How YOU Can Beat the Market!

Ok, the real title is “How I Can Beat the Market & Why You Can’t! (And By Market I’m Referring to Stocks and Bonds!)” That’s a little too long, and didn’t sound nearly as catchy. I’ve taken a break from reading investment books and moved my focus to researching some low-capital entrepreneurial endeavors. Much more on that soon. I wanted to read books on stock market investment because I felt woefully unprepared to put money into the market. Numerous realizations have hit me lately. Although I know next to nothing about investing, it’s still more than the average investor. No modesty here.

I wouldn’t put money into something until I have some expertise in that field. This is no guarantee of making money, but it certainly does help to minimize risk.

Invest in Transcendence

[Back without popular demand. I stand by my predictions, except I am shaky on McCain being the next president. At the time, I assumed a Republican would win yet again (Democrats were.. are?.. in complete disarray), and McCain felt like a front-runner.]

Step into my lab and lets take a whirl around some of the more obscure and bizarre areas of my research. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so don’t be alarmed by sudden forks in consciousness; it comes with the territory. Over here we have Terrance McKenna’s Novelty Theory, which states that time is a fractal wave of increasing novelty – newness, increasing complexity, and dynamic change. McKenna’s data is derived from the King Wen sequence of the I Ching that shows, when mapped, moments of increasing and decreasing novelty in the world. Crackpot enough? Well novelty increases exponentially despite temporary setbacks, and it is set to culminate on December 21, 2012. At this limit of infinite novelty, “anything and everything conceivable to the human imagination will occur simultaneously.” Sign me up for some of that. How the code to explain novelty over time is trapped in the I Ching has stumped far greater mathematicians than I, but the argument makes sense intuitively: the world is going to end soon. Now it’s real easy to get down on the harbinger of the apocalypse; “Oh, you see that line behind you stretching a million men long across the breadth of human history? Yeah, they got here first, and I’m still alive… *jazz hands*.” Just who were these cult leaders and non-prophet organizations? How do I know that their projections were subject to the same rigorous inspection and methodology behind mine? I’m classically trained in apocryphal apocalyptic analysis. They didn’t even have universities in the Paleolithic period. Oh, if only there was some independent verification of the importance of 2012…

The Job Hunt

Finding a decent entry-level job is more difficult than I expected, considering I was under the impression the job market is wide open right now. Every job worth having wants a candidate with a degree in economics, finance, or business administration. My standard line: your supervisor doesn’t hand you a stack of papers on your first day at work and say “here, perform some econometrics.” I actually came across a job titled “Econometrician” and it was, unsurprisingly, looking for a master’s degree + experience. Anything relevant to an entry-level position could easily be learned on-the-job by a qualified candidate, so why do many businesses unnecessarily limit their pool?

50 Years to Freedom

This job looks like it would be interesting. There’s some legitimate responsibility here, I wonder what kind of experience it takes to get the higher-ups to trust you with a position like this? As my browsing of job listings expands beyond UC Irvine’s ZotLink database of entry-level jobs – most of which I am not qualified for – I am confronted with descriptions of what real jobs entail.

12-16 years relevant experience with a bachelor’s degree, or a far more lenient 8-12 years with a master’s. That’s when it hit me . . .