> there's nothing random about that.
>
>
>
>
>
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