Mood Over Math…How to Profit In a Connected World

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  • on June 10th, 2012

The $SPY futures are ripping. Seems like Spain is saved. It only took $150 billion.

Not $120 billion or $99 billion.

Countless Deloitte and Touche people have been locked down with Moody’s and Goldman people to figure out the number. Presto. Solved. Phew.

I like math. I always aced math in school. I am thankful my son Max and daughter Rachel seem to have a good math ‘gene’. Math was easy to me until Calculus entered the curriculum. At that point everything started sounding made up. Same with investing. As soon as it starts sounding like Calculus…you are getting f@#ked. Financial math starting sounded like Calculus in 1998. The math wiz’s at Long-Term Capital perfected math (leverage). So cute.

Math has only gotten sillier in 2012. Don’t believe the formula’s. Don’t believe the sellers of these formula’s.

Today, mood trumps math by a breathtaking margin in finance and markets. There are 900 million people connected by Facebook. There is Twitter, Instagram, even Stocktwits that create noise and of course signal. Everyone is holding hands. You sneeze, I hear it. I sneeze, you are likely to see it on Instagram.

If math mattered, how could $AMZN be trading at it’s multiples. If math mattered, isn’t $AAPL cheap by comparison. Of course math does matter. Eventually $AMZN will slow down enough for a bunch of ‘value’ investors to horde shares. I will have moved on I hope.

If someone can explain the math of $AMZN to me based on this chart, they are full of shit.

I can only imagine what it was like for JP Morgan when he read the first ‘ticker tape‘ that was create by Edward Calahan in 1867.

If he could tweet, he might have said:

Holy Shit…I hope I never have to share this ‘ticker tape’ …I am #winning !

JP was tapped into the best collective mood there was at the time. He was getting it ahead of almost everyone else. If you can read mood, know the price, and have it before everyone else …you have a big edge. Today, everyone with a smart phone has the means to read mood, the price is a commodity and you get most news that really matters ahead of your banker or broker.

The banks are at a huge disadvantage in this new era of ‘Mood over Math’. They are always late. They can’t use Twitter or Facebook or Stocktwits at work. The read stuff reporters make up after they see it ‘trending’. As more people come on to these connected platforms look for mood to ‘bubble’ as a financial term before math comes back into favor.

Next up I will explain where math still matters most – angel investing.

The information in this blog post represents my own opinions and does not contain a recommendation for any particular security or investment. I or my affiliates may hold positions or other interests in securities mentioned in the Blog, please see my Disclaimer page for my full disclaimer.

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