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As you’ve probably forgotten by now, I like to play the stock market.  Last year, since there was no money available, I just did paper trading.   It went reasonably well and was somewhat enjoyable, although it takes only five minutes on 250 days of the year.

A hobby should bring good news into your life.  Keeping track of Trump’s lies, or the latest Global Warming trends, or the disease status of the Cavendish banana — these are not good hobbies.  I want a system that wins often, which means it won’t win large amounts.  I want the trades to be completed in a couple of weeks, so I don’t have to wait for months or years to find out whether I chose well.  I want it to be mechanical and not require me to figure out which politicians/impresarios/pundits are lying (assume it’s all of them) or which news stories were planted (all of them) or which inventions actually work (some of them).  I need something that’s appropriate for this bear market (and my perma-bear disposition).  So I have settled on “contrarian Keltner-channel swing trading”.

Well, if you’ve been following along at home, you got a realized gain of 4.2% today!  The swing took 12 market days, so an annualized gain of 87.5%!  And all you had to do was to take stock-trading advice from 🐔 🪛 ⚾ (The Crank Channel).  We don’t even charge for it.  So how did your sensible investments do today, hmm?
      A lot of people bought stock at 9:30am Eastern this morning, presumably because they did their end-of-year portfolio reviews and then entered MARKET BUY orders over the weekend.  Oftentimes these annual investors will pump up the market for several days at the start of a year — but not this year.  Today’s rally opened strong, banged our gong (upper blue line) within the first five minutes, then sank into the red for the rest of the day.  You see how important it is to enter your trade orders in advance, just in case something happens quickly?
      Let’s remember once again how much fun it was at the open on December 13ᵗʰ, when the market gapped up and gave us an immediate 2.8% profit.  The market price continued higher for a little while, then spent the rest of the day falling — after we had gotten off the ride at the open.  And we had predicted only a 2.0% win that day for a blue-line hit.
      When using LIMIT orders, price-gaps between days are your friends!  You wake up (if you sleep late) to better news than you were expecting when you went to bed.  Those girly-man traders who use STOP orders have to put up with getting worse news than they had expected.  What fun is that?  And when a gap-down gives us a cyan trade for a better-than-blue-line price, well that’s just 𝙜𝙧𝙖𝙫𝙮 added to our final profit.
      So, what trade orders should we enter for tomorow?  We just use the same algorithm every day!  Since we are currently all-cash, we’ll take a long or a short position, whatever the market offers.  Buy-limit at the lower blue line or sell-short-limit at the upper blue line, whichever happens.  Or both the same day!  Or neither!  It’s all copacetic.  As per our algorithm, we’ll bet 10% of available capital on each trade order, so as to have some skin in this game but not be too committed this early in the new run.  And if that sounds at all reasonable, I would like to remind you that you are watching 🐔 🪛 ⚾ (The Crank Channel).

As shown by places like r/wallstreetbets, it is only too easy to get people to follow your investing advice.  You just spout overconfident bullshit, ignore the consequences of your actions, and keep on spouting.  But the problem with this is that people believe you, lose their money, then blame you.  So I imagine the broadcast would have a silly name and make frequent references to the fact that I am a crank and you have only yourself to blame if you ape my financial moves.  Do your own research, paper-trade before committing real money, yadda yadda.  But of course nobody will and so I need for the system to not hurt people too badly if they choose to overtrust it.

I really like the current algorithm.  It did quite well in my end-of-year review and I decided not to make any of the changes I had been contemplating.  It takes relatively little risk, despite the lack of protective-STOP orders.  It buys only very-safe Russell 2000 index funds (surely the 2,000 component companies aren’t *all* frauds?), and helps anxiety-sufferers by providing absolutely nothing useful for you to do while the market is open, although of course you can do “status checks” all day if you truly must.

So, um, Objective Reality.  As I’ve mentioned previously, I think that Objective Reality actually exists, but is beyond our ken.  We live in a Subjective Reality that corresponds to the real world (more or less, sometimes a lot less) but is always separate from it.  In contradistinction to Plato, who believed that the material world is merely a shadow of the Real World of Ideas, I believe that the objects in the universe are just exactly what they are, but our finite ideas about those objects are mere shadows of the infinite ideas that would truly describe Objective Reality.  Unfortunately for our egos, our ideas about our ideas are also mere shadows of the True meta-ideas about how the universe really works.  And so on, to infinity.  There is just no way to think our way out of our sub-reality and into the real world.

I like this religion because it allows me to dismiss out-of-paw some of the wacky ideas that are floating around the noösphere.  Anyone who thumps his Bible as “the complete Word of God” is obviously deluded, because the complete Word of God must be infinitely long and so cannot be captured by any book of limited pages.  There used to be a lot of well-respected physicists who thought that Newton’s F=ma was Reality, but of course it could only ever have been Approximation.  Today, there are probably some scientists who think that Einstein's F=ma ∕ √1−(v²/c²) is Reality, but we *know* that this too must be Approximation because it is a finite formula with only a few variables.  In Reality, everything in the universe depends on everything else for each of its properties.  For practical purposes we can safely ignore most things most of the time—but occasionally something that we thought could be ignored will turn out to have been critically important, such as the effect of Hurricane Katrina upon President W.’s war plans.  This is the conundrum of our existence: we must approximate because we cannot perceive Objective Reality, but “Reality bites” and so we cannot approximate without risk.

Another nice feature of this religion is that it explains the existence of Magic.  As a professional computer programmer, I could hardly profess my Faith in any clockwork-universe philosophy that rejects Magic.  How then could I explain what it is that I do all day?  Arthur Clark said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, which is sometimes paraphrased as "Magic is technology you don’t understand” (see Zekmalados’ comment here).  To connect this with Objective Reality, I claim that “Magic is useful activity based on approximations of the laws of physics that you don’t happen to know”.  Since the Real laws of physics are infinitely complicated, no one can know all of their useful approximations, so for each person there are things he can do that will be perceived by others as Magic.  With a little practice, you can learn to perceive your own activities as Magic even though you know the physics approximations that make them work.  Do you understand how the “quantum tunnelling” effect works?  You can use a cell phone anyway, but it’s Magic to you!

I’ll admit to a certain vanity in my thoughts about Magic.  I believe that I have more Magic in my right rear dewclaw than you could find in an entire conference room full of Harry Potter fans, but I realize that this belief is Approximation and some Potter fans actually do have the Talent.  Still, it is a useful thought because it helps me to feel superior to the Mundanes.

Regarding E₈ and string theory: Oh dear, this post is too long already.  Maybe I’ll get to those next time.  Meanwhile, here’s a random disconnected link to a certain author’s thoughts on similar subjects.

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