John Maynard Keynes, Investment Innovator

Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 27, Number 3—Summer 2013—Pages 213–228

By David Chambers and Elroy Dimson

When John Maynard Keynes managed the endowment of King’s College at hen John Maynard Keynes managed the endowment of King’s College at Cambridge University, the actively managed part of his portfolio beat the performance of the British common stock index by an average of 8 percentage points vs the British common stock index by an average of 8 percentage points per year from 1921 to 1946.

Six Years of Bitcoin

As you can see from the chart below, most of the time Bitcoin is uneventful or pleasant. Occasionally it is neither uneventful, nor pleasant.

Histogram of BTC.png

Over this period, returns have been 70% annualized with an annualized standard deviation of 75%. The chart below provides a logarithmic perspective.

Correl(Log Daily Price, Log Daily Volume) = 0.95

Correl(Log Daily Price, Log Daily Volume) = 0.95

Human Misjudgement - Animated

  • Psychological Denial
  • Agency Costs
  • Apply discounts
  • Learn basic elements of advisers' trade, ask him to explain why he is right
  • Bias from commitment tendency
  • Bias from Pavlovian association, 3/4 of advertising works on pure Pavlov
  • Economics, in many cases when you raise the price, it will get a larger market share, pure old Pavlov
  • Bias from reciprocation tendency, acting as others expect
  • Ask for a lot and back off
  • Over-influenced by social proof, that is the conclusions of others, particularly under the conditions of natural uncertainty and stress
  • Oil company buys a fertilizer company, all other oil companies follow suit, all waste capital
  • Bias from contrast distortion
  • Cognition mimics sensation
  • Real estate broker, first think you do is take them to the most awful overpriced houses, then take him to a moderately overpriced house and then you stick him
  • Bias from over-influenced by authority
  • Bias from deprive super-reaction syndrome.  Removal of something almost possessed but not ever actually possessed.  The disaster of New Coke... The feeling of BAR BAR Lemon at the slot machine... Boy do the people that build casinos understand human psychology! 
  • Pepsi was within weeks of having old coke in a Pepsi bottle... Would have been one of the biggest disasters of all time.
  • It is not greed that drives the world, it is envy
  • Bias from chemical dependency, always involves large states of denial and causes a breakdown
  • Lotteries, where you don't get to pick the number get little play, lotteries where you get to pick the number, get big play
  • Bias from liking distortion, tendency not to learn appropriately from someone disliked
  • Other normal limitations of sensation, memory cognition and knowledge 
  • Stress induced mental changes, dogs conditioned by Pavlov, great Leningrad flood occurred, dogs were extremely stressed as they feared for their lives as the water was rising, the water receded in time to save some of the dogs and Pavlov noted that they had a total reversal of their conditioned personality. Spent the rest of his life giving nervous breakdowns to dogs.