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

To: carranza2 who wrote (73369)	5/6/2010 5:07:48 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

C2, it remains the case that the robots are still just machines which are told what to do and how to think by their PhD powered mathematicians reflecting regular, garden variety human desires. <It was the unthinking, unfeeling, un-intuitive robots at work. After LTCM, one would think that the allegedly intelligent Masters of the Universe would know better. > Keep in mind that evolutionary processes involved the vast majority of attempts to fail, leaving the intelligent to carry on. Even the supremely intelligent God-like have to take risks, even though they attempt to get those risks low. Some of them [most of them] will fail, leaving those with even more intelligence to carry on. The test of intelligence is reality, not having previously got top honours in mathematics and financial relativity theory. Luck is part of the deal and even the bestest of the best are still subject to bad luck. But on top of that luck is sitting intelligence. As Tiger Woods said to Michael Campbell who beat him to win the US Open a few years ago, when asked how you go on doing this .... "You keep trying and perfecting and sometimes you get lucky". Tiger doesn't always win. Now Rory is roaring along, having fun and demonstrating phenomenal pure talent, just as Tiger did, wandering, grinning, down the home straight at Augusta, 12 strokes ahead, all those years ago. It's not proof that the Masters of the Universe are not masters merely because some of them die in the attempt, many of them simply because of bad luck. Plenty are carrying on - Warren Buffett for example. Globalstar precipitated the LTCM crash and Asian Contagion because two onboard faulty computers outvoted the correct computer during the launch of the Zenit rocket across Siberia. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. That's not far off bad luck. If the launch had succeeded, I would probably not have lost my money [though management of Globalstar seemed determined to persevere with dopey marketing plans]. LTCM would have been considered amazing geniuses. QCOM is racing down with the rest and I still have all my shares. But that's okay. I was getting close to selling but decided that I'd ride the trough and buy in at the bottom, using profits from JPM and WFC shorts [and further dividends from QCOM]. NZ$ has been defying gravity. While NZ's economy is doing, superficially, just fine, that's on the back of low interest rates which are "sure to rise", like Edmonds Baking Powder [a century old NZ tradition for baking]. Regarding debt resolution, it isn't necessary for the world to have an economic implosion and drops in production. What's required is a change in who gets to buy the production - previously it was those borrowing, now it should become those saving. But the tradition of governments is to rob savers when such times arrive and for rioters to destroy everything on the basis that if they can't have it, nobody will. Which results in them really going down for the count because I'd be happy to hire them, at reduced pay, but if they destroy what I have too, then I won't be hiring them and they'll have to eat grass or dirt. Judging by finance.yahoo.com getting bogged down many times today, a LOT of people must be clicking flat out, wondering what the heck is happening to their money. Mqurice