All Epsilon Theory Content
Everything we have published at Epsilon Theory since 2013, an archive of more than 1,000 evergreen notes.
When it comes to politics and social media, making up straw men about our enemies to make them look ridiculous seems like good entertainment. But beware embracing amusing-but-wrong cartoons in zero sum games.
Introducing the Epsilon Theory Discovery Map – a novel way to navigate the Epsilon Theory archives, not based on chronology or author, but based on connectivity, similarity and consistency in the underlying narratives.
We are living in a Golden Age of corporate management competence, driven by the adoption of process technologies and minimax regret strategies. That’s not going to stop in 2019, and it has major implications for your portfolio strategy.
Some resolution season advice for young professionals who would become successful professional investors without becoming charlatans – a task easier said than done.
Complex systems and uncertainty influence us to look for something – anything – to hang our hat on. The problem? We’re prone to hang our hats on extrapolations of the rare facts we can find, many of which have no explanatory power at the margin, where markets live and breathe.
Is it early days with the development of the Narrative Machine? Yes.
But not as early as you might think.
Eight crucial insights on how to incorporate Narrative data into an understanding of markets.
We’ve been doing it wrong with AI for too long. Time to do it right.
We can’t SOLVE for the future of complex social systems like markets or politics with algorithms. But we can CALCULATE the future of these systems with AI.
The problem for markets today is not the Fed.
The problem for markets today is the guy in the White House and his game of Chicken with the world.
We would usually tell you that all information is information. There is no good or bad. No right or wrong. But some things aren’t even information. Knowing what you can ignore is worthwhile.
When our processes of inquiry lack challenge, doubt and obsession with falsifying our best ideas, the result is inevitable. Our conclusions cease to be science and become something else entirely. That something else is a thing sensitive to narrative, vulnerable to priors and bias. That something else is scientism.
It is a frustrating truth that good – even great – investors rarely know exactly what it is that makes them good. And so the inevitable guilty pleasure of investors – building portfolios from the best ideas of their various managers and advisors – is almost always doomed to fail from the beginning.
There is very little that an investor can do to more easily become a better investor than to better understand his behavior. But the investor who relies on awareness, discipline and self-control remains susceptible to a world that seeks to influence his standard for correct behavior.
Imitation is not only the sincerest form of flattery, it’s also the engine behind so much of what we do in both professional baseball and professional investing. The trick, of course, is not to get beaned in the process!
Common knowledge effects, credentialing and missionaries are everywhere. You may differ in your view of their importance, but if your framework doesn’t acknowledge their role in price-setting, you’re not seeing the full picture.
ET contributor Pete Cecchini, better known as Cantor Fitzgerald’s Chief Market Strategist, is back with the December installment of his series, In the Trenches. For ET readers who want a less philosophical but no less smart take on markets, Pete’s your guy.
No matter how much you try to make mama tell you what part of the snake you’re eating, and no matter how much the answer might comfort you, it’s important to know that neither you nor she is telling the truth.
Our December 11 edition of Office Hours has concluded, but subscribers can still catch the replay here.
We are pleased to announce the launch of Epsilon Theory Professional, or ET Pro. It is a service designed to leverage our narrative research more directly for investors and asset owners. Learn more about the types of content and research we’re doing here.
Discretionary investment always and in all ways boils down to two things: edge and odds. In the US-China trade war game of Chicken, you have no edge. And you don’t know the odds. Time to sit this dance out.
We will be live at 2PM on Tuesday, December 11, 2018. Click here to get more information about ET Live, how to subscribe and how to get your questions in for the day.