So to sum, to Jim Chanos, drinking a little kool aid is actually healthy for him. To Jeremy Siegel yelling 'bullshit' every once and a while is also quite healthy. And to achieve an overall good balance (and other improvements) our gut feelings will do a MUCH better job than our concious mind, which is full of limiting beliefs, baggage, egoic limitations, dumbness, "knowledge" etc etc
Here is a great twitter fight that helped me understand myself and some of these ideas https://tinyurl.com/yd939ss5 NassimNicholasTalebVerified account@nntaleb Feb 1 Replying to @R_Thaler "Outside your shit papers, in the real world, risk-takers work with thresholds to simplify life. @R_Thaler @JamesMarsh79" Perhaps the same can be said about rules of thumb. They work to simplify life and need to be considered in the broad context that the person is operating in, not whether they are 100% true/accurate or not
Trump needs to stop with this Twitter bullshit soon, it looks like his administration has a negative carry as a result of it
About rules of thumbs and guts feelings, two interesting books you might pick up : Gigenrenzer seems to hold Taleb in high regard btw, whereas he disputes Kanheman's vision of system 1 and 2 of thinking, particulary Kanheman's looking down on system 1, the faster and instinctive mode of thought. I've read a few books of Malcolm Gladwell lately, quite a bit behing the herd here as he's been apparently a top selling author for over a decade, but entertaining read and much about gut feelings.
There should be links to Amazon in my post above, but they are not showing on my computer, so in case others also have a problem, below are other links: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=risk+savvy+gigerenzer&t=ffsb&atb=v65-3__&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?q=blink+gladwell&t=ffsb&atb=v65-3__&ia=products
Good buys, these things are proving a lot more resilient than expected. Hopefully they go more parabolic and become good shorts again. But this GBTC thing is just so stupid, 100% premium to NAV and at some point the dealers will be able to deal with the excess demand/accounts/documentation and it will make little sense to pay any kind of premium to bitcoin. Just seems madness that this is trading like this. I got a short at IB with a long hedge in another account, so I have a borrow secured for short this crap in the future
GBTC borrow rate went from low single digits to ~50% at IB. I guess that's how this will balance out. If nothing much happens in a week or two and GBTC doesn't put some good short setups, I will cover and move on. I"m still waiting on BTC-e to credit my account from a wire I made last week. Everything takes ages in this bitcoin world right now
I was watching Martin Skreli 'This week in investing 4' and he shows how he is managing his portfolio. He is 40% long select biotech/drugs names he understands, he is short around 20% in names he dislikes. He also mentioned in the past that he would be happy with a 6% return a year It struck he that he is essentially mimicking a Dalio/Browne/El-Erian diversified portfolio, those portfolios make medium sized predictable returns with low risk. So does buying high quality/well located real state (if the premium is not excessive). So, that's another addition to the list of how to produce those decent medium lowish risk, predictable returns. Become a specialist in a sector and run a conservative long-short book. But one has to be very careful in that short side