As much as I’m trying to salvage the end of my year by taking it slow, I’m still keeping myself plugged in. There is no unplugging in our hyperreality.
I’ve accepted this is a part of being human for the time being. I don’t struggle with internet addiction even if understand how it can be for others.
So here I am keeping an eye on various market movers like central bank rate cuts and earnings calls. It’s a shame I didn’t go into banking as it’s a lovely hobby I just happen to enjoy it watching the data go by.
The intake of long insight and slow instincts interplays with short data and animal spirits if you can stomach it. For me at least I don’t make moves based on any given day.
I find impossible to make much sense of the here and now, so the best I we can do (at least those suitably complex situations) is make very long plays or extremely short ones. I wouldn’t want to plan for a middle distance. Pity the politicians operating on two year schedules.
I’m glad I make long plays if it’s a choice between long and short. I wouldn’t want to edge out small gains in the algorithms like my quant friends do. Too much is out of distribution and nothing is ever really priced in. Cliff Asness is right. Markets have become less informationally efficient. Information becoming free made insights almost impossibly expensive.
For me it’s silly to make grand claims of sensemaking as we bumble from “so over” to “so back” by the hour. I’ll never compete with that.
What do we need over the next decade? How about two or three? That’s my plan. Anything else risks tip toeing between hyper tulip mania and the deepest depths of the Great Recession trough. I’m amazed we’ve shaved off volatility as long as we have. Apres Boomers, le deluge? Reality feels like hyperparameters are deliberately set to dumb.
And so Wendell Berry is now percolating up not just through the permaculture hippies, Monsanto fighting eco-terrorists and nouveau TradCaths but in the feeds of my design hipsters too.
Williamsburg taste by way of pastor parents has found its way back to the Kentucky poet. Back to the land didn’t take for the Boomers but maybe this time it’s different. (Only if you are landed gentry).
“The cure proves incurable.”
