The market is not random...

Great piece from the oddhead blog here. Great - but in my analysis - wrong....

The markets are not in any shape or form random, in as much as they are not completely unpredictable.


It is to be expected that an analsyis of any daily data would show a random distribution. Movements over relatively long time periods have a stronger, self fulfilling, prohetic capacity due to the effects of mass psychology. Many traders can hold a contrarian point of view for an hour. Fewer, one that contradicts the concensus for a day. Very, very few individuals can hold out for a week, month or year.

In other words, with enough time to come to a concensus, the market tends (not all the time, but tends) to revert to an "established view". The majority of people thinking "the market has dropped 2%, it'll probably bounce back to a fib. point @ 33%" - and on avergae - most of the time, it happens. The net effect being a consistency you see in the oddhead data. where you see an even distribution of larger and smaller price movements to reflect the different states of markets over time. 
If you did this analysis with the week or month stats - it would be even more perfectly distributed.

It does not mean that the markets are perfectly random in the size of their movements however. Not at all.

To find human characteristics. To uncover an edge, you need to look in a little closer. If you were to compare histograms on the hour data - 8:00am compared to 10:00pm for example - you'd see extraordinary differences. At 11 o'clock the histogram would be narrow and taller than at 10:00pm. Price movements would be, on average larger, and more frequent.

Its this short term volatility where a lot of traders find an edge.

Circles and rockstars - great clip...

If they want a new f**k pig - give 'em a pig....

Agencies, clients - we get so caught up in insights, in being clever, in data, in second guessing, in analytics.


We engineer so much complexity into simple issues.

People who run farmville don't.

If they hear from their users that they want a new tractor - they create a new tractor.

Farmville sells 800,000 tractors at $20 a pop every day. They made $115m last year.

How?

They don't overcomplicate things. They don't try and outsmart or outthink anyone.

They stick like glue to the needs of their customers.

And they have fun.

Nothing else matters......Listen to what your customers want and build it for them.

It really, honestly, doesn't get more complex than that.

"Threatening the recovery"

There is no recovery you donkeys.

You've splashed £170b.

1m more people are employed now than they were in 2000.

The public sector grew by 7,000 people last month.

The f**king Titanic would refloat if you pumped that much bloody money into it.

When you stop spending - that's when you'll "threaten the recovery"

And that day is fast approaching - either

because we'll have the other numpties in power

or

the nice people from the IMF will be telling us to chose beween the money taps and the lights

This is not rocket science....

Seems anger really is an energy...

Wherever anger is generated - it lives on in other aspects of life - fascinating here

Imagine if every child in the country was made aware of  this - and 5% applied it to life.....




On a happier note - had a great, hour long conversation with my old tutor last friday

Spent the last year wondering whether I wanted to be a psychotherapist - it turns out I really do

hurray!

without analytics - I lost interest.....

About 6 weeks ago I made some design changes to the blog and inadvertently deleted the analytics tracking code.

Funny thing is. I can see now from my history - I stopped posting.

Without that real time feedback I lost interest.

If that effect is more general - how does that affect online planning? What implications does that have for monitoring and analysis in a marketing team?

social business slides by David Armano

Social Media Is Dead: Long Live Common Sense.

View more presentations from David Armano.

Reimagining the enterprise (in my experience) is the only way a businesses can really grasp the opporunity online.

Its not easy.

And it certainly isn't something that can, or should be left to the marketing department....