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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stock Farmer who wrote (26617)	12/30/2002 1:51:15 AM
From: TobagoJack	Respond to of 74559

Hello John, Happy holidays to you and may 2003 be as interesting to you as I hope for me:0) BTW, FWIW, IMHO, I won on the CSCO bet as defined in my own fashion, with the low price of the year being USD 8.x. My guess was not for year-end price, but for the year's low;0) Next year, CSCO low will be USD 5. Chugs, Jay

To: Stock Farmer who wrote (26617)	12/30/2002 7:18:30 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 74559

<Gravity works, reversion to the mean rules, each wave crest of the ocean is followed by a trough, and then another wave crest, nothing lasts forever, and often a lot less than forever, et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, so on and, oh you know, so forth.> and <as we might pixelate the Golden Rule: "Do unto others before they do it unto you". > John, fine sentiments in a zero-sum game of territorial conquest, possession being nine points of the law, wealth as a fixed amount and where voluntary interaction creating consumer surplus is not part of the rules. Similarly for Jay's theorem on reversion to the mean etc. Yes, that's true to some extent, but overlaying that is the more powerful teleological purpose of life, the universe and everything. I don't know where we're going, but we're on our way. We can see where we've been more clearly. We have come from an unbroken chain of DNA going back to pre-Cambrian primordial soup, with ever-increasing consumer surplus. If we look back over the last century, but over all of time too, we see no reversion to the mean. Other than in narrow financial terms like P:E ratios, interest rates, inflation rates, currency exchange rates, etc fluctuating around a more or less mean. But if we look back over the Dow for a century or two, we see an increasing level, glitches such as the 1890s, 1929, 1974, 1987 and Y2K notwithstanding. We have seen an increasing human population for multimillennia. We have seen increasing wealth for multimillennia. We have seen increasing emphasis on intangible zero marginal cost of production [replication] values [writing, music, art, communication, software, money, law]. This is all lasting forever and increasing. Well, forever is a long time, but until It takes over anyway. I suppose your golden rule is correct. Create CDMA and give it to others before they give it to you. Then, they'll give you something in exchange. Each transaction will involve a consumer surplus and the never-ending process will continue. There's no zero sum - each trade involves consumer surplus [if only wishful - sometimes both parties lose]. There's always entropy. Consumer surplus is the opposing force to entropy. Maybe eventually entropy will win and the whole universe will go black hole on us. But there seems to be a lot of scope for consumer surplus development to continue, along with entropy. Okay, admittedly I'm slinging the analogies around a bit carelessly, but I dare say you get my drift. Mqurice