Behavioral Economics: The Big Short Part III, The DK Effect Part VI

Tune into any of the three major business news channels and you’ll be treated to an endless parade of “experts” framing that day or week’s trading activities with narratives that, on the surface, seem to explain what’s driving the market at any given time. But after a couple of decades of watching these people, I’ve concluded that a great deal of their “analysis” is simply designed to keep the rubes in the game by providing seemingly “rational” explanations for what are largely high frequency, computer driven trading schemes that use “dark pools” of money and others forms of subterfuge to separate investors from their money.

The Big Short:The Dunning-Kruger Effect Part IV

While there’s been no shortage of post-mortems on the cause of the Great Recession, the most entertaining has to be the new movie The Big Short, a Golden Globe and Oscar nominee for best film, based on Michael Lewis’s book of the same name… The film follows three sometimes inter-related investment entities as they uncover the massive fraud that had taken over the real estate industry, and their efforts to profit from that knowledge. That a morality tale emerges in the wake of their pursuit of “price discovery,” a traditional goal of the free (unmanipulated) market, is just icing on the cake.