I DON'T KNOW. MY SPREADSHEET TOLD ME TO...

We want reasons. We want to know why the market went down today. We want explanations. We want to know how TSLA keeps going down when Model S looks so cool and drives so fast. It is very uncomfortable not connecting the dots and even more difficult to accept the fact that we may never know.

Neuroscientists believe that our desire to connect dots and gather explanations is how we make it easy to remember what goes on around us. Instead of remembering three pieces of information like 2, 3, and 5, it is far easier to remember 2+3 = 5. Chess grandmasters remember all his moves and his opponents months after their match because they could see the connections in their head.

I dread talking stocks with friends. They ask me what I buy or sell. I say I bought AAPL. They ask for a reason why. I usually say :

I don't know...

Here comes silence, followed by oh.. ok.  haha.

I cannot tell them it is because my spreadsheet told me to. I cannot tell them that the qualitative analysis based on news and company data will surely lead to the poorhouse. Remember Enron? Remember Lehman Brothers? Fundamentally, the companies were doing great, right before they crashed. Of course there was trouble looming and if you had dug deeper, spending 20 days buried under the financial statements, you might have been able to predict what was going to happen.

However, while you were in the library, I'm sure good traders who did the quantitative analysis must have been shorting the stocks already.

Of course, I would like to give a smart sounding explanation as to why this stock will go up or down at parties. However, I have been trying to suppress that part of my brain for years. I have to accept the world as I see, not through the contexts I created. You wear the sunglasses, the whole world look dark.

I suppress not because of some philosophical purpose. It just costs too much not to.