After struggling at the end of October, the S&P 500 has finished higher on every single trading day so far in November. This marks the 16th 6-day winning streak for the S&P 500 over the last ten years. As shown below, the last four 6-day winning streaks have been met with declines on day seven.
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rssThe Power of Habit: Why We Do The Things We Do
The notion that success is a simple matter of following routine and sticking to good habits isn’t exactly new. But in his just-released book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, Charles Duhigg explains why. An investigative reporter at the New York Times who also has an MBA, Duhigg taps into insights from biology, sports, consumer products marketing and manufacturing.
How do people kick smoking? How did Procter & Gamble turn Febreze into an also-ran into a big seller? How did Tony Dungy turn his National Football League defenses into champions? How did Paul O’Neill (the executive, not the baseball player) succeed at Alcoa? It all comes down to understanding the power of habits, Duhigg argues. “In the last ten years, our understanding of how habits work has been totally transformed, and companies take advantage of that,” he said.
People, like animals studied by scientists in laboratories, tend to see a feedback loop in their behavior. They are cued or prompted to act in a certain way, respond with a routine behavior, and then receive a reward for the behavior. “If you identify the cues and rewards, you can change the routine,” Duhigg writes. (more…)
Real Times News Will Not Increase Your Bankroll
Another explanation as to why real time news is useless:
Mike Bloomberg became the richest man in New York by selling traders just fifteen seconds head start on the data they needed. Fifteen seconds costs thousands of dollars a month per trader. But in most cases, what we get online is not actually in real-time and it’s not news, either.
Getting ever closer to the first moment is expensive in other ways. It might cost you in boredom, because watching an entire event just to see the good parts takes time, particularly if there’s no guarantee that there will even be good parts.
It might cost you in filtering, because the less you’re willing to wait, the more likely it is that you’ll see news that’s incorrect, out of context or not nearly as valuable as it appears.
When journalists, analysts and pundits are all racing to bring you the ‘news’ first, you get less actual news and more reflexive noise. Go watch an hour of cable news from a year ago… what were they yelling about that we actually care about today? (more…)