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Neuroplasticity: Your Brain and Your Trading – #AnirudhSethi

Neuroplasticity – HOPES Huntington's Disease InformationIn Neuroplasticity: Your Brain and Your Trading, we will explore how Neuroplasticity can help traders create a more accurate trading system. Neuroplastic is the ability of your brain to adapt to its surroundings and change through experience. Neuroplasticity is an exciting new area of research in which scientists are studying the ways that our brains change over time with various types of input.

Mental training has been shown to be a powerful tool in improving performance on tasks from memory recall, math calculations, motor skills, creativity, decision-making, and many others. Neuroscientists have found that mental training increases gray matter volume in specific areas of the brain responsible for those skills.

 

##What is neuroplasticity and how does it affect trading?:

 

In the world of neuroscience, babies are like sponges. They process data twice as fast and their brain is still developing due to new neural connections that form in response to stimuli. The thing about brains—they can adapt! Imagine what it would be like if your left speech center was damaged after an accident or stroke; you could learn how to use your right side instead because they’re always adapting with time (talk about a tough feat).

Your brain is more awesome than we even thought: not only does it have all this processing power but also some cells called “mirror neurons” which help us understand other people’s actions by simulating them ourselves–in short, mirror neurons make imitation easy for our children while giving adults empathy skill.

The conventional wisdom once said that we could never recover from the loss of brain cells, but now research has shown that you can grow new ones. For instance, if a senior is injured or ill they will experience significant changes to their neural pathways in response and this makes up for lost neurons by creating more connections between healthy neurons so everything can be sorted out again! (more…)

Copper and silver prices spike as governments decarbonize

Money is flowing into the markets for such materials as copper, silver and aluminum on growing demand thanks to a shift to renewable energy and electric cars.

The trend was triggered by solid demand in China, which brought the COVID-19 pandemic under control ahead of other countries. Now investors around the world are trying to get ahead of the curve on the so-called green cycle poised to lift the commodity markets over the long term.

Three-month copper futures on the London Metal Exchange, the global benchmark, hit a seven-year high earlier this month. With the price at $7,984.50 per ton as of Friday, copper futures have risen about 80% from a low in March when the coronavirus was wreaking havoc in China.

Ever since the spread of infections settled down there, the Chinese government has been propping up the economy through public works investment and other steps. “In China, there is a shortage of many industrial products, and this is spreading to materials,” said Naohiro Niimura, a partner at Japanese commodities consultancy Market Risk Advisory.

China’s monthly imports of copper ingots and related products are well above year-earlier levels in volume terms. Meanwhile, many mines in South America and elsewhere have been forced to cut output due to COVID-19 infections. (more…)

With each new trade we must believe the following:

1.  Consistent profitability has nothing to do with our predictive abilities.

2.  With each new trade we cannot place any undeserved significance (e.g. “this is the perfect setup”) on its outcome.

3.  We cannot expect the trade to do anything for us other than provide the information needed for us to either hold or exit.   The process by which we have determined our trade setup will also be our guide for exiting (win, lose, or draw).

4.  We accept that we have control over the process but absolutely no control over the outcome.

5. We accept that our current trade setup may look exactly like past opportunities, profitable or not, but may produce an entirely different result due to the collective beliefs and decisions of other market participants.

Enjoy ( Must Read )

Paul Singer

From Forbes:

Coming off a huge debt deal with Argentina, hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer’s advise is to be wary of expert advice. “The important turning points in markets are never identified with precision in advance by ‘experts’ and policymakers. This lack of foresight is not surprising, because markets and the course of the economy are not model-able scientific phenomena but rather are examples of mass human behavior, which are never predictable with anything like precision,” says Singer. “But what is surprising is that even the most sophisticated investors, traders and commentators continue to rely on predictions issued by those who have no record of success at such forecasts.”

Nice.

A Brilliant New Speech, George Soros Reveals The Exact Moment That Angela Merkel Started The Euro Crisis

His key warning:

In my judgment the authorities have a three months’ window during which they could still correct their mistakes and reverse the current trends. By the authorities I mean mainly the German government and the Bundesbank because in a crisis the creditors are in the driver’s seat and nothing can be done without German support.

He ends with a plea:
We need to do whatever we can to convince Germany to show leadership and preserve the European Union as the fantastic object that it used to be. The future of Europe depends on it.

June 02, 2012

Ever since the Crash of 2008 there has been a widespread recognition, both among economists and the general public, that economic theory has failed. But there is no consensus on the causes and the extent of that failure.

I believe that the failure is more profound than generally recognized. It goes back to the foundations of economic theory. Economics tried to model itself on Newtonian physics. It sought to establish universally and timelessly valid laws governing reality. But economics is a social science and there is a fundamental difference between the natural and social sciences. Social phenomena have thinking participants who base their decisions on imperfect knowledge. That is what economic theory has tried to ignore.

Scientific method needs an independent criterion, by which the truth or validity of its theories can be judged. Natural phenomena constitute such a criterion; social phenomena do not. That is because natural phenomena consist of facts that unfold independently of any statements that relate to them. The facts then serve as objective evidence by which the validity of scientific theories can be judged. That has enabled natural science to produce amazing results.

Social events, by contrast, have thinking participants who have a will of their own.  They are not detached observers but engaged decision makers whose decisions greatly influence the course of events. Therefore the events do not constitute an independent criterion by which participants can decide whether their views are valid. In the absence of an independent criterion people have to base their decisions not on knowledge but on an inherently biased and to greater or lesser extent distorted interpretation of reality. Their lack of perfect knowledge or fallibility introduces an element of indeterminacy into the course of events that is absent when the events relate to the behavior of inanimate objects. The resulting uncertainty hinders the social sciences in producing laws similar to Newton’s physics. (more…)

Super forecasting: the Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock -Book Review

I have found the bookSuperforecasting: the Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock to be interesting, provocative and useful. I strongly recommend it.

Philip Tetlock is on the faculty of Wharton in the Management Department, and Dan Gardner is a journalist and author.

The basic story is that Philip Tetlock and his colleagues formed the Good Judgment Project (or “GJP”), and joined a prediction competition sponsored by the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity, or IARPA, which is the intelligence community’s version of DARPA. GJP recruited volunteer forecasters, gave them some basic training, and put them into teams. The GJP teams were so successful that eventually the competing groups, including Michigan and MIT, were shut down or merged with Tetlock’s group. As they screened out their most successful participants, Tetlock called them “superforecasters”. (more…)

Evidence Based Trading

The late Ayn Rand emphasized that philosophy was the most practical of disciplines: it governs the ideas that lie behind all we do and think. The philosophical premises we assume affect how we approach trading.
A beautiful example of this is David Aronson’s new book, “Evidence-Based Technical Analysis”. It’s a well-written, thought-provoking text, with many practical examples of how to conduct data analysis in an objective way.
Starting with the premise that knowledge consists of statements that are found to be true, Aronson, writing in the positivist tradition of philosophy, excludes subjectivity as knowledge. He explains:
“The most important consequence of TA adopting the scientific method would be the elimination of subjective approaches. Because they are not testable, subjective methods are shielded from empirical challenge. This makes them worse than wrong. They are meaningless propositions devoid of information. Their elimination would make TA an entirely objective practice.” p. 148
This is bound to rub many traders the wrong way, but it’s an important challenge. What is knowledge? How do we know what we know in the markets? How can we demonstrate that knowledge is such, and not illusion? (more…)

Evidence Based Trading: Why Philosophy Matters

A beautiful example of this is David Aronson’s new book, “Evidence-Based Technical Analysis”. It’s a well-written, thought-provoking text, with many practical examples of how to conduct data analysis in an objective way.

Starting with the premise that knowledge consists of statements that are found to be true, Aronson, writing in the positivist tradition of philosophy, excludes subjectivity as knowledge. He explains:

“The most important consequence of TA adopting the scientific method would be the elimination of subjective approaches. Because they are not testable, subjective methods are shielded from empirical challenge. This makes them worse than wrong. They are meaningless propositions devoid of information. Their elimination would make TA an entirely objective practice.” p. 148

This is bound to rub many traders the wrong way, but it’s an important challenge. What is knowledge? How do we know what we know in the markets? How can we demonstrate that knowledge is such, and not illusion?

Once we start with the premise that all knowledge consists of explicit propositions that can be tested for truth, we necessarily are led toward trading that is rule-based and rigorously backtested.

Is there another, *valid* form of knowledge and trading? Can we prove that?The late Ayn Rand emphasized that philosophy was the most practical of disciplines: it governs the ideas that lie behind all we do and think. The philosophical premises we assume affect how we approach trading.

Predictions vs. Expectations

There are two VERY DIFFERENT terms to consider when it comes to trading: 1) Prediction and 2) expectation (or confidence) surrounding the prediction. 

Placing a trade involves making a prediction. It is not possible to place a trade without making a prediction, and that is true even for trades that might or might not execute, such as those placed using a stop order or limit order, for example.

Every trader who places a trade does so because the trader believes there is some chance, greater than 0%, that the trade will be beneficial, perhaps based on historical probability (back testing) perhaps based on intuition (years of trading experience) perhaps based on hopes and prayers or possibly based on nothing more than a need to gamble. Whatever the basis, there must be SOME chance to benefit or else the trader would not entertain it. The trader predicts he or she will benefit, or else the trader does not enter a trade order.

No matter what the prediction may be, so long as the EXPECTATIONS for the prediction are based in reality, there is nothing inherently wrong with making a prediction. As long as a trader accepts a 30% win rate, for example, and makes allowances accordingly, there is nothing wrong with taking such a trade. The same is true for trades with 50/50 odds, as long as the trader properly predicts, expects, and is prepared for 50% failures; which is why it is possible to flip a coin and still be successful. 

Many successful traders may say they never predict, when what they may really mean is that they never EXPECT their prediction to come true. Thus they may say things like “I only react” when more accurately they are reacting… to a failed prediction. For, it is virtually impossible to trade without predicting. So, I say to all you new traders out there “Don’t be afraid to predict. Just know how likely it is that you’ll be wrong, and know what to do when your prediction fails!”