People are looking for Messiahs to cave certainty out of a world that is inherently non-deterministic and stochastic. This desire manifests itself as an apostolic belief in omnipotence, which is exploited by the kings and high priests alike throughout history. The expert that would tell you definitively that wearing a mask is stupid, and COVID19 does not affect children (both are proven wrong as the thing evolves)
Can you really judge things by what you see? Why there were, are, and will always be crook doctors? For instance, there were someone suggested injection of micro amount of phenol as a cure for COVID19, apparently, some people utilized his service when the hospitals are packed. Was the positive result really due to the phenol injection or it is just the body recover from the worst of it on its own? The same is true for vaccine. There is a story of a boy having a seizure right before the vaccine injection. Should the injection happened 3 seconds earlier, people would have drawn the conclusion that the seizure was caused by the vaccine. When multiple vaccines are mandated by the population, there are gonna be coincidence. If you are someone unaware of the confirmation bias, then you would take that as absolute truth.
Information Leakage: There will always be a cat and mouse game of people in the know hiding information from people who can benefit from that information. Yet there are leakage, always. The key question is the following, how do you drive the most information out of observations, where to look? For instance, you can estimate how pervalance of this disease by celebrities. People also did study with satellite images and search terms. Also, when people try to find out super secretive government projects, they go to Linkedin or tender documents. Information always leaks out, you have to know where to look.
Weathering the tumultuous times with hedging. There was a preprint published on the Med-archive site, showing that asymptomatic patient has similar viral load in their respiratory tracks. I have no doubt that the medical professionals have picked up on this critical piece of information since that would mean that controlling of the spread via identification of carrier is unlikely to happen with conventional monitory equipments. Yet at that point, the majority of the world still think it is a China problem alone. Stock market barely budged. A hedging structure should have been designed then to withstand the shock. One way to do it would be shorting the oil if your business would be impacted should the virus spread. If it does spread, your business would dry up but so is oil need. Therefore, the gain with shorting the oil would compensate your dying business. Another scenario would be that you hold stocks, but on the event horizon, perceptions downfall is a possibility should the virus spread. Options or futures should be purchased at that point. If the virus is contained, then you lose the money spent on options and futures, however, if it does spread and forced the economy to a halt, not only would those options and futures pay handsomely, cash at that point of time also means you can take full advantage of the forced liquidation of those big guys such as pension fund, Norwegian sovereign wealth fund or college endowments. That is that ultimate buying the dip structure isn’t it. Hedging is different to taking a position, since the objective is not necessarily to gain from the oscillation but to have a stable response no matter which side things go.
Decision Making Under Uncertainty. Most people can only look at the upside of a decision. However, the most important determinant should be the downside. People would never hear the sounds of Kassandra because they don’t want to, a blind optimism is often the crucial ingredient for commitment.
Extreme Version of You Seems that any fossilized structure can only take into account few variables. It is absolutely a valuable thing, to be able to achieve extreme version on that few variables, but it is not enough, nor is it optimal. It is a tag of war, the incentiviced extremed version of you and a more optimal version.
Get The Channels Ready in Case an Opportunity Reveal itself There was a point in market that major players in bitcoin and stockmarket has to liquidate and the price dropped percipitously. It was an excellent opportunity to purchase some asset. However, I did not have an account for US stock and I did not have an account for bitcoin. By the time I get all those paper work sorted out, the opportunity has passed me by. This does not only apply to investment, but so many other things as well. I think the main take away is that get things ready when you can, during the downtime, because push would come to shove, make sure you are prepared either to weather the storm or take advantage of an opportunity.
There is always a spectrum of people, their valuation dosn’t nessassrily reflect their value who are the value creators and who are pure consumers?I guess that answer depends on the time and circumstances. In the long run, value are probably created by the researchers who figure out a better way to produce product that is needed by a society, they don’t quite get the share of the value they created, because there really isn’t a structure for them to do so. Patent holders are their institutions. I can also see why some managers with excellent track record are valuated highly, a good track record in taking on uncertainty is hard to comeby. However, any role in the society is valuable, just what the circumstances allows them to charge for that value they created. In the case of pandamic, those essential workers kept people from dying of starvation. I hope they get a raise, or harzard pay of sort. Point being, valuation and value created could be situationally dependent.