I barely scraped by with a ‘C’ in grad school statistics! Also, blog writers certainly can use a good editor! I believe I could have used a better word than “correlate” in context. Perhaps “translate” would have been a better word?

@ Clem:

I agree with your comment but I would guess that most momentum players ACTED as if home values and personal income would continue rising in perpetuity.

Similarly, it is reasonable to assume that we all know that we will die; however, most of us ACT as if we will live forever or at least that our death day is far into the distance when it is possible that death can come this very day.

@TakBoko4:

To add to your comment about kids and their parents, I also observed a teenage boy in Disney quickly walking with his father (apparently on their way to the next ride). The boy was watching a movie on his father’s iPhone. The father turned to the boy and said, “Turn off that movie! You’re wasting my battery!”

I quickly thought two things: 1) The boy is missing the greater experience — the present moment in one of the most magical places on earth. 2) The father was not concerned that his boy is disengaged with life by playing with gadgets but only that his iPhone battery might run out while in the park!

I didn’t carry my phone or even a watch in Disney.

Thanks to all for the comments and to Barry for inviting me to write this post!

Cheers…

Kent @ The Financial Philosopher

Apparently this quant didn’t get the memo:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant?currentPage=all

I don’t think so. It was simply another form of Momentum Trading and most momo players are fully aware that trends don’t last forever.

“…Driving a Lexus, wearing designer clothes and living in a large home does not, by default, correlate with positive financial wealth…”

These status symbols either do, or do not correlate with a positive net worth. The default scenario is the scenario. An r-squared exists, it will give you a statistical understanding of the correlation. In other words, those status symbols may correlate with positive financial wealth. In fact, I’d bet they do.

Now, they might not correlate with financial wealth of certain specific, high ranges, but an r-squared exists for them too.

——————

Is Kids “living within themselves” a new phenomenon….?

At this level, I feel it differs from what I grew up with where we also “lived within oursleves” but had some family members who violently rebelled and restricted us and told us to go OUT THERE AND GET SOME AIR in the REAL WORLD.”

I wonder how that goes. It’s difficult to do that today. If I had had free reign to “Face Book” or “My Space” being a “quiet sort” I might have made my own reality in those Forums and never sought out anything different.

In my day…it was the Public Library…to get away…these days…it’s going on vacations or out to social occasions with Mom and Dad where the I-Phone/Game Phone is ever present. Dinners are punctuated with “clicking sounds of texting” and the SELF IDENTITY is the way to be noticed in a shrinking people/personhood environment.

What’s good is that geekies can connect with fellow geeks and the Poker Players/Traders can connect with their own…and so it keeps the interaction down in human discourse and discontent in the Middle Schools and High Schools.

One can walk around perfectly content in one’s own “Virtual Community” and AT LAST never have to deal with the others. Yet it does seem that suicides and teen depression is on the rise… But, that also means that those who have the MONEY from PARENTS to have ACCESS to VIRTUAL WORLDS will be able to find their own VIRTUAL WORLD…and the poor will be left to Prison or Drugs to deal.

Well…I don’t want to be gloomy or too simplistic here with my hyperbole. But, truly…I do worry about the ability of the kids who have access to Face Book and My Space having a healthier life than those who have no outlet but the reality of their daily contact…face to face with their peers…and how THEY DEAL.

It’s something we need to think about as a society. How “Our Kids” (folks on this site) cope as opposed to those who have nothing. And, by nothing…..meaning no untamned wilderness….new vistas to explore beyond the apartment in Urban Lifestyles and the ever growing CONTIANMENT of the Surburban/Ex-URBAN new GHETTOS where kids are confined from EXPLORATION of our earth.

The parents with Lawn Services where the kids don’t rake leaves for parents or earn extra money raking leaves for neighbors. (No ties to the land when the “Lawn Service” comes once a week and does the job) and where those “high tech” swing sets complete with the “Tented Forts” (the stuff we oldies used to build out of cardboard boxes or scrap wood in back yards years ago) go unused after parents forked out money for them and the kids turned cold “fish eye” because they’d rather be “gaming” with the newest tech toys.

Who knows where this all goes. Perhaps we only need to experience nature and building with tech innovation inside our bedroom walls. Perhaps VIRTUAL is really the way civilization is going and to be a Luddite is to say Fresh Air and “Build it out of REAL CAST OFFS” is the challenge for creative thinking that kids have always used to learn to get ahead and get some “space” away from Parents…that all kids really want for some times in their life.

Or, is it better to be sitting and gaming or building or innovating with your I-Phone or other Device while at Grandma and Granpa’s for Thanksgiving Dinner? One could go through the whole boring thing while finding new and creative things to do “clicking away.”

Maybe it’s just the best new thing…and going to Disney or the rest…is just a great distraction from kids who have a different direction these days?

As I said…who knows? Lot’s of new things going on…sifting and sorting…

Or do we compromise with the technology… (checking our I-Phones or Blackberries) while we display to our kids how we “experience the fantasy.)

Thank you for your reply.. I think you are trying to grapple with what we all are these days. That you say the disconnects…. Well… it was good. How do we deal with all of this that we try to show our kids…and yet the reality of what they grow up with will outweigh much.

Anyway…I hear ‘ya.

And thanks for your reply. As a “benchwatcher myself”….I understand …in these times…maybe one can’t make a living with observations of that..if it doesn’t have monetary value.

But…good to know that your perspective of that (soak in the environment from park bench) center is there….we are all trying to balance that..OH MAN…it AIN’T EASY! Those views from the Park Bench often prove to be more real…than the other crap out there we slog ourselves through.

Anyway…it was an interesting post and glad for Barry that he has buddies who post that cause us to push further in our minds…in these times.

It’s interesting that you wanted more of my “conclusions” from my Disney visit. I actually edited out several sentences detailing many of my observations from Disney and some of the conclusions drawn.

One observation of Disney I thought was interesting came the night I watched the “Wishes” fireworks display in the Magic Kingdom, which may be the most fantastic and most thought-out display of fireworks in the world. Perhaps it was the immense draw to remain in an “illusion” or perhaps it was the irresistable pull from the brain’s frontal lobe to constantly think of the future; but half of the crowd missed the fireworks display because their eyes were glued to their own camcorder, iPhone, cell phone camera or some other recording device.

I’m all for recording magical moments for posterity but there is no way that any recording device could match the intensity of experiencing the event with the naked eye. So many people seemed to be in a hurry to capture the magic with a camera or to get to the next ride that they missed the opportunity to simply “be there” in the present moment.

I often would sit on a bench and just watch people and soak in the environment. I’d rather recall the “real thing” in my mind than see something that pales in comparison later.

Thanks for the comment…

Kent

Read your interesting post…but it seemed you “wimped out at the end” as to the REAL conclusions you got out of your Disney Visit.

I wish you had gone more into the personal…(where it is today) rather than “drifting off” into “algorithmic and jargonish spew.

I loved reading it …although the “hype” was more than the “meat” of the article. Hope to hear more from you because your lede was a big HOOK that got me.