There are some interesting historical paper reconstructing stuff like GDP or interest rates from the medieval times. Pretty sure I saw one showing that long-term performance of the stock baskets too.
If you go back a little longer, maybe about 40,000 years instead of 4,000 years, the Neanderthals didn't make it.
Yeah, I am pretty sure the first protozoans did not concern themselves with PE ratios either. However, some financial concepts (interest rates, bonds, shares, buy low sell high) have been around since the middle ages. I don't know how much free time do you have, but this is a fun book about credit risk and politics way back when: Lending to the Borrower from Hell: Debt, Taxes, and Default in the Age of Philip II
Thanks for the suggestion. I am a full time option trader. Retail, amateur, retired from my day job a long time ago, so yes, I have time to read your book. After all, I wasted my time writing >6500 posts in between trading and research.
Odd you brought this up. Today I was thinking about Louis Bachelier and his revolutionary thesis paper "Theory of Speculation". I just sometimes sit back and watch these markets and consistently dumbfounded. Dumbfounded in the sense of it not making any sense. And trust me, I'm one of those people who try not to make sense of movements. I'm product indifferent and price omnidirectional, I can care less about the why's. But all I see is people trying to label every single movement of the spooz to some catalyst in our modern world. I believe our current financial system is flawed majorly and we've drifted a bit. We need some fresh minds and ideas to approach this new decade with. Advanced algo markets are constantly changing and you need to adapt or die out quick! Cheers!
I've come to the conclusion (unless I learn something new) that trying to predict the markets is like trying to predict the behaviors of a wild animal in a cage. You simply cannot know what will happen. Despite years and years of studying, you are still left with lots of uncertainty. Too much uncertainty to risk real money on. I may even stop paper trading because I'm not learning anything from it other than to see that it's random.
I agree with you.. kind of. You may be correct, the animals movements appear to be random within the cage, but maybe we don't even need to really predict the animals movements exactly. Instead, we could quantify the cage dimensions, what the cage is made out of, and how the animal reacts to its 4 corners. Now we have some framework given, its better than having that wild animal in a huge field. The cage could be the microstructure of the market, or the distribution of prices within time. Idk, I have no clue wtf I'm talking about, but I just feel like finance is evolving but I just hope it evolves for the better because I'm seeing wayyyyyy to much slick sellers selling "3 easy patterns" to financial freedom and it makes me wonder who tf buys into these things, but hey you know the saying "a sucker is born every second"
I'm also not sure how true it is that mathematical formulas (algorithms) are responsible for price movement. That would mean that the major players such as Bank of America, etc. rely on blind mathematics rather than knowledge and intuition of experts. Makes no sense. Especially when you consider that things such as news events are qualitative in nature. You cannot quantify a news story into a mathematical formula. News stories have been the major movers of markets lately.