Byung Kyu Park's Personal Website

Doubtless 2011 has been a big year as far as global events go. Aside from symbolically important events (such as the Arab Spring and, just yesterday, the death of Kim Jong-Il), economically important events were unfolding this year, with lasting impacts—and they are still unfolding; two years from now, we might be marking 2011 as the beginning of the end for EUR, or five years from now, we might look back at 2011 as when EMU solidified into a more perfect “United States of Europe” (with or without U.K. which today appears to be a pariah of Europe).

I thought I would just note two rather ironic turns of events:

• Standard & Poors downgrades U.S. credit rating, and the treasury yields plunge, as “flight to safety” causes flow of funds to U.S. treasuries
• ECB refuses to print money by buying up sovereign debt (like the Fed’s QE2 in U.S.), and, in a response, EUR falls like a stone.

In both cases, simplistic analysis of what credit ratings mean (lower credit rating ought to equal higher risk of default, which ought to mean higher borrowing costs, i.e. yield) and supply-and-demand (ECB puts fewer EUR in circulation; EUR should be more expensive not cheap) would indicate the opposite of what actually happened, but, well, that’s the nature of the market. It’s a complex beast, where global forces push things in a way that’s not entirely predictable (as an aside, gold behaved like a safe haven earlier in the year (mostly anti-correlated with stock market indices), until some time in September when it flipped and started behaving like a risk asset (mostly correlated with stock market indices)).

And of course, there are still a couple more weeks left in the year, so who knows what more crazy things will happen …

I had been struggling with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations for a couple weeks. It had been a fascinating read, but the book was much longer than I had suspected: the Kindle book counts 15939 “locations”, and since 7 “locations” are approximately the same amount of text on a single page of a pocket paperback, it’s nearly 2277 pages of a pocket paperback (as a textbook, it might be 500 pages or so, I think). So, I’m only 17% of the way through (i.e. position corresponding to location 2700 or so), but it’s O.K. because it was so long to begin with anyway, right?

… Not!

I also bought the newest edition of Graham’s Intelligent Investor. That was 3 days ago. I am now almost halfway through the book, or, at location 4811.

Clearly the problem wasn’t either with the length of the text or how interesting the material is (from purely intellectual level, I think they are of about the same interesting value, as can be attested from the approximately the same number of notes I made reading). So, how was it that I could read through almost twice as much of the latter book in much less than half the time?

I think it comes down to motivation, and more specifically, profit motive. Adam Smith’s book, while it offers a valuable insight into capitalism and market economy (which is why I started reading it in the first place), it is not, in the practical sense, applicable to today’s economy, e.g. the stock market. On the other hand, the information in Graham’s book is the information I need right now in order to make prudent investments in the stock market, as I have been moving my liquid assets into stocks for a week or two and will be buying even more dollar value of stocks in the next few days. I think this profit motive is what made so big a difference in my, ah hem, performance.

I wonder if something similar could be instituted for my, er, day job, if I would be a more productive researcher.