Science Of Persuasion

Found via Farnam Street.

Link

………………..

Related books:

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive

Aswath Damodaran on CNBC

Talking about Facebook, mostly.


Link

Bond Investor Gundlach Buys Stocks, Sees 'Kaboom' Ahead

Found via the Corner of Berkshire & Fairfax.

It’s mid-October, and Jeffrey Gundlach is giving a stump speech to a luncheon crowd of about 200 financial advisers and investors at Los Angeles’s City Club. The renowned money manager’s theme: the financial catastrophe on the horizon.

The co-founder and chief executive officer of DoubleLine Capital LP explains that the first phase of the coming debacle consisted of a 27-year buildup of corporate, personal and sovereign debt. That lasted until 2008, when unfettered lending finally toppled banks and pushed the global economy into a recession, spurring governments and central banks to spend trillions of dollars to stimulate growth, Bloomberg Markets reports in its January issue.

In the ominous third phase, he predicts another crisis: Deeply indebted countries and companies, which Gundlach doesn’t name, will default sometime after 2013. Central banks may forestall these defaults by pumping even more money into the economy -- at the risk of higher inflation in coming years.

Gundlach, 53, doesn’t know when the third phase will get here, but he tells his audience they need to gradually get ready for it.

“I don’t believe you’re going to get some sort of an early warning,” Gundlach, who’s also chief investment officer at Los Angeles-based DoubleLine, tells his listeners. “You should be moving now.”

Authors at Google: Nate Silver: "The Signal and the Noise"

Link

……………..

Related book: The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't

Bill Gates: My 13 favorite talks

Link to: Bill Gates: My 13 favorite talks

PIMCO: Forecasting Equity Returns in the New Normal

​Equities as an asset class are a necessary component of long-term portfolios, and unique in their ability to provide significant upside over time through careful allocation changes based on a framework of return forecasting.

Under our baseline assumptions, we forecast the broad U.S. equity market to produce nominal annualized total returns in the +4.0% to +5.1% compounded per annum range over the next five to 10 years.

Patience, diligence and the careful avoidance of downside risks can greatly enhance the experience asset allocation portfolios can achieve from this volatile but infinitely interesting asset class.

GR-NEAM Reflections: 12/03/2012 - The Barbarous Relic Expresses An Opinion

Gold prices continue to rise. The reason is that expected returns on more productive assets are falling in attractiveness. The message implied is that investors should beware just the excessive risk taking that they are being encouraged to do.

Hussman Weekly Market Comment: How to Build a Time Machine

With industrial production, capacity utilization, real disposable income, real personal consumption, real sales retail and food service sales, and real manufacturing and trade sales uniformly declining in their latest reports, coincident economic indicators – having generally peaked in July – are now following through on the weakness that we’ve persistently observed in leading economic measures. We continue to believe that the U.S. economy joined a global economic downturn during the third quarter of this year.

While we use a broad range of signal extraction and noise-reduction methods in our own work, the economic data in recent months has required less and less sophisticated analysis, as many of the most reliable leading economic measures have turned clearly lower (e.g. Philly Fed Index, Chicago Fed National Activity Index, and the new orders and order backlog components of numerous regional and national Federal Reserve and purchasing managers surveys). Still, the leading/coincident/lagging relationships across these indicators remain important. Not surprisingly, analysts have now turned to the last refuge of the economic data, which is to focus on historically lagging measures such as payroll employment.

John Mauldin's Outside the Box - Popular Delusions: The bull case for safe havens

For Grice’s previous piece, see HERE.

A month ago in Outside the Box, Dylan Grice made the case for the need for safe havens, due to expansive monetary policy. But what is a safe haven anymore?

In today’s piece, a follow-up to last month’s, Dylan gives us a very good rundown on the historical relationship between equities and government bonds, in order to point out the very atypical current negative correlation between them.

Nassim Taleb quote

From Antifragile: 

While in the past people of rank or status were those and only those who took risks, who had the downside for their actions, and heroes were those who did so for the sake of others, today the exact reverse is taking place. We are witnessing the rise of a new class of inverse heroes, that is, bureaucrats, bankers, Davos-attending members of the I.A.N.D. (International Association of Name Droppers), and academics with too much power and no real downside and/or accountability. They game the system while citizens pay the price.

At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.

The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others.