Will the market recover in the new year? Or do we still have a ways to go? Bears online have been going on and on about “capitulation” as in “nothing will change until we finally have capitulation.” Capitulation in normal terms means surrender, so in financial terms it means the point where investors finally give up holding and sell their shares at a loss. According to Investopedia capitulation is also the point where the investment hits its bottom. Prima facia this is a circular argument, “we won’t hit the bottom until we’ve reached the bottom” is another way to phrase it. But even dumber, this is a backwards looking argument that cannot be used for predictions. Over the year of 2022, $SPY (a popular ETF that tracks the performance of the S&P 500) hit it’s 52 week low in November at 348$ per share (it currently trades at 382$). Who’s to say that that wasn’t the capitulation, and it won’t go below that? When the S&P500 hit 666 in 2009, that was the bottom of the bear market, yet many people still didn’t believe it, expecting that there was still more pain to endure. It wasn’t until a while later that we realized no, that really was the bottom, there’s no more “capitulation” after that. So I don’t put any stock in people talking about “market capitulation.”
Author Archives: theusernamewhichismine
You can make resolutions at any time
Small post today. New Year’s is often the time for resolutions, demands from yourself to yourself that you will change yourself in the future. But it doesn’t have to be the only time, I’ve made resolutions to myself throughout this year and will likely do so into next year too. I haven’t kept to all of them but I’ve always tried my best. I want to be always improving, not just when it’s popular to do so.
Talk to type
My cousin only uses her phone to text, and only texts by using talk to type, she says things and the phone will write her message. During Christmas she was texting with friends while speaking with the family, but didn’t realize some of her more uncharitable remarks were being picked up and typed by her phone. I think she’ll have a lot of explaining to do to her friends.
Short post today: green hydrogen isn’t always
“Green” hydrogen power has become something of a minor meme industry. Hydrogen power (or “fuel cells”) is used to burn elemental hydrogen with elemental oxygen producing only water as a waste product. This industry has long been the fantasy of those who want to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and prevent the accumulation of carbon in our atmosphere, the problem is that the most economical way of producing elemental hydrogen does neither. Hydrogen is usually produced from natural gas, but “green hydrogen,” could theoretically be created by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. Recently I read a story of a company seeking out tax breaks to produce green hydrogen from water, but the company isn’t interested in installing solar or wind power and using that for their purposes, they want to simply buy power from the grid and use it directly. The problem is that most of America’s grid isn’t actually powered by green power but by fossil fuels. This so called “green hydrogen” would simply use the electricity from fossil fuels to produce hydrogen, with no analysis done as to whether this would produce more or less greenhouse gases than producing hydrogen from natural gas instead. In this case then, green hydrogen may not be so green.
An excerpt from my Christmas letter
My Christmas letter this year was a bit personal, but there is a small part of it that I do want to broadcast to the world
I went to a Christmas party with my extended family, and I got a look around at the folks my age, older, and younger, and I thought about what my life is and what I hope it will be. I don’t know if I’m on a path that will lead me where I want to go, and I’m not sure what I could do to change it. I still want to get my continue my work in science, I still think I’m a good enough writer to work in scientific or technical communication as well, and I think I’m a good enough analyst to even understand financials and the work “under the hood.” Yet I haven’t reached a level in my career that gives me the comfort and freedom I truly want. I know none of us gets all we want, we’re always left with these self-doubts and self-reflections, wondering if our choices will take us where we want to go, but these days I feel overwhelmed by my doubts and fears about my own future. A lot of young friends I know joke about existential fears they feel, that Climate Change or Nuclear War will kill us all within a few decades, but then those same friends go about their day without seeming to feel any ill effects from the dread. What’s the opposite of existential? I feel a very personal dread every day and I do think it’s keeping me from doing my best, the fear of failure may be causing me to fail, and I don’t like it but don’t know how to avoid it. Whatever comes, I want you all to know that I will keep trying, keep striving, keep working towards my goals and towards the work I hope will help everyone. I don’t know what the future will bring me, but I promise to always try.
Interpretatio graeca for Chinese myths and legends
I’ve been reading an interesting book from 1931. It discusses the motifs and references used in Chinese art, highlighting the Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist stories that many of them derive from. However the book has a problem in that the authors were clearly trying to relate every Chinese story back to the stories they were more familiar with, mainly Indian Buddhist stories but also Roman/Greek ones as well. The Romans used to do this all the time, they called it “interpretatio graeca.” The Romans figured that every god or goddess in every culture was merely a manifestation of a god they were already familiar with, so they would “interpret” foreign gods as being the same or similar to their Roman/Greek gods. So Ra, the chief god of the Egyptians, got conflated with Apollo in Roman writings because since they shared a sun motif they must be identical, right? But Ra was not the same as Apollo, and Chinese myths are not the same as Indian myths, yet the authors of this book keep conflating the two and interpreting Chinese myths through a lens of Indian myths.
The book itself is called Outlines of Chinese Symbolism & Art Motives (sic) by C.A.S. Williams. In many respects it works well as an overview of the history and stories that make up a lot of Chinese art, and a primer into Chinese art culture. And yet it falls into this trap again and again of trying to interpret everything unfamiliar through the lens of the familiar. I understand perhaps that for the reader this can make things easier, saying that “This god is the king of the gods, he rules the sky and causes lightning to happen” may be harder to remember than saying “he’s like Zeus,” but saying “he’s like Zeus” brings a bunch of inaccurate assumptions that really aren’t true to what the Chinese sky god is actually like.
I wonder if this is in part because of out-dated theories in comparative religion. There was a vibe for a time of assuming that all myths and legends were just borrowed or stolen from earlier cultures. Jupiter and Zeus weren’t an original idea, they must have been borrowed by the Greeks and Romans from some previous culture that had a sky god wielding thunderbolts and ruling the other gods. The theory went on to say that every single sky-god in history was just a borrowing of a borrowing from an “original” sky god that was dreamed up 10,000 years ago. But the other option is to realize that “sky god causes thunder” is an easy thing for different people to come up with independently. Assuming that every myth in history was borrowed from somewhere else is also how you got inaccurate claims that for example “Jesus was just re-branded Mithra” and other ahistorical nonsense. It’s a very human feeling to want to related everything back to something you already know well, but it doesn’t lead to good history and so it should not be a feeling used in Academic writing.
Still, for a book from 1931 Outlines is surprisingly good, I enjoy being able to read the characters and phrases it writes in original Chinese, and learning the meaning behind some of them with it’s usually accurate descriptions of etymology. The descriptions of myth and stories generally seem accurate and the nonstop conflations with Indian myths can be ignored. I got this for 6$ at a used book store and I think it was worth the money.
The stock market doesn’t care about your cost basis
When someone is down 50% or more in a stock, they’ll often take to social media to complain and casually ask “what should I do next”? No one wants to sell for a loss, people almost act like it’s admitting failure. And people’s perceptions are often colored by the price at which they bought the stock. “Oh I bought 10 shares at 100$ and now they’re each worth 50$, when can I expect to break even again?” I can’t predict the market but I can say one thing: the price you paid for the stock DOES NOT MATTER. It doesn’t matter if you’re up or down, you should look at any stock you own and as yourself “do I think this stock will perform as well or better than the market in the near future?” A lot of people get stuck in a mental narrative, they start to think trends will either continue indefinitely or definitely reverse soon, depending on what would make them feel better. But a stock that is way down could still be overvalued just like a stock that is way up. A few months ago Carvana ($CVNA) stock was down 50% year to date. What did it do after that? It dropped another 50%, and another 50% from there, and just for good measure another 50% from there. Dropping 50% 4 times in a row meant it had lost about 94% of its starting value from January 1st. And Carvana still had a ways to go as it’s currently down 98%. If you had bought $CVNA on January 1st, then by April 1st you would have seen it lose 50% of it’s value. Your friend may have been tempted to think “it can’t go much lower, can it?” and bought the dip while you held your shares. You would then see your shares go on to lose 98% of their value while your friend’s shares lost 97% of their value. Your friend lost relatively less than you did, but still lost nearly everything.
Your cost basis on a stock is only relevant for tax purposes, it should have no bearing on your investment decisions. The only thing you should care about is the current price and the expected future price.
Merry Christmas :)
I hope all my readers are having fun with their families, I know I am. I hope in the coming year I can continue to update this blog and bring whatever expertise I have to whatever subjects I can.
My internet sucks today
As with many people, I travel during Christmas to see my family. I’m currently staying at a family member’s house, typing out a blog post because I still want to write every day. They’re working on decorating and I don’t want to disturb them, but I don’t know the password to their wifi. I’m having to make do by using my phone as a personal hotspot, but the bandwidth is terrible and it takes like 20 seconds to load any webpage. This had made me think of a question: what technology would I miss the most if I lost it? Agriculture might be pretty high up there, but the internet would definitely take top spot. I could probably do without a car or climate controlled rooms for longer than I could do without the internet, it’s just made my life so much easier and more fun. I like to blog, I like to game online, but more deeply I like to keep in touch with all my friends who live far away and work with my collaborators who live in other countries. I like that when I travel I can easily book hotels and find restaurants all before I arrive in a city, and that when I’m home I can find which hotspots are too crowded to go to without wasting my time to first go to them. Even reading has gotten more fun with the internet, Agatha Christie had a habit of dropping random bits of French into her books just because, and if I read those books without the internet I’d have no way of knowing what a character had said, and wondering to myself if it had been an important clue. Now I can just type it into google translate and know “ah, that character was just mocking another one’s accent, cute.” Not to mention that I can start a book on a kindle, lose that kindle, and continue right where I left off on a second kindle. And also not to mention that my local library has an email digest of new books that are often very interesting, and which I’d have never known about if it weren’t so easy for them to tell me about them through email.
Yeah the internet is pretty great, I should ask for the wifi password.
Why do people still use Twitter?
This is a short thought today, since it’s mostly jumping off my last post about Twitter. But with Twitter again in the news since their CEO is addicted to limelight, I figured I’d pontificate about why I think Twitter worked and may continue to work as a prestigious social media site despite proclamations of doom coming from every angle.
Note that I did say prestigious social media company. Some may turn up their noses, but Twitter was and still is the social network of choice for many companies to broadcast their content globally. Most companies wouldn’t be caught dead on Reddit, and Facebook doesn’t really enter into the social fabric as it once did, but the things that happen and are posted about on Twitter continue to drive endless news cycles, even when it’s not about Elon Musk, and companies want to take part in that conversation to direct it for their own ends. Companies and fame addicted continue to broadcast themselves on the Twitter, even as some of them start contemplating an escape route, but I don’t think one will be easy to find because nothing really replicates what Twitter is. Not Mastadon, not Post, not Substack, there is not a single social media site that is just “Twitter without Elon Musk.”
Twitter allows users to broadcast their message in ways that no other social media site does. While other sites do let you spread your message through posts and links, Twitter lets any and every user view your content if you attach yourself to multiple avenues of “trending topics” either with a hashtag, a phrase, or just putting yourself in the middle of a thread that’s trending. If you want people to see you, just look at the sidebar for what’s tending and try to put that somewhere in your tweet, the algorithms will find you and anyone searching the trending topics will see your tweet. If enough of them see and like your tweet, your tweet itself may trend and be made visible at the bottom of entirely unrelated tweets. Compare that to any other social media, the easiest example is Reddit which is a walled garden at the best of times: if you want people to see you there is no way at all to broadcast yourself to the entire Reddit community. At best you can join a highly popular subreddit and try to post in the highly upvoted threads, but even then you’re only speaking to a specific community in a specific thread. People in the r/cutekittens community will never ever see your epic takedown of Ron Desantis if you posted it in r/politics, and people in r/politics will never see your favorite fuzzball because you posted it in r/cutekittens. The moderators of the subreddits ensure that their communities stay “on topic” and thus separated from each other by a wall that can’t be breached. By contrast someone scrolling through @cutekittenpics will always see the trending topics on their sidebar, and your epic takedown of Ron Desantis may be trending there, putting the cat-scroller just a click away from seeing you.
Back to the moderators, Twitter is much more of a free-for-all than other social media. Of course there are rules and moderators will ban you if you break them, but the Twitter moderators are for lack of a better word more “professional” than most social media mods not least because Twitter mods are paid. By in large Twitter’s broad guidelines are but lightly enforced (especially now that Twitter is understaffed). Compare that to a subreddit where a volunteer moderators will ban you for no better reason than they’re on a power trip, or Mastodon where high-school level drama can get you banned from communities for being part of the wrong clique. Very little gets you banned from Twitter for any length of time. Just because you acted like a dumbass, or held extremist opinions, or just outright hate authority, you will still likely be able to tweet into the void for as long as you want so long as you don’t repeatedly violate their very very low standards of conduct. You can be infamous on Twitter but it’s very hard to be silenced, even before Elon Musk took over some of worst lightning rods in popular discourse kept their names alive on Twitter long after a Mastodon or Reddit admin would have banned them.
It’s not well appreciated, but these two factors; light touch moderation and ability to broadcast, go hand in hand as part of Twitter’s MO. Because no one is able to control the discourse the way a moderator would, companies and individuals feel free to set up shop and broadcast their message since they can’t be silenced by a cranky or drama-prone mod. And because every type of competing message is being broadcast at all times, Twitter becomes window into the “now” of society, a look at all those things being talked about right now but which may or may not still be important in a week. This window into the “now” draws in journalists, activists, and others who feed on discourse. The producers of discourse (companies, politicians, socialites) get attention, which they think will help them with whatever their goal is. The consumers of discourse (journalists, activists, socialites) get a window into the “now” which they think will help them with whatever their goal is. Note that many Twitter users are both producers and consumers of discourse, and I use the word “socialites” to demarcate anyone and everyone who enjoys or spends their time talking about society and humans in general (that includes most of us!).
This kind of firehose of social discourse, where everyone’s messages are constantly competing for views and clicks, is not replicated on any other social media that I know of. Some social media is heavily moderated, where the moderator gets to decide the narrow alley of what discourse is allowed (politics vs cute kittens) or of which views are allowed (right, left, center, etc). Other social media is heavily siloed, so even unmoderated discourse can’t spill out into each user’s individual walled garden. There really is nothing quite like Twitter at this point in time, and to me that explains why the vast majority of its users are sticking with the platform even while many of them dunk on the current owner and bemoan the downfall of their favorite timesink. I wonder what historians will write about all this in a hundred years’ time?
Streams of Consciousness 