EclecticLip

(Originally written Dec 2009; posted April 2010)

I ran into one of my old Classical Studies professors at a Starbucks recently.  It was fun catching up; it was sobering to think those days were about twenty years ago.  Back then, Brian Mulroney (!) was Prime Minister and the ground-breaking, subversive, edgy cartoon TV show was The Simpsons.

Smalltalk aside, we discussed the recent Landmark Edition of Herodotus, the Greek historian known variously as “the father of history” and “the father of lies”.  This is because he’s generally reliable (for an ancient historian) on Greek matters — and hilariously unreliable for anything outside of Greece (being, the other 99% of the world).  To his credit, he does tell his readers that he’s just reporting what all these foreign sailors have told him.  Which begs the question of why he spent so much time with foreign sailors. 

Though one line in his Histories suggests that Pheonicians circumnavigated Africa millenia before Europeans, Herodotus is most famous for telling Greek audiences that in India, fox-sized ants would get covered in gold dust while digging their burrows, which the locals would collect with whatever passed for the “Swiffer” of that era.*  But they’d have to be careful, because these ants were so fierce, they would eat camels.  The more mundane reality is that folks in a part of Pakistan have harvested gold dust from the coats of marmots for centuries.  And there is a type of scorpion in that region dumb enough to chase camels.  Ah, the miracle of mistranslation! 

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* this is separate from the Golden Fleece legend.  If the latter has historical roots, it would most likely be the ancient practise of using sheepskin to collect gold dust floating down rivers in the Black Sea area.  (The sheepskin was cheap, available, and renewable, and had lots of surface area with which to catch the particles.)

The other week, I partook in a stock trading course I’d bid on as a lark, as part of the company United Way campaign.  I can blithely report that it amounted to a get-rich-quick scheme for people who are otherwise immune to get-rich-quick schemes. 

I doubt any of the professionals in the room would fall for chain letters, winning-lottery-ticket emails or advance fee fraud (the son of the brother of the President of Nigeria needs your help!) – but we indeed shared the collective gullibility that there was a way to rake in the dough at the Wall Street casino.

Come of think of it, apart from style of dress and dental health, we were probably no different from our tribal forebears in millenia past, who sought shamans’ advice to ensure their own prosperity.  (Contrary to popular belief, cavities seem to’ve been rare, way back in the day – most food simply wasn’t sugary enough to cause tooth decay.)  And I suppose our behaviour wasn’t so different, either, from Fortune 500 executives bringing in high-priced consultants to turn their companies around.  It all seems like a lot of dart-throwing, in the end. 

The course centred on “technical analysis”, the theory that a stock’s price follows near-immutable patterns – unless it doesn’t, which is why you arrange your bets such that you cash out with only a small loss the other 48% of the time; the stock market equivalent of a seat belt and air bags, I suppose.  Nor is it as nutty as some of the purportedly-professional investment advice I’ve read, some of which relied on planetary alignments.  (Hmm… maybe that was the Wall Street Journal’s astrologer?)

As for the brotherhood of technical analysts – there’s no handshake, but the password is “Fibonacci” – their investment numerology is based on the purported role of the Golden Mean (0.618) and various permutations thereof, in predicting future prices.  I’m not sure if Euclid would’ve been proud or horrified, but since he was smart, he’d’ve probably demanded a royalty.

By the logic of this arcane rubric, it should be possible to make money on a stock without knowing a thing about the company.  While I’ve proven the opposite true many a time, that prospect struck me as somehow inappropriate.  After all, even when it comes to making money in the stock market, shouldn’t you have to earn it by putting in hard work to research a company, and so forth?  Then the cognitive dissonance hit me: I had enrolled in a course to learn how to make easy money, and was now irritated that there could be a way of making easy money.  Naturally, I resolved this by deciding that maybe easy money wasn’t such a bad thing after all.  When it was in the right hands.  Specifically, mine.  Such is the clueless egotism of the modern male. 

All in all, the course reaffirmed my sense that the surest way to get rich quickly off of secret knowledge is to claim you have some, then meter it out for an exorbitant fee.  A recent motivational poster from despair.com does put it nicely. 

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