I have been thinking about what I do. About what I create. It is all timeless. That is my passion. Timeless drives me, but it doesn’t drive the rest of the world. Most people, especially in the market analysis space, thrive (or survive) on timeliness.

Monday morning, tomorrow, will be filled as usual with talking heads telling you what will happen or why it is happening. They will explain it all with nice prose. We all know many of these people. Many have high IQs and are well known.

However, when someone runs on timeliness there is only so much usefulness in their views. Why? Well, you have to listen to them all the time. How do you learn to do it by yourself if you are forever attached to the next thing someone says? That view of mine puts me in the distinct minority. That view leaves me writing timeless books and directing a timeless film.

That view of mine makes me radioactive to some.

I thrive on that.

Back in the days of the U.S.S.R. free bread was given out. The only trick was that you had to stand in line for hours to get the free bread. You either paid for the bread with cash, or in this case your time. Seth Godin makes the case that the Internet is just like the bread line days. Most people don’t think about how much time they are blowing trying to find whatever and even if they find it — they still are left to deal issues of authenticity. If you are in the ‘bread line’ looking (or should I say ‘waiting’) for insights into how great traders make it happen, help to save time is available.

Imagine anyone living in NYC could transport to Tokyo in 1 hour. Current flight time? 13 hours. So imagine you can shave off 12 hours. Once you get to Tokyo you have a hand held device that allows you to broadcast HD video to the world at 24p (30p or whatever — fastest available).

EVERYONE has this capability. Now what?

Of course, the travel time drop is not about to happen, but the hand-held broadcasting is easily imagined. Map out the economic development that unleashes?

I caught this from Gary Shilling:

“Conventional monetary ease is now impotent with the federal funds rate close to zero , the money multiplier collapsed and banks sitting on hoards of cash and over $1 trillion in excess reserves. Sure, large banks report to the Fed that they are easing lending standards for small business, but after the intervening financial crisis, many fewer potential borrowers are deemed creditworthy than in the loose lending days. Furthermore, the small business trade group, the National Federation of Independent Business, reports that 91% of small business owners have had their credit needs met or business is so slow that they don’t want to borrow. The Fed is pushing on the proverbial string.”

Makes sense. Easy to agree with. However, how come the economic types across the board never write about the obvious:

1. Empty commercial space is everywhere. What fills it up? When? Further, commercial space is being arbed away by the internet. Do movie theaters, sporting venues, book stores, electronics store, etc. survive in the face of home theaters and online shopping? The real question for me are empty stadiums. Small cities can’t support them. Jacksonville, San Diego, etc. have empty pro sports stadiums. Canary in the coalmine of future issues?

2. Everyone knows the Feds pulled out their credit card (funded by us) to pay off our credit card. Where is the economic development there? Sure, people can rap on about aggregate economic statistics, but to what end? If all economic activity is just Federal credit card spending, growth estimates and recession debates serve little purpose.

From the Business Insider a quote from David Rosenberg:

“If I was going to publish a bullish report on the U.S. economy, it certainly wouldn’t be based on consumption, employment or housing. It would be based on innovation, patents, and the likelihood that the U.S. is embarking on a manufacturing renaissance of sorts — partly reflecting the new permanently higher level of energy prices, which has negatively affected globalization, years of U.S. dollar depreciation, which has helped act as a protective tariff for local producers as well as a major competitive boost. Remember how aviation technology accelerated dramatically in the 1930s depression? Nothing is to say that we can’t see major advances in coming years in energy, medical and transportation technologies even as the economy continues to struggle with expunging all the debt and spending excesses of the last cycle. I have no problem with reports that are bullish on specific themes but at the same time I strongly feel that we should treat reports that shamelessly attempt to downplay the very serious and complex headwinds in the U.S. labor and housing markets, with the utmost of skepticism.”

True. There is no innovation on the horizon that could possibly come close to the internet and wireless. That’s done. Everyone can easily imagine the future of where those go (read: smaller and faster; *yawn*). What will make an iPhone in 5 years revolutionary over today’s version? Nothing. Seriously, mobile technology will allow everyone to be an on the go porn producer who can chat at all times while playing video games. Yawn again. Worse yet? The internet is arbing away “jobs” at a blinding pace. The genie is out and automation will keep on keeping on the elimination of human capital. There is the rub: no innovation and the internet on the other side of the ledger pushing people out of ‘typical’ cradle-to-grave-work-for-the-man jobs (see: Seth Godin’s ‘Linchpin’). So millions are left waiting for government types to blow the all safe horn (read: race back to the malls and buy stuff), apparently ignoring that the politicians are using unprecedented policy tools to keep it all afloat.

The market needs to be allowed to function without the manipulation of the record spending invisible hand. Not going to happen? Then the downside at some point will be far greater. Taking the pain now would be so much better. Just pull the band-aid off, right?

A whole bunch of reading and viewing. Get started!

A favorite:

A definition:

open the kimono: v. phr. to expose or reveal secrets or proprietary information.

Opening the kimono? My job (inspired by a comment in an earlier post).

There are people (read: intellectual twits) who don’t understand the value in this article because the date is “2005″. They think, “It’s 2010, no good now!” The people who think like that are the same people who trust their money to the buy and hold insanity of Fidelity. Everyone gets what they want, right? Off my soapbox and onto a a great excerpt from that article:

“I [Harding] went to Sabre [first firm] because I didn’t want to sit in an investment bank and make money. I wanted to know if you could do it from outside the markets looking in. “Could you be on a desert island and make money trading?” was the question I was asking myself.” Partly this was Harding the scientist exerting an influence, as the efficient market hypothesis was a hot topic amongst academics that studied markets…”With the EMH under consideration I was very interested to know whether the very antithesis of that, technical analysis, had any truth in it. So I went to Sabre very much in the spirit of intellectual curiosity.” According to Harding the prevailing thinking at places like Wood Mackenzie was that there was no intellectual respect for technical analysis. There were a hundred analysts there, consisting of various types of serious people, and the technical analyst was isolated at the end of a row in an out-of-the-way part of the office. His craft was considered intellectually light-weight by his peers and the press. ” I remember being visited by the FT’s Barry Riley in 1988. Within a week there was a side-swipe in print along the lines of “that’s more than the whizzkids with computers can manage,” ” recalls a somewhat wearisome Harding. “But the thing is he and all the other serious investment professionals nodding sagely in agreement were wrong. No amount of looking knowledgeable and smug will make you right if you are wrong in the first place.” This attitude was something that Harding was to get used to over his career. “For eighteen of my 25 years in markets I have received intellectual scorn and derision from everyone – business school professors, senior investment professionals to experienced journalists. But thankfully now it’s different: the battle is won. The enemy is routed. All we are doing now is mopping up the stragglers.” David Harding spent two years at Sabre Fund Management, each day drawing hundreds of charts by hand, like a true craftsman. Every chart was bound into big leather folders, and in turn each chart pattern was copied into other folders. He likens it to an old-fashioned publishing house. Harding noted without irony that the company was run by accountants, and that “there certainly was method in what was done there.” He continues “I certainly regard my time there as the foundation stone of my credentials as an empiricist. There is nothing like drawing thousands of charts by hand to fix them in your mind. In fact I regard this phase of exhausting taxonomy of technical analysis as being like the relationship used to be between biology and taxonomy in the life sciences. Until something like 1830 you had gentlemen scientists collecting leaves and putting them into folders, and it wasn’t until Darwin that he and others started putting some order on it. Only by arranging data and putting it in order can you get any pattern out of it. What AHL and others have done is go beyond the taxonomy and turn trading into a real science.”

Continuing:

“Our sort of approach to markets is a science. It is an unpublished science, but it is a real one. You could get the thick leather bound volumes of papers on it if there was a willingness to “open the kimono”, as the horrible modern expression has it.” “The process of trading our system is like repeatedly drawing different coloured balls from the statisticians apocryphal bag. As we draw out a ball it becomes part of the track record, and we put it back in the bag, but there is no guarantee that the balls will come out in the same order in future.”