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Strategies & Market Trends : MDA - Market Direction Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: j g cordes who wrote (11344)	4/18/1999 11:00:00 AM
From: j g cordes	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 99985

Thoughts concerning the relationship between computer systems and humans and markets. This is from my book in progress on markets and I welcome comment. If one considers that the computer is evolving into an information delivery machine, much like a TV.. but through the complexity of the internet, then its apparent that the ratio of delivered information to self created information is growing by leaps and bounds on the delivery side. This poses some interesting problems and has changed the character of the market. Problem one is how do we as individuals deal with the deluge of information? We have a fixed amount of time each day to read the paper, watch the news, respond and search out personal or business related data. A greater diversity of information delivery devices is being constructed in our environment from outdoor ads of every kind like billboards to more personal devices like TV, movies, newspapers, magazines, mail, radio and those nasty subliminal devices. With computers the delivery environment expands another level, it gets inside the messages and becomes a part of the content we negociate our lives with. Problem two is how does the information industry organize and present itself when each individual has less time and attention span? Less time and attention means restricting the time to respond and restricting the range of responses one can make. If they can't interview you for an hour, then the minute they do have has to be structured as yes/no answers. There isn't room for opinion, coloration or depth of response as yes/no answers are ususally pre-constructed to confirm or exclude something that's already been decided. So on the one hand we have an increasing diversity of information sources to respond to, while on the other hand we have the delivery business contracting its content in response to our ever decreasing attention spans. Problem three is how is this reflected in the market. Momentum playing as a percentage of trading is outstripping the norms of value and cyclical trading. This in part is because the information delivery/response environment has changed as described above. Short term, decreased attention span with nearly reflex hyper-responses to limited yes/no information about the trade is the new norm. We don't wait for content to motivate a trade, we respond to fluctuations of price and volume through devices that respond to devices. Jim