INTUITION

We are not recommending anything here, just suggesting there is some wisdom here often overlooked when it comes to markets specifically and life in general.

We do not personally know or have any association with anyone mentioned here. Here are the words of a popular George Michael's song from some years back.

I feel so unsure
As I take your hand and lead you to the dance floor
As the music dies something in your eyes
Calls to mind a silver screen and all its sad goodbyes

I'm never gonna dance again
Guilty feet have got no rhythm
Though it's easy to pretend
I know you're not a fool

I should have known better than to cheat a friend
And waste a chance that I'd been given
So I'm never gonna dance again
The way I danced with you

Time can never mend
The careless whispers of a good friend
To the heart and mind ignorance is kind

There's no comfort in the truth, pain is that all you'll find

I'm never gonna dance again
Guilty feet have got no rhythm
Though it's easy to pretend

Market Music, from Patrick Schotanus

October 10, 2014
Good morning Mr. Niederhoffer:

In your bestseller, The Education of a Speculator, you wrote:

I need to know what is happening in the markets…I hooked up a music synthesizer to the computer, linked it to the interface between the computer and quote screen, and generated a program that would give a musical summary of the markets. I used piano tones for stocks, strings for interest rates, the cello for short-term rates, and the violin for the 30-year bond. The Japanese yen was registered with the high flute, corresponding to the favorite instrument in Japan, the shakuhachi. The English horn, the French horn, and the Alpenhorn stood in for the other currencies.

A lot has changed since then, particularly in terms of software tools becoming available to achieve this. In that spirit, the "music" in this video has been created by turning market data (prices, returns, volatility, and other time series) into MIDI-format (via our software tool) which subsequently was imported into what is called a Digitial Audio Workstation (DAW). The latter allows users to assign instruments (from a single guitar to a whole orchestra) to those data-sets and turn them into sound.

I created this video as part of my PhD research. The fact that it does, indeed, sound like music with a certain rhythm and timbre (rather than random audio-signals) is exactly what distinguishes my approach from earlier attempts at sonification of market data. In the final step, the resulting "composition" is linked to software which allows the creation of visuals that dynamically respond to the sounds (e.g. the small coloured spectra you see appearing against a backdrop of coloured fog).

The video captures a specific period in finance history. Usually I then ask watchers how they would allocate percentage wise a hypothetical portfolio across stocks, bonds, and cash based purely on this video (i.e. "Don't analyse the video but focus on how it makes you feel; what did it convey?").
What's the purpose of all this? Please allow me to share another quote, this time from Jack Schwager's The New Market Wizards:

"Every market has a rhythm, and our job . . . is to get in sync with that rhythm . . . There's no sense of self at all. There's just an awareness of what will happen. The trick is to differentiate between what you want to happen and what you know will happen. The intuition knows what will happen." 

Although some investors/traders have a natural ability to intuitively get a sense for market rhythms, others may need a little help. The investment research method I'm developing is aimed at that: offering a structured, disciplined approach (including advanced software) to train investors' intuitive abilities to sense the market mood in general and its rhythms (i.e. swings) in particular. Massive amounts of data can be efficiently transformed this way to benefit from the whole spectrum of the human-computer bandwidth. Perhaps you're familiar with the behavioural finance concept of System 1 and System 2 of the human mind (e.g. Kahneman, 2011)? Audiovisuals are particularly suited to appeal to System 1 abilities.

Why is this important? Because I believe we have gone way too far in quantifying markets, inspired by the flawed premise of the "market as machine". As a result, what we casually refer to as "the market's mind" has become imbalanced (at multiple levels). Apart from the obvious suspects like HFT, VAR, and flash crashes, monetary policy is also misinformed by this bias. Moreover, we try to understand market sentiment and moods purely analytically (e.g. put/call ratio, bulls/bears spread, etc.) while increasingly repressing our emotions by outsourcing decision-making to algorithms. By distorting the delicate process of discovery it is no wonder we're facing secular stagnation, for example.

Admittedly, this is just my opinion, but should you be interested in the background to all of this I would be happy to send you a short introduction (derived from my thesis + draft paper).
Happy to discuss and clarify.
Warm wishes,
Patrick
http://www.dailyspeculations.com/wordpress/?p=9719

The friend betrayed here is you when you fail to discover and listen intuitively to the market's rhythm, fail to honor your intuitive side.

Much of our lives is spent developing what is revered in society today, the intellectual side. This is not to play the importance of that down, just raise the question how much time have you spent developing the intuitive. In most cases the answer to that is clear--very little.

The rule is what one focuses on expands. This is not just some feely-touchy goodie from the world of self-help or improvement. It's part of the universal law like water seeking its own level. In medicine there's a parallel construct: If you listen to the patient he will tell you what's wrong.

One of the major criticisms of modern medicine is that there's very little listening going on. 

Learning to listen to the market is as much of part of it all as the palaver about stochastic oscillators, MACD, new highs versus new lows and so on.

t.man hatter