Tag: Fads

Bear in mind the gambler’s advice: if you don’t know who is the patsy in the room, it’s you.

The anthropomorphic metaphor of the market is too relativist, the view of the market as a voting machine is too rationalist: to take either too seriously leads to error.

Business seeks clarity but demands sensitivity to particular circumstances, looks for certainty but resents detailed prescription, and as they grumble business people fail to recognise the incompatibility of these demands.

Models are only as good as the correspondence between the model and the world, and this is where problems begin.

The appeal of separatism in modern Scotland is linked to the country’s relative economic decline, as self- congratulation turns to grievance in response to failure.

Private equity promoters propose layer upon layer of debt, leveraged by non-recourse finance. But the same finance theory also tells us that you do not increase the value of an investment portfolio by increasing gearing.

The paradox is that if you do not have complete control over your emotions, you can have too much information for your own good.

Congestion charging can have a substantial effect on behaviour, but busy commercial centres tend to derive their advantages from the clustering of business activities, which cannot function without large-scale transport of people and goods.

The right general principle is that brand names and trade marks should be protected, not where there is a producer interest in doing so, but where there is a consumer detriment from failing to do so.

If the measure of skill is how often good performance repeats itself, poker is a more skilful activity than investment management.