本质上说，市场是一部复杂的投票机器，它是一帮有着不同前景参照点（来自行为金融中的前景理论）的资金代言人，不断对经济基本面、流动性和风险情绪这三个决定性要素，进行按资金量加权的动态双重投票过程──第一重是赋予这三个要素不同权重：经济数据公布的时候（包含业绩发布的关键报表时刻），权重都在基本面上；央行领导讲话时，最多的权重加在流动性上；而地缘危机和雷曼时刻，避险情绪又占据了99%的考量。第二重则是给这种投票赋予资金量的权重，大资本的话语权总是高于散户，尽管他们也不一定总对。同时，每个投资人的参考点是不一样，这就导致对于同一消息的不同判断，例如QE退出，有人觉得流动性会变差，有人觉得这是经济走强的信号，而这会导致不同的交易行为。
所谓市场一致预期不过是相对得到公认的参照点，因此市场总体是根据个体相对一致预期的预期差来做反应，而其控制的资金量筹码起到权重作用。在这个过程中，晴雨表式的厂商（包括意见领袖）的作用就是试图建立能够影响市场判断的重要参考点，操纵其间的预期差，并从中渔利。市场每时每刻就在这种动态、混乱，而且略显神经质的投票过程中随机游走。http://cn.wsj.com/gb/20130710/SHY071549.asp
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Margaret Thatcher: Freedom fighter | The Economist
as when she came to it.
She was also often outrageously lucky: lucky that the striking miners were led by Arthur Scargill, a hardline Marxist; lucky that the British left fractured and insisted on choosing unelectable leaders; lucky that General Galtieri decided to invade the Falkland Islands when he did; lucky that she was a tough woman in a system dominated by patrician men (the wets never knew how to cope with her); lucky in the flow of North Sea oil; and above all lucky in her timing. The post-war consensus was ripe for destruction, and a host of new forces, from personal computers to private equity, aided her more rumbustious form of capitalism.
The verdict of history
Criticism of her comes in two forms. First, that she could have done more had she wielded her handbag more deftly. Hatred, it is true, sometimes blinded her. Infuriated by the antics of left-wing local councils, she ended
Margaret Thatcher: Freedom fighter | The Economist
ONLY a handful of peacetime politicians can claim to have changed the world. Margaret Thatcher was one. She transformed not just her own Conservative Party, but the whole of British politics. Her enthusiasm for privatisation launched a global revolution and her willingness to stand up to tyranny helped to bring an end to the Soviet Union. Winston Churchill won a war, but he never created an “-ism”.
The essence of Thatcherism was to oppose the status quo and bet on freedom—odd, since as a prim, upwardly mobile striver, she was in some ways the embodiment of conservatism. She thought nations could become great only if individuals were set free. Unlike Churchill’s famous pudding, her struggles had a theme: the right of individuals to run their own lives, as free as possible from micromanagement by the state.
In this section
- Freedom fighter
- Revolution in the air
- Right target, wrong shots
- Memento Modi
- A new specie
Related topics
In her early years in politics, economic liberalism was in retreat, the Soviet Union was extending its empire, and Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek were dismissed as academic eccentrics. In Britain the government hobnobbed with trade unions (“beer and sandwiches in Number 10”), handed out subsidies to failing nationalised industries and primed the pump through Keynesian demand management. To begin with the ambitious young politician went along with this consensus (see article). But the widespread notion that politics should be “the management of decline” made her blood boil. The ideas of Friedman and Hayek persuaded her that things could be different.
Saturday, March 10, 2012
Life's Messy. Train Your Brain to Adapt
What's the Big Idea?
Margaret Moore is the founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital. Paul Hammerness, MD, is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Together, they hope to get at the physical and psychological roots of chaos. In a recent interview, Moore told Big Think that there is a cognitive basis for chronic disorganization.
Organization, she says, is not just about a cluttered desk. It’s about self-regulation, a skill that is developed by the pre-frontal cortex--the seat of executive function in the brain. The left pre-frontal cortex regulates your attention: it evaluates, judges, makes decisions. Modern life, with its barrage of incoming emails and phone calls and texts, taxes the pre-frontal cortex, inhibiting the brain’s ability to focus. Those who have naturally strong self-regulation can handle the overload—and those who don’t are left feeling guilty and out of control.
But the plasticity of the brain means we can all learn to be better focused and more organized. “When you can focus all of your brain on one thing, that’s when you’re at your best,
she says. "You’re integrating all your brain. But it also consumes a huge amount of resources. You get tired. That’s really how the brain learns—when the brain is learning, it’s laying down new networks. The brain is changing when we focus. It takes a lot of energy, and when it’s depleted it isn’t able to manage the emotional brain. When your pre frontal cortex is depleted, your emotions rule all day. ”
The quickest way to deal with stress, says Moore, is to summon a positive emotion. In her experience as a counselor, the most successful people are able to cultivate a three to one balance between positive and negative thoughts: “What we’re really talking about is using your brain’s most precious resource, which is your attention, in the way that it allows you to accomplish the most and make the biggest impact on the world.”
So why do we so often fail to stick to our organizational goals? "Perhaps you’ve got the motivation, you’ve got the willpower, but the confidence is crap," she says. "The motivation goes to sleep when you don’t think you can do it. You can only build confidence by doing it, by actually experiencing it." Organization is achieved through future-oriented thinking: the ability to monitor one's emotional response (i.e. "I want to watch TV now!") and redirect attention towards the activities that will help us achieve our goals (i.e. "if I spend 30 minutes doing the dishes now, I will wake up to a clean home tomorrow").
If you learn how your brain works and work with it, you can start to exercise more cognitive control over your own functioning. The first step is to figure out what is it that you really want that being organized will give you. "That’s the fuel that will keep you going when you’re struggling to change your brain," says Moore. "Every time you make a change that lasts, you’re changing your brain."
http://bigthink.com/think-tank/lifes-messy-train-your-brain-to-adapt
Margaret Moore is the founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital. Paul Hammerness, MD, is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Together, they hope to get at the physical and psychological roots of chaos. In a recent interview, Moore told Big Think that there is a cognitive basis for chronic disorganization.
Organization, she says, is not just about a cluttered desk. It’s about self-regulation, a skill that is developed by the pre-frontal cortex--the seat of executive function in the brain. The left pre-frontal cortex regulates your attention: it evaluates, judges, makes decisions. Modern life, with its barrage of incoming emails and phone calls and texts, taxes the pre-frontal cortex, inhibiting the brain’s ability to focus. Those who have naturally strong self-regulation can handle the overload—and those who don’t are left feeling guilty and out of control.
But the plasticity of the brain means we can all learn to be better focused and more organized. “When you can focus all of your brain on one thing, that’s when you’re at your best,
she says. "You’re integrating all your brain. But it also consumes a huge amount of resources. You get tired. That’s really how the brain learns—when the brain is learning, it’s laying down new networks. The brain is changing when we focus. It takes a lot of energy, and when it’s depleted it isn’t able to manage the emotional brain. When your pre frontal cortex is depleted, your emotions rule all day. ”
Q: Can we actually reshape our habits just by thinking?
A: I did a coaching demonstration yesterday with a young woman who is really suffering from clutter at home—really suffering. If you look at the genetic wiring around organization, there’s a good amount of the population who have competent executive function. The other part of the population has better access to their emotions. That’s generalizing a lot, but those folks, like the woman I was coaching yesterday, are very good at living the moment, very good at connecting, they’ve got great emotional intelligence, they can pick up other people’s emotions—but they can’t find their keys. Those folks are really struggling. Privately they feel despair, because their emotional expression is turned high. It’s a strength, in terms of their ability to connect with people, but it’s a weakness when it comes to organizing.
Q: How do you take control, even when you're feeling overwhelmed?
A: Negativity is a very important part of life. When you have negative emotions, they have a message to give you—and they’re very good at getting it through. They overtake the good. They’re like crying babies demanding your attention. And so the first thing to say is, don’t permanently suppress them. Listen to them and figure out, ‘is this an error message? Or is this something I really need to pay attention to?’ The limbic system is an old part of the brain. It takes in a lot of input from a lot of places faster than they get to the thinking brain. So there’s often something important in the negative. Stress is the trigger for learning and growth. Stress is what makes us accomplish things. It’s not that it’s bad. It’s part of life. It’s not that you want to wipe it off the board. It’s more about what your relationship is with the negative.
Stress is designed biologically to be powerful; it takes over your brain much more than positive emotion. Your heart rate goes up, you breathe faster; your blood pressure goes up. It makes you ready to respond. It’s got a purpose, but it doesn’t help when it’s time to sit down and work on something for thirty minutes. Naming the emotion, giving it a language, in an empathetic caring way—just a little self-empathy instead of ‘I’m an idiot for feeling like this’—that in itself can shift it.What's the Significance?
Q: How do we form these cognitive habits?
A: You have to train yourself. When you encounter the situation, you have to reappraise it. You do this by talking to your irrational emotions. Then practice changing the negative self-talk.
The quickest way to deal with stress, says Moore, is to summon a positive emotion. In her experience as a counselor, the most successful people are able to cultivate a three to one balance between positive and negative thoughts: “What we’re really talking about is using your brain’s most precious resource, which is your attention, in the way that it allows you to accomplish the most and make the biggest impact on the world.”
So why do we so often fail to stick to our organizational goals? "Perhaps you’ve got the motivation, you’ve got the willpower, but the confidence is crap," she says. "The motivation goes to sleep when you don’t think you can do it. You can only build confidence by doing it, by actually experiencing it." Organization is achieved through future-oriented thinking: the ability to monitor one's emotional response (i.e. "I want to watch TV now!") and redirect attention towards the activities that will help us achieve our goals (i.e. "if I spend 30 minutes doing the dishes now, I will wake up to a clean home tomorrow").
If you learn how your brain works and work with it, you can start to exercise more cognitive control over your own functioning. The first step is to figure out what is it that you really want that being organized will give you. "That’s the fuel that will keep you going when you’re struggling to change your brain," says Moore. "Every time you make a change that lasts, you’re changing your brain."
http://bigthink.com/think-tank/lifes-messy-train-your-brain-to-adapt
Saturday, December 3, 2011
icing on the cake - Idioms - by the Free Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.
icing on the cake
something good that is added to another good thing He was delighted to have his story published – getting paid for it was just icing on the cake.
icing on the cake - Idioms - by the Free Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.
Friday, December 2, 2011
If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen
If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen
Meaning
Don't persist with a task if the pressure of it is too much for you. The implication being that, if you can't cope, you should leave the work to someone who can.
Origin
This is widely reported as being coined by US President Harry S. Truman. That's almost correct, but in fact Truman was known to have used it at least as early as 1942 - before becoming president. Here's a citation from an Idaho newspaper The Soda Springs Sun, from July that year:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)