Platypus, Exactly! How many times do you hear a song in your head and then flip on the radio and it is playing? How many times do we turn the TV set on and just "know" what the next word is going to be? How come, when the phone rings, sometimes we know it is going to ring right before it actually starts ringing? Lastly, why can't any of these concepts apply to the stock market?
There are 280 million people living in the US. That means that on any given day, 280 people could experience "1-in-a-million" type experiences. Imagine if the nightly news carried 280 reports a day these phenomena. Maybe it's all probability... just like trading?
I remember when I was a kid I used to look down at my watch and be surprised to see that the hour had just rolled over. "wow, it's all zeros!" It seemed to happen so often that I was sure that I had some super clock in my head that would allow me to do this several times a day. Of course, I never took into account how often I looked down at my watch and it wasn't zero, the odds of looking down at any time and it being all zeros, and that coupled with the fact that when the hour was about to roll over I'd watch the clock like a hawk, like any kid waiting for the school bell to ring. It is interesting to find coincidinces. It is more interesting still to determine just how much of a coincidince it is. There were six lotto drawings in NY on 9/11. I'm sure if we worked hard enough we could find significance in all of these! New York:Evening Numbers: 9-1-1 New York:Midday Numbers: 8-3-3 New York:Evening Win 4: 3-1-6-5 New York:Midday Win 4: 9-9-9-4 New York:Take 5: 25-28-36-38-39 New York:Lotto: 3-7-11-15-52-58 Bonus:56 New Yorkick 10: 4-6-8-14-18- 20-29-31-33-35-38-51-52- 53-58-59-60-62-63-69
There is an excellent work on Synchronocity by Victor Mansfield! Synchronocity, Science, and Soul-Making; Understanding Jungian Synchronocity through Physics, Buddhism, and Philosophy... PEACE and good trading Platypus, Commisso
My take on randomness is pretty well covered in the bible. My personal experiences seem to corroborate.
chasinfla, So for the rest of us who haven't developed mind reading skills yet, what do you mean by that?
Alphie, sorry I am late in responding. Let's see. I could tell you to 'search ET!' but I won't. <center><a href="http://glass.ed.asu.edu/stats/lesson3/"><img src="http://glass.ed.asu.edu/stats/lesson3/normal.jpg"width=150 height=100></img></a><font size=1><i> Normal Distribution</i></font></center> I don't think any short answer will be satisfying, nor will a long answer fail to bore you. I'll be short. Under "Normal" circumstances, two standard deviations seems to be the limit on what, 95% of events under observation? Most of life seems to be restrained, held in check, surrounded by a boundary. It's a form of order imposed on what would otherwise be chaos. If so, there is a Restrainer. Also, the bible teaches clearly that events that are random to man are not random to the Almighty. Some might see this as superstition, what they called in Anthropology 101, a 'convenient myth.' And yet, science supports it -- if what we call randomness were <i>truly</i> random, why would 95% of any group of events be restrained to some fixed, relatively small distance from the mean (and 99.7% to a slightly larger distance)? Randomness, unpredictability, coincidence, accidents. These things are out of man's control. But, if there were an Almighty, would such things be out of His control? It would be a contradiction. (He may choose to withold control. In fact, I believe He does in some cases. But He restrains the vast majority of possible outcomes within a relatively small boundary. Like a parent who lets a child play in a back yard that's fenced in, God has made life, like the earth we live on, to human scale.) Well, so much for being short. Not trying to prove anything here. Just trying to offer you an answer to your question.