What Is This Is?

Every morning at 6:30 PST, Mr. Market gives Atlas a wake-up call. During the preceding 14.5 hours, our sites and sources have been parsing the data collected from the prior day’s activity in all the financial markets we follow. Atlas refers to the results that spit out as “WHAT IS.” Opinions and forecasts describing what it all means are somebody else’s best (or self-serving) guess. We call all of it “everything else” or “static.” We do our best to ignore that huge burden of “everything else” which weighs on everybody’s emotions, factoring just “WHAT IS” into our daily rules-based decision-making process.

All the talking heads, smart economists, and assorted market pundits ultimately get paid for producing content of some sort: opinions, research, white papers, etc. These must be issued frequently to justify individual salaries even when there is nothing to say. In our experience, the result is often a vast accumulation of noise with nothing new actually being said (i.e. static).

The most recent Nobel Prize for Economics went to a certain Professor Thaler whose ground-breaking research on our human propensity to act irrationally when making economic decisions has become the next big things in the field of finance. We have noticed it has carried a special influence into the area of marketing financial products. Since Dr. Thaler has shown we all tend to act on personal biases, affinities, prejudices, and favorite notions that often conflict directly with WHAT IS, avoiding the plethora of marketing pieces that skew toward promoting products despite their manipulation or even contravention of actual evidence is paramount to Atlas’ own methodology. We will provide an actual illustration of this “static” producing process in an upcoming blog as an example of the pervasiveness, often subtle, of this trend. (by J R)