240 entries under "book"

I commit myself to follow the set of rules we have devised in all instances except dire emergencies if the rest of those affected make a similar commitment and act accordingly.

Once appropriators have made contingent self-commitments, they are then motivated to monitor other people's behaviors, at least from time to time, in order to assure themselves that others are following the rules most of the time. Contingent self-commitments and mutual monitoring reinforce one another, especially when appropriators have devised rules that tend to reduce monitoring costs.

[Seeming simplicity is not equivalent to generality. Setting variables to a constant usually narrows the applicability of a model rather than broadening it.]

['I will if you will' becomes credible through monitoring that makes deviations visible.]

[Variables indicating benefits of proposed rules:]

1. Numbers of appropriators
2. Size of CPR
3. Temporal and spatial variability of resource units
4. Current condition of CPR
5. Market conditions for resource units
6. Amount and type of conflict
7. Availability of data about (1) through (6)
8. Status quo rules in use
9. Proposed rules

[Variables describing forecasted costs of changing the status quo:]

1. Number of decision makers
2. Heterogeneity of interests
3. Rules in use for changing rules
4. Skills and assets of leaders
5. Proposed rule
6. Past strategies of appropriators
7. Autonomy to change rules

[Variables describing resulting costs for monitoring and enforcement:]

1. Size and structure of CPR
2. Exclusion technology
3. Appropriation technology
4. Marketing arrangement
5. Proposed rules
6. Legitimacy of rules in use

[Variables affecting internal norms and discount rate:]

1. Appropriators live near CPR
2. Appropriators involved in many situations together
3. Information made available to appropriators about opportunities that exist elsewhere

[Better to view institutional choices as informed judgements about uncertain benefits and costs as opposed to mechanical calculation.]

whether grazing areas are used to produce milk or wool or meat can affect the ability of the appropriators to learn more rapidly about adverse conditions, should they arise. Milking occurs daily, and variations in yield are rapidly apparent to the herders. Wool is sheared less frequently, but the quality of wool is immediately apparent to those who herd sheep. The quality of meat produced for market is monitored less frequently and may not even be known by herders. Consequently, the quality and timeliness of the information that CPR appropriators obtain about their resource vary according to how a resource unit is used, as well as across resource types. The problems of groundwater pumpers in obtaining accurate and valid information about the condition of their CPR are more daunting than those of herders, regardless of the final products of herding activities.

[In a setting where external government has little effect on internal choices, the likelihood of appropriators adopting rule changes positively relates to whether:]

1. Most appropriators share a common judgment that they will be harmed if they do not adopt an alternative rule.
2. Most appropriators will be affected in similar ways by the proposed rule changes.
3. Most appropriators highly value the continuation activities from this
   CPR; in other words, they have low discount rates.
4. Appropriators face relatively low information, transformation, and enforcement costs.
5. Most appropriators share generalized norms of reciprocity and trust that can be used as initial social capital.
6. The group appropriating from the CPR is relatively small and stable.

The typical assumptions of complete information, independent action, perfect symmetry of interests, no human error, no norms of reciprocity, zero monitoring and enforcement costs, and no capacity to transform the situation itself will lead to highly particularized models, not universal theories.

1. [Define clear boundaries for the resource and who can share in it.]
2. [Proportion the sharing based on local conditions.]
3. [Empower those affected by the rules to modify them.]
4. [Monitor with stakeholders who are accountable.]
5. [Sanction those who violate rules with gradual escalation based on context and severity.]
6. [Prepare low-cost local conflict-resolution mechanisms in the event of disagreement.]
7. [Recognize the right to self-organization without challenge from external authorities.]

Irrigation rotation systems, for example, usually place the two actors most concerned with cheating in direct contact with one another. The irrigator who nears the end of a rotation turn would like to extend the time of his turn (and thus the amount of water obtained). The next irrigator in the rotation system waits nearby for him to finish, and would even like to start early. The presence of the first irrigator deters the second from an early start, the presence of the second irrigator deters the first from a late ending. Neither has to invest additional resources in monitoring activities. Monitoring is a by-product of their own strong motivations to use their water rotation turns to the fullest extent.

personal rewards for doing a good job are given to appropriators who monitor. The individual who finds a rule-infractor gains status and prestige for being a good protector of the commons. The infractor loses status and prestige. Private benefits are allocated to those who monitor.

Because the appropriators tend to continue monitoring the guards, as well as each other, some redundancy is built into the monitoring and sanctioning system. Failure to deter rule-breaking by one mechanism does not trigger a cascading process of rule infractions, because other mechanisms are in place.

The first step is that the village forester marks the trees ready to be harvested. The second step is that the households eligible to receive timber form work reams and equally divide the work of cutting the trees, hauling the logs, and piling the logs into approximately equal stacks. A lottery is then used to assign particular stacks to the eligible households. No harvesting of trees is authorized at any other time of year.

[It was considered reasonable for the land violations detective to demand cash and sake from infractors and use it for their own enjoyment. In addition to those penalties, contraband harvest was confiscated along with equipment and horses, the latter two only retrievable by paying a fine to the village.]

The first thing to understand is that there are probabilities at work. A trader with 55% winning days will average two or three 5day losing streaks per year and probably one 6day losing streak. A 6 day losing streak is enough to make the best trader feel like a complete moron. But he isn't. It's just probability

[Markets with bearish sentiment without many positions is primed to fall as new entries reflect their perspective, whereas with many positions is more st risk of reversal as there may be no one left to sell.]

['Buy the rumour, sell the fact' refers to markets pricing in an event ahead of time and then reversing when it takes place. Often the moment of a news release is the apex of this sentiment and you may notice counterintuitively that good news getting priced in over time ends up reversing on its announcement]

Instead of gyrating back and forth for a while before finding equilibrium, the market now finds equilibrium very quickly after the release of economic data. Hedge funds and banks use regression analysis before the data release to estimate how far each asset should move on various outcomes and they execute trades via algorithm at the moment of release. They will buy or sell until all asset classes are approximately in line with where history suggests they should be and this will happen in microseconds. There is nothing left on the table for the human traders because all the liquidity in the market is hoovered by the bots in the first few microseconds.

[P&L targets remind you of the point where your job is done and so to book profits rather than increase leverage.]

[If the average moves on two instruments are respectively 1.2% and 0.6%, you wouldn't want the same position size in both.]

[The market only cares about how economic data releases compare to expectations; so not in relation to last month or year but rather the median awaited by economists and traders.]

[When markets react to old or random news, focus more on what's happening rather than whether it makes sense.]

[If you backtest and find an optimal moving average that worked in the past, that doesn't guarantee success in the future. Better to pick what fits your timeline granularity.]

Trading is a serious intellectual pursuit that is also incredibly fun. The joy of attempting to solve an unsolvable puzzle. A nearly impossible daily test of discipline and selfcontrol. An endless emotional rollercoaster of instant feedback, frequent disappointment, sudden euphoria, and nearly unbearable periods of crushing selfdoubt.

A Simple Marketing Worksheet

• Who's it for?
• What's it for?
• What is the worldview of the audience you're seeking to reach?
• What are they afraid of?
• What story will you tell? Is it true?
• What change are you seeking to make?
• How will it change their status?
• How will you reach the early adopters and neophiliacs?
• Why will they tell their friends?
• What will they tell their friends?
• Where's the network effect that will propel this forward?
• What asset are you building?
• Are you proud of it?

[Trusted marketers earn enrollment because they make a promise and keep it. With trust comes attention that lets them tell a story uninterrupted. The story can lead to more enrollment, more promises, more trust.]

[Everyone is famous to 1500 people. In our culture, fame breeds trust.]

[It takes more (stress) for a customer to say yes than to walk away.]

[Make sure your most loyal customers have a megaphone to tell others: people like us do things like this.]

[Building new things for your customers (instead of finding new customers for your things) implies investing in their lifetime value.]

[A supermarket might expect the lifetime value of their regulars to be thousands of dollars, so they would do well to 1. sponsor events for new residents in the area and 2. do right when a local complains about the fruit not being ripe.]

[People won't tell their friends because you wanted or asked. You need to make your offer worth sharing.]

[Facebook during their initial growth was well-positioned as a status signal for insecure and high-status students who craved to move up in some invisible hierarchy.]

[One kid brings a yo-yo to school but it doesn't create much traction. A charismatic fifth-grader who is good but not intimidating opens the Yo-yo Union club to all with three spare yo-yos to share; then there's three early adopters leading the way and soon there's thirty kids with yo-yos on the playground.]

[We only notice ideas that cross the chasm beyond neophiliacs.]

[You serve many but profit from few; whales pay for minnows.]

If the goal is to get it over with, get the person off the phone, deny responsibility, read the script, use words like "as stated" and "our policy," then, please, sure, yes, keep doing what you're doing and watch it all fall apart.

['Cheap' can mean 'scared', a last refuge when there are no other ideas.]

[Status is an omnipresent layer in how people make decisions. It's always relative but what is perceived by others can differ from is believed internally. Some people want to hold on, and some want to move up; some even want to move down because it may mean safety and less competition.]

[Consider what the person you're serving measures with respect to their status before they make decisions.]

"Who eats first" and "who sits closest to the emperor" are questions that persist to this day. Both are status questions. One involves dominion; the other involves affiliation.

[Amateurs create what they like, whereas professionals create what other people will like.]

[Spam scams are poorly worded to filter you out quick. They seek people who are dominated by greed and avoid wasting time on the careful and well-informed.]

[A brand is not your logo: it's a shorthand for the customer's expectations when they buy from or meet with you. Your brand is the promise they think they're making.]

If people care, you've got a brand.

[Start not with solutions but with people you seek to serve and a problem they want solved.]

[Commodity work isn't lucrative when other options are a click away.]

[Charging ten times more isn't about quantity: it's for a different story.]

[Grateful Dead favoured extremes on the XY axis (live recordings over polished albums, long jams for their fans over short radio hits) and owned them.]

[Beside the intended audience, there's also an accidental audience who ends up getting more satisfaction from tearing down the work.]

["For those who want A and believe B, choosing C is perfect." Based on who they are and what they want and know, everyone is always right.]

[Launching an extreme (fastest, cheapest, most convenient) means breaking the former extreme's status.]

"I made this" is a very different statement than, "What do you want?"

[Specific is kind of brave as it's accountable: it either worked, matched, spread, or it didn't. Are you hiding behind everyone or anyone?]

[Find a corner of the market that can't wait for your attention, where you are the perfect answer.]

["How can I start a business?" is contrived, whereas "What would matter here?" relates to real needs of others.]

Focus on the smallest viable market: "How few people could find this indispensable and still make it worth doing?"

Instead of looking for members for your work, look for ways to do work for your members.

Everyone is lonely, insecure, and a bit of a fraud. And everyone cares about something.

[Pet food caters to the owner; humans don't even know what it tastes like.]

[Conspiracy theories might attract out of a desire for uniqueness or belonging in a small group.]

[When you show up with a flotation device to help someone drowning, they don't need ads to understand or be persuaded.]

[Old-fashioned marketing centers the one buying ads, and is done to the customer rather than for them.]

Marketing is the act of making change happen. Making is insufficient. You haven't made an impact until you've changed someone.

[Marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve their problem.]

Marketers don't use consumers to solve their company's problem; they use marketing to solve other people's problems. They have the empathy to know that those they seek to serve don't want what the marketer wants, don't believe what they believe, and don't care about what they care about. They probably never will.

[Humans tell themselves stories. We should consider those as indisputably true and not persuade otherwise.]

[Not the drill bit, not the quarter-inch hole, not the shelf, but rather the satisfaction of doing it themselves or the admiration from a spouse or a room free of clutter. Understand how the utility of an object is to serve their real wish: to feel safe and respected.]

[We buy how it makes us feel, and there aren't so many feelings to choose from. To deliver belonging, connection, peace of mind, status, or other desirable emotions likely means something worthwhile.]

with correct deep breathing, the ribs gently massage the spine and internal organs.

Blood circulation throughout the body happens via blood vessels (veins, arteries, and capillaries). There are around 100,000 miles of blood vessels in an average adult body! These lie across or underneath, or are surrounded by muscles. Relaxed muscles that are not stiff and over-contracted won't squeeze and pinch the blood vessels, meaning they transport blood more effectively.

Remain relaxed, even when you are doing exercises that may seem at first to be primarily strength building; consider all the movements to really be a stretch.

1. [Identify edges objectively.]
2. [Calculate risk for every trade.]
3. [Accept the risk or reject the trade.]
4. [Act on edges without hesitation.]
5. [Take money off the table when it's available.]
6. [Monitor susceptibility for errors.]

[Partial take profit reduces risk on the stop by that same proportion.]

[One hierarchy of stages for taking profit can be 1. initial moves in your favour; 2. support or resistance on a larger timeframe (with a move of your stop to the entry point); and 3. significant high or low on a larger timeframe.]

[Variables used to deal with market dynamics can go in and out of effectiveness as market participants and their interactions change.]

a football player who trains with weights and sprints is "conditioning" his body for playing football.

A sub 2.15 marathon runner is not "fit" to dead lift 600 pounds of iron, and a world-class power lifter is not "fit" to run a sub-28-minute 10,000 meters. Using our narrow definition, neither athlete would be "fit" to perform any number of movements on the gymnastics balance beam. The Olympic gymnast would not be "fit" for sumo wrestling, and so forth.

Strength is a muscle's ability to contract against the resistance of an external object (a weight) or one's own body weight.

Power utilizes strength within an explosive burst of energy.

Agility encompasses the possibility of executing power movements in rapidly changing directions

[Regardless of their belief, everyone wants to be believed because it feels good, and being disbelieved can easily feel harsh, like an attack.]

1. Beliefs seem to take on a life of their own and, therefore, resist any force that would alter their present form.
2. All active beliefs demand expression.
3. [Beliefs keep working whether or not we are aware of them.]

[If you woke up one day and everyone acted as if you didn't exist, you'd probably try to shake someone out of it. Beliefs will act the same way if purposefully ignored and force their presence to be acknowledged.]

Thinking outside of the boundaries of our beliefs is commonly referred to as creative thinking.

[The pattern-making sensibilities of our mind are tricked into confounding a unique now as potentially not unique when it seems to share similar properties with another occasion.]

We can "know" exactly what an edge looks, sounds, or feels like, and we can "know" exactly how much we need to risk to find out if that edge is going to work. We can "know" that we have a specific plan as to how we are going to take profits if a trade works. But that's it! If what we think we know starts expanding to what the market is going to do, we're in trouble.

[The objective is not making money, but consistency. The skills involve having an objective state of mind less easily blinded by pain-avoidance mechanisms; to let things unfold and be capable to take advantage when there's an opportunity.]

[Market info is only threatening if you expect it to do something for you; otherwise, you have no reason to fear being wrong.]

[Your edge is only an indication of one thing more likely to happen than another; the only evidence needed is whether the variables used to define the edge are present. Other information is noise and makes as much sense as trying to prove the next coin flip will be heads after ten flips came up tails: the odds are still 50/50 regardless of what you find.]

[If you believe you called the market once, you'll probably try to do it again, thereby setting yourself up for a trap; things are never the same again.]

when the positive or negative energy from our memories or experiences become linked to a set of words we call a concept, the concept becomes energized and, as a result, is transformed into a belief about the nature of reality. If you consider that concepts are structured by the framework of a language and energized by our experiences, it becomes clear why I refer to beliefs as "structured energy."

Since we can't expect something we don't know about, we could also say that an expectation is what we know projected into some future moment.

Events that have probable outcomes can produce consistent results, if you can get the odds in your favor and there is a large enough sample size.

[If casinos have a 4.5% edge on their customers, it translates to netting 4.5% on all money wagered there with that probability.]

[Technical analysis is mathematical, whereas mental analysis is psychological and uses technical indicators as a proxy for collective behaviour patterns.]

Each trade contributes to the market's position at any given moment, which means that each trader, acting on a belief about what is high and what is low, contributes to the collective behavior pattern that is displayed at that moment.

At the moment he puts a trade on, and for as long as he chooses to stay in that trade, other traders will be participating in that market. They will be acting on their beliefs about what is high and what is low. At any given moment, some percentage of other traders will contribute to an outcome favorable to our trader's edge, and the participation of some percentage of traders will negate his edge. There's no way to know in advance how everyone else is going to behave and how their behavior will affect his trade, so the outcome of the trade is uncertain. The fact is, the outcome of every (legal) trade that anyone decides to make is affected in some way by the subsequent behavior of other traders participating in that market, making the outcome of all trades uncertain.

Since all trades have an uncertain outcome, then like gambling, each trade has to be statistically independent of the next trade, the last trade, or any trades in the future, even though the trader may use the same set of known variables to identify his edge for each trade. Furthermore, if the outcome of each individual trade is statistically independent of every other trade, there must also be a random distribution between wins and losses in any given string or set of trades, even though the odds of success for each individual trade may be in the trader's favor.

[Casinos don't need to predict the future to create consistent results: as long as the odds are in their favour, a large enough sample size will give their edge a chance to work.]

[For any pattern to be "exactly" the same as in a previous moment, exactly the same traders would need to be present with the equivalent mental state; therefore virtually impossible. So every market moment is unique even though it may rhyme with a previous occurrence.]

[Being aware of uncertainty and probabilities doesn't automatically translate to profiting from it.]

When you've trained your mind to think in probabilities, it means you have fully accepted all the possibilities (with no internal resistance or conflict) and you always do something to take the unknown forces into account. Thinking this way is virtually impossible unless you've done the mental work necessary to "let go" of the need to know what is going to happen next or the need to be right on each trade. In fact, the degree by which you think you know, assume you know, or in any way need to know what is going to happen next, is equal to the degree to which you will fail as a trader.

Traders who have learned to think in probabilities are confident of their overall success, because they commit themselves to taking every trade that conforms to their definition of an edge. They don't attempt to pick and choose the edges they think, assume, or believe are going to work and act on those; nor do they avoid the edges that for whatever reason they think, assume, or believe aren't going to work. If they did either of those things, they would be contradicting their belief that the "now" moment situation is always unique, creating a random distribution between wins and losses on any given string of edges. They have learned, usually quite painfully, that they don't know in advance which edges are going to work and which ones aren't. They have stopped trying to predict outcomes. They have found that by taking every edge, they correspondingly increase their sample size of trades, which in turn gives whatever edge they use ample opportunity to play itself out in their favor, just like the casinos.

[Typical traders avoid predefining risk because "it isn't necessary", which implies they believe that they can and do know what will happen, as well as that they're correct.]

When you're convincing yourself that you're right, what you're saying to yourself is, "I know who's about to come into this market. I know what they believe about what is high or what is low. Furthermore, I know each individual's capacity to act on those beliefs (the degree of clarity or relative lack of inner conflict), and with this knowledge, I am able to determine how the actions of each of these individuals will affect price movement in its collective form a second, a minute, an hour, a day, or a week from now."

[Watching a market with no intention to trade is frustration-free because nothing is at stake.]