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Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
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Category: Humanities & Social Science
Posted on: July 15, 2008 1:48 PM, by Jonah Lehrer
What you need is a distraction from the drip of bad economic news. (Just remember: the stock market is a random walk that, over the long-term, has an upward slope. Besides, investors who do nothing to their stock portfolio - they don't buy or sell a single stock - outperform the average "active" investor by nearly 10 percent.) So, instead of trying to get your broker on the phone, browse through these exquisite satellite photos, courtesy of NASA:
via kottke
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Comments
Lovely image. You just made me wonder - as I am sitting 10" underneath a battered copy of Howard Berg's "Random Walks in Biology" text - whether anyone has analyzed the stock market with multidimensional diffusion tensor or finite element analysis. (Now say that ten times fast.) I'm sure someone's done it.
Posted by: Rachael | July 15, 2008 3:04 PM
Thanks for the photo!
And you brought back memories of my finance undergrad and our bible, "A Random Walk Down Wall Street" by Malkiel. I was told then to imagine the market as a man with a yo-yo walking up a hill with the advice that investors should focus on the steady rise of the hill, not the daily ups and downs of the yo-yo.
Posted by: Dan | July 15, 2008 4:42 PM
Jonah, its interesting you refer to the Random Walk of markets (based on the Efficient Market HYPOTHESIS), financial bubbles, and Sir Popper all within a few posts. Not easy to reconcile my friend. Science is best left to scientists and finance to alchemists.
Posted by: Glenn | July 18, 2008 6:28 PM