The Economist Who Realized How Crazy We Are
Comment of the Day

May 29 2015

Commentary by Eoin Treacy

The Economist Who Realized How Crazy We Are

This article by Michael Lewis for Bloomberg may be of interest to students of behavioural technical analysis. Here is a section: 

Enter Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, psychologists at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Together, in the late 1960s, they had set off to confirm their suspicion that the weird self-defeating stuff that people do isn't random and inexplicable but fundamental to human nature. More to the point, human beings were not just occasionally irrational, but systematically irrational. They had predictable biases -- for instance, they were inclined to draw radical conclusions from tiny amounts of information. Their preferences were unstable. When faced with a choice between two things, they responded not to the things themselves but to descriptions of those things. Perhaps most significantly, people responded very differently when a choice was framed as a loss than when it was framed as a gain. Tell a person that he had a 95 percent chance of surviving some medical procedure and he was far more likely to submit to it than if you told him he had a 5 percent chance of dying.

Eoin Treacy's view

The so called noise of irrational movers cancelling one another out is disproved by price trends. Technical analysts have been shouting about this fact for a century and in Asia it was never even a question. At the most basic level fundamental analysis tells you everything you might need to know about the instrument except when to buy or sell. For that we have to look at the price charts. 

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