I was a trader for 21 years, and anyone taking markets seriously needs to consider the following… You remember the day when Kervial was liquidated? The SocGen rogue trader… ‘the hero’ in France. They sold $50 billion dollars worth of stock. How much did capitalization drop world-wide, based on that? Markets went down 12 percent! With a $50 billion order, you drop markets by 12%. We lost 7, 8 Trillion. A huge amount. So it tells you, don’t pay attention to stock markets. They’re driven by the marginal buyer. It means nothing. Short term markets mean nothing.
In a nutshell, Dance with Chance is all about knowing what you can and cannot predict and, therefore, what you can and cannot control.
Think about it. Every day human beings make decisions. Some are important: should you invest your life savings in the stock market? Others are trivial: should you take an umbrella today? But in both these cases you have no control. The stock market will go up or down, it will rain or it won’t… and there’s nothing you can do about it.
The problem comes when people seek to gain control by making predictions. By consulting an investment expert or a weather forecast, they think they can control the value of their investments or avoid getting wet.
But this is just an illusion. An illusion that psychologists call ‘the illusion of control’.
In many areas of life – the stock market and the weather are just two examples – accurate prediction just isn’t possible. There is always uncertainty about the future in most areas of our lives. Throw in some emotions, such as greed, fear and hope, and human beings’ predictions get even less accurate. So what are we to do?
Fortunately, Dance with Chance comes up with plenty of positive suggestions. Most importantly, it uncovers a ‘paradox of control’ that’s the antidote to the ‘illusion of control’. By knowing when to give up control, we can actually gain more control over many aspects of our lives than we had in the first place.
