{"id":2344,"date":"2014-12-02T19:03:36","date_gmt":"2014-12-03T00:03:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=2344"},"modified":"2014-12-02T19:03:36","modified_gmt":"2014-12-03T00:03:36","slug":"epsilon-theory-salient-partners-signs-and-portents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=2344","title":{"rendered":"Epsilon Theory – Salient Partners | Signs and Portents"},"content":{"rendered":"

Epsilon Theory – Salient Partners | Signs and Portents<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Like the criminals that Bruce Wayne fought as Batman, we investors are a superstitious, cowardly lot. We are constantly ascribing way too much import to this sign or that sign, constantly freaking out over the meaning and significance of this market event or that market event. It doesn\u2019t help that the financial media world has devolved into fiefdoms of rah-rah soothsayers on the one hand and doom-seeing end-timers on the other, so that whatever our predispositions might be we can easily find Voices of Authority to read the entrails to our liking.\u00a0And it really doesn\u2019t help that we are in the midst of the\u00a0greatest crisis of faith in the markets since the 1930\u2019s<\/a>, so that \u2013 as Stephen King wrote \u2013 we survive by looking for day-to-day signs to show us what to do.<\/b>

And yet sometimes a little freaking out over the signs and portents is clearly the right thing to do. Sure, if your nanny declares her loyalty to your adopted-under-mysterious-circumstances devil-child as she hangs herself outside the nursery window it\u2019s probably a case of mental illness, but I\u2019d also listen a little more closely to what that pesky priest says. If you\u2019re Pierce Brosnan in the \u201cBag of Bones\u201d mini-series and you think that your dead wife is sending you cryptic messages via a handful of refrigerator magnets \u2026 well, maybe you should drive into town and buy more refrigerator magnets, see if she\u2019s got anything interesting to say. If you\u2019re Desdemona and you\u2019re worried that Othello\u2019s lip-biting is a sign that he\u2019s about to fall into a jealous, murderous rage \u2026 well, maybe you should run out of the room instead of hanging around to see if you\u2019re right.

It\u2019s a tough call, evaluating what\u2019s a \u201ctrue\u201d sign and what\u2019s a \u201cfalse\u201d sign.\u00a0Are we being foolish to sell our energy stocks after oil prices took another big hit, or are we reading the market\u2019s tea leaves correctly and saving ourselves a lot of future pain?<\/b>\u00a0Are we acting as Shakespeare says any wise person would in a knowable and deterministic world, by putting on our cloaks as clouds appear and looking for the night as the sun sets?\u00a0Or are we mistaking our play-acting market world for the real world, putting on our cloaks as the projectionist shows us a picture of clouds and looking for the night as the stage lights dim?\u00a0<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Epsilon Theory – Salient Partners | Signs and Portents. Like the criminals that Bruce Wayne fought as Batman, we investors are a superstitious, cowardly lot. We are constantly ascribing way too much import to this sign or that sign, constantly freaking out over the meaning and significance of this market event or that market event. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[244,263,594,1581],"class_list":["post-2344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-economics-2","tag-energy","tag-oil-prices","tag-signs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2344"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2345,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2344\/revisions\/2345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}