By Vikas Shah (Originally for AllAboutAlpha.com) Modern markets are hugely complex environments. CME Group for example, trades over 3 billion contracts (with a notional value of over U$1 quadrillion) each and every year. Alongside this, many of the world’s largest companies such as Google, Alibaba and Amazon (with market capitalisations…
“Macroeconomics has not done well in recent years…” writes Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, “The standard models didn’t predict the Great Recession; and even said it couldn’t happen. After the bubble burst, the models did not predict the full consequences.” In a hugely relevant recent paper titled “Reconstructing Macroeconomic Theory…
Each and every year, I have the pleasure of judging at the Rice Business Plan Competition. Tens of thousands of enterprising students from around the world compete, with a handful making it to the finals in Houston, Texas. At this incredible event, student entrepreneurs pitch to the crème-de-la-crème of global…
Money is a strange phenomenon. Our modern notion of it mean that (in essence) it is intrinsically useless apart from as a medium of exchange. Our government, regulators, law and communities agree that phenomena (whether a physical banknote or an electronic ledger such as a bank account) have certain value,…
Many of recent history’s most significant market events have manifest in what was (previously) the extreme of the market. These “bubbles” and “crashes” follow power laws, meaning that (in theory) they could reach any size and fundamentally threaten the functionality of the entire financial system. Typical central-bank and policy…
It’s quite conceivable that the grandparents (or even parents) of the future will be made to feel even more archaic as the young of that generation look at them quizzically and state “…are you serious? You used to use bits of paper as money?!” Money is a cultural abstract. It…
The perception that we learn from our mistakes is just one in a long-list of cognitive and behavioural biases that exist in the human mind. As WIRED reported in 2009, “Researchers from MIT have shown that the brain learns more after a success than a failure. This study indicates, contrary…
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It was her death that actually made us say 'right, that's it – we've talked a lot but we haven't done anything. Now we've got to do something'. And that's when Zoo Check began which is what we were called in those days.
You create change in other people when you're totally honest, transparent, and authentic. When you show people who you really are, with all your flaws, with all your vulnerabilities…it moves them.
We engage in this kind of behaviour even more enthusiastically when we're anxious about being excluded or left out.
There's an adage, 'you don't ask? You don't get!' And in the curious world of humans, this applies more than you'd expect. You'd be astonished at how many people kick themselves after an event not having secured the contact they wanted to, or speaking to the person they had aimed for. In truth, this came down to not being bold enough.
Education attenuates conspiracism such as those without a high school diploma are twice as likely to believe conspiracy theories than people with a graduate degree. But 1 in 5 people with a graduate degree believe in conspiracy theories, which is 20% – that is a high number. Education does not entirely eliminate it.
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