Really Bad Hair Day

Bad hair day doesn’t begin to describe the awfulness of a day of real negativity.  There are days when the sun just seems to go out.  Everything you normally find pleasant or interesting becomes grey and dull and pointless.

Somewhere or other, if you look deep down there may be some trigger.  A task or project you were enjoying yesterday hits a brick wall today; or perhaps you perceive a brick wall where none is there in reality.

It is the sort of day when you really don’t want to be you at all.  It is the sort of day when you are almost literally paralyzed and any mental or physical activity becomes so impossibly onerous, the only thing to do is to switch off. Turn the lights out. Refuse to think. Refuse to move.  Goodnight Sooty.

It is hard to know how “normal” such an experience is.  Do “normal” people get to feel like this? It seems unlikely.

Today was triggered by a foray back into the world of trading and quantitative analysis. And the realisation that, for me at least, that world is something I ought to leave behind and never look back on.

The trap is the “El Dorado” mindset.  In terms of trading, it is the nagging suspicion that there is something out there that you have missed, some end of the rainbow which, if traced to its origin, will produce a vulgarly big pot of gold.

The trading world as well as the markets themselves are mostly full of “noise”.   Well, “shyte” might actually be a more accurate description.

Meaningless chatter going nowhere; trading “advisors” and coaches; prolific academics churning out moonshine papers where they claim this or that significance in a “new” avenue of finance.

The harsh reality of financial markets is that they are largely unpredictable and any attempt to forecast price is doomed to failure. Unless you have some advantage not generally available.

There is nothing so damaging to the health as chasing the end of a rainbow.  Like the unicorn, it is a myth.