Convincing Ourselves

This post is based on a thought I had after listening to Bilal Hafeez on his last appearance on Bloomberg, talking about the impact of the coronavirus on the markets. I am not an expert in finance by any means and Bilal is essentially a veteran of the industry. He discussed what many others before him have spoken about as well. Algorithmic trading is now a massive part of global financial markets and trading. The thinking goes that because machines are doing a lot of trading, it is possible that they will make irrational mistakes and make the market crash eg during the recent Coronavirus incident. Modern Algos: Algorithmic trading is essentially now mainstream. The biggest and most successful of fund of them all is the legendary Madallion fund run by Renaissance Technologies. The fund uses leverage but is capped and not open to outside investors. It is arguably the most successful fund of its size. However, RenTech and its many funds are not the only players. Citadel is als...

This is part 2 of the Freedom series. Find part 1  here It is interesting how we often make decisions. Not only everyday decisions, such as what to wear or what to eat but even big life decisions. We analyze, study the pros and cons, do a cost-benefit analysis. Some take a long time to make important decisions, others intuitively move forward. During all of these decisions, we often believe that we are in charge of what we decide. After all, we have options, we have choices, what can be more freeing than making your decision? The problem is what we make those choices based on. There can be a number of factors dictating that. Long term plan, upbringing, values, and beliefs. However, in all of the cognitive and behavioral conditioning that might be obvious to us, we often forget the social aspect. I am not talking about social conditioning where we learn beliefs like religion and family values, but the fear of not fitting in. What will they say? What will they think? Th...

Perfectionism is great, but when it becomes an obsession it can ruin your life.I have an obsessive personality and I get phases of perfectionism that transform into something similar to OCD and they ruin me. I burn out while studying, I burn out while exercising, hell I even burn out at work. Perfection is bad but there is more to it than just that. The Good kind: Perfectionism, the need to be perfect, the need to be better every time, the need to out do oneself is great. Its the engine of human and societal growth. This passion to be better and be right and grow, has taken the world from the stone ages to today. It is this perfectionism that has provided passion to artists, scientists, businessmen to do great things. It is this perfectionism that has made a mother great at parenting or a coach help their student. Perfectionism in and of itself is definitely great! The Bad kind: However perfectionism, the need to be perfect, every single time, to be better than before, to push ...

There is no magic formula to success. We need to work harder and smarter and then there is luck/chance/right place right time. We can not do much about luck but we can surely work on everything else. There are many people who want to be successful in a certain field, but for some reason cant get themselves to be the best. What can we do? Well, as always I believe it is all about convincing ourselves of various truths and realities that we usually ignore. Step 1-Know what you want The first step to being good at something is to know convince yourself that this is something you want to be good at. I once wanted to do a PhD, but my proposal was never accepted. After getting rejected several times I realized that as much as I wanted to be 'known' as a good academic, it is not something that I really wanted to do. I believe I might not have even finished my PhD as I probably would have gotten depressed in between.  To be good at something, we need to give a lot of effor...

Confused Confused, indecisive, procrastinate? Sometimes we just cant make sense of things and because we cant make sense of things we don't take action. Of course, nothing is more important than action but when life overwhelms us with choices, information, chores, sometimes it becomes difficult to look past the immediate and take a birds eye view of the grand perspective. There are many such instances where we can simply not think right, ranging from small everyday things, starnge annoyances, all the way to big life decisions eg 1-Buying a new smart phone? --we can be confused about specs, pricing, plans etc 2-Eating out, where to go?-- what to eat, why to go there? 3-Do my classmates hate me? --why do they laugh at me? why do I have so few friends? 3-Which university to go to? --what will it cost, what will be the return, how far will it be from home? etc etc etc Once we convince ourselves that there is a path forward, we can break through all the clutter and cle...