Irrational Gold Selling

By Richard Daughty, on July 12th, 2010

Last Monday I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that the price of gold had dropped $44.20, which was weird enough since Kitco was showing the “Gold Price Change due to Weakening dollar” was up by $23.00, meaning gold should be going up thanks to the weakening dollar, while the “Gold Price Change due to Predominant Selling” was down a whopping $67.20! Wow! Selling!

Since most of the problems with my medications regimen seem to be finally solved, what could I do but laugh, although weakly, in a kind of dull, sedated babble, “Hahahahahahaha!” at the sheer incongruity of it all, instead of going off on a Manic Mogambo Tangent (MMT) of some kind, probably either about how the Federal Reserve has destroyed the dollar by creating too many of them, or, on a more timely topic, about what idiots the sellers of gold are.

Apparently, these market-timing geniuses have failed to understand that that this is the Perfect Freaking Time (PFT) to buy gold, because here they are, selling! Hahaha!

Observant Junior Mogambo Rangers (JMRs) have taken note of the fact that my laugh is less than the usual Loud Mogambo Laugh Of Scorn (LMLOS) of story and song, and instead is a weak, nervous, “I wish I was dead!” titter of laughter, like the time when you came sneaking into the house or office early in the morning or late in the afternoon, respectively, stumbling drunk, trying to be quiet, wearing your own underwear like a weird hat for some reason that you can’t recall, and your mom, wife or boss was waiting for you.

And the reason for my lack of uproarious mirth is that something is, in a word, weird. I mean, selling gold right now is so devoid of reason that I want to laugh heartily at the idea and at the stupid people that got the idea to sell gold, but I can just sit here, dumbfounded, shaking my head in disbelief and tittering nervously.

Obviously, I am now of the “buy and hold” camp instead of the “trader” type of person, as I have “discovered” many important things about trading stocks, bonds, commodities and their derivatives, and by “discovered” I mean “scarred and bloodied by slimy insiders, with still-festering open wounds and tender scars, both emotional and financial.”

And all of it could have been completely avoided if I had read Nassim Taleb’s book The Black Swan and found that the bell-curve of normal probability is not how things really work over the long term, or if I had internalized the related discoveries of non-linear systems (“Chaos Theory”), or if I had a wife that had said, “Don’t be an idiot! You are too stupid, too ignorant and full of too much Bizarre Mogambo Crap (BMC) for you to ever – EVER! – succeed as a trader of anything! Get a job and go to work, work, work!”

Instead, I made the mistake of having a real-life wife who said “Whatever you do, I will support you and love you!” which, now that I am looking back, makes me scream at her, “That’s the most stupid thing you have ever said because you know what a whack-job, paranoid, worthless, lazy lunatic I am! So all my failures are your fault! Your fault! All your fault!”

However, buying gold, silver and oil in defense against the horrific inflations in prices that will destroy us, thanks to the horrid Federal Reserve creating too much money so that the despicable Obama administration can deficit-spend us into bankruptcy and utter destruction, is all my idea.

I got the idea from 4,500 years of historical precedents of one moronic country after another doing this same, stupid “spending oneself into bankruptcy” thing, all you can do is say, “Whee! This investing stuff is easy!”

Irrational Gold Selling originally appeared in the Daily Reckoning.



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Does Meaningful Work Contribute to Life Satisfaction?

By Winton Bates, on July 12th, 2010

In my last post I expressed disappointment that the authors of an article about material prosperity and life satisfaction did not acknowledge the sense of achievement that many people obtain from their work.

How do I know that meaningful work contributes to life satisfaction? It would be easy enough to make a fairly long list of people I know who probably get a great deal of satisfaction from their work. I expect many readers could make similar lists. There is also some research evidence on this question.

It is well known that unemployed people tend to have much lower levels of life satisfaction than people in other workforce categories (including those who have retired). The Australian Unity Wellbeing Index indicates, however, that unemployed people also tend to have much lower levels of satisfaction with what they are achieving in life. There is also a marked difference in satisfaction with ‘achieving in life’ between employed people who are looking for alternative work and those not looking for work. Robert Cummins et al, authors of the report, suggest that low satisfaction with what they are achieving in life may be one of the main reasons why people seek to change their employment. The authors add: ‘Many employed people gain a great sense of ‘purpose in life’ from their employment, and having a sense of purpose is central to wellbeing’ (See: Report 17, April 2007, p. 164-5 and Figures 8.9 and 8.18).

Research on the relative contributions to life satisfaction of orientations to pleasure, engagement (the psychological state that accompanies highly engaging activities) and meaning (pursuit of a meaningful life) is also relevant. Christopher Peterson, Nansook Park and Martin Seligman have found (using data from an internet survey) that orientations to engagement and meaning have a greater impact on life satisfaction than does pleasure. The authors also found somewhat higher life satisfaction scores for respondents simultaneously near the top of all three orientations and notably lower scores for respondents simultaneously near the bottom of all three orientations (‘Orientations to happiness and life satisfaction: The full life versus the empty life’, Journal of Happiness Studies, 2005).

A short article by Amanda Horne on the ‘Positive Psychology News Daily’ site refers to research by Michael Steger and Bryan Dik which suggests that meaningful work is associated with people developing a sense of identity which comes from knowing ‘who they are, how their world works and how they fit in with and related to the life around them’ and ‘people’s identification of, and intention to pursue, particularly highly valued, over-arching life goals’ (Chapter on finding meaning at work in Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology and Work).

One of the points emphasised by Peter Warr, the author of extensive research on happiness in the workplace, is whether individuals want to be in the role they have been assigned, the value to them of different role characteristics and the attractiveness of core tasks. He suggests that such matters can have major implications for individual happiness. Warr also notes:

‘Some happiness is not actually accompanied by feelings of pleasure, or satisfaction of desires. This second form of happiness invokes reference standards of some kind, perhaps some realization of personal potential’ (‘Searching for happiness at work’, The Psychologist, Dec. 2007).

Some people might wonder why people who claim to get a great sense of achievement from their work often require high levels of remuneration for their services. I think this might have a lot to do with rationing of their time. Successful actors, sporting professionals, business leaders, artists etc. can be fairly sure that by requiring high levels of remuneration their services will be purchased by people who will appreciate them. They also know that can always give their wealth away if they feel embarrassed by the amount they are accumulating for doing things they might be happy doing for nothing.

Consideration of the way high-achievers allocate their time raises some obvious questions about the importance to life satisfaction of an appropriate balance between work and home life and between different domains such as ‘achieving in life’ and ‘personal relationships’. That might be a good subject for a later post.

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