Efficient Market Hypothesis or the Black Ducks

It’s always difficult to post the latest event and findings, just to put it in prospective. Is there anything in the Indian papers worth reading today? Or shall wait 4 the outrage to surface it?

Sharing two of the contrary indicators and psychology of Efficient Market Hypothesis and Black Swan that I have taken from the reformed broker and Hedgeye blog.

Sometimes it can be the Black duck

 “The trouble with the Recency Effect is that everyone all of a sudden thought they were Nassim Taleb, ornithological experts on the spotting of Black Swans. Every blip on the screen or blurb in the newspaper was fresh evidence of the next hundred years’ storm. Forget being fooled by randomness, people have become obsessed with randomness.

 But as we’ve learned, not every aberration is a Black Swan in the making. Sometimes, it’s just an ordinary Black Duck. A negative event or possibility that is processed and dealt with, that doesn’t necessarily lead to contagion, panic and meltdown.”

Hedgeye Blog: The St. Petersburg Paradox:

 “The mathematical expectation of the speculator is zero.” –Louis Bachelier was a French mathematician who was, well after the fact, credited with founding the Efficient Market Thesis. In 1900 Bachelier published his Ph.D thesis titled “The Theory of Speculation.” In his paper, Bachelier discussed the use of Brownian motion to evaluate stock prices. Unfortunately, his thesis was “not appropriately received”, which resulted in academic black-balling and the concept being buried for more than sixty years.

 Almost sixty-five years later Professor Eugene Fama from the University of Chicago was officially credited with developing the Efficient Market Thesis after publishing his Ph.D thesis. His paper was titled “The Behaviour of Stock Market Prices.” The core tenet of his paper and the Efficient Market Thesis is that an investor “cannot consistently achieve returns in excess of average of market returns on a risk-adjusted basis, given the information that is publicly available at the time the investment is made.”

Is it not somewhat ironic that the determination of who founded the Efficient Market Thesis was not efficient?”