This Many Idiots Can't Be Wrong
Copyright (c) 2000 Wade Walker
Being blessed with a unique combination of the desire to overanalyze everything and intense scorn for the foibles of my fellow man, I once sat down to try to enumerate all the stupidities of mankind. This was before I knew enough math to realize that those stupidities are not just infinite in number, they’re an "uncountable infinity." I can even prove this mathematically, though I’m not going to because doing that sort of thing where a member of the fairer sex might read it would constitute what I refer to as a "copulation frequency decreasing event" or CFDE for short. Yes, an even worse CFDE than being the guy who coined such immortal blasphemies as "Jesus H. Fuckmonkey" and says things like "Day-yam! I’d like to be Sallie Mae so I could extend her a federally subsidized, low interest bone loan." However, there is one particular stupidity on my abortive list that I never get tired of making fun of. A less vulgar person might call it something like the "problem of attribution," but I like to call it the "circle of bullshit," and I believe it’s responsible for almost all mankind’s problems. Its workings are deceptively simple. Here’s a typical example. Somewhere way back in history, someone had the bullshit idea that there are these super-powerful beings called "gods." The Day Planners of the gods are usually quite full, what with their constant appearances in animal form to impregnate hot mortal chicks, tracking down and killing of mortals who’ve seen them naked in the forest, et cetera, but allegedly if you sacrifice an animal to the right one of them before planting your seeds, it will ensure a good harvest. After several dozen failed attempts, this finally works for someone, just by random chance, since even an idiot will get a good harvest sooner or later. Voilà! Religion is born, and as a bonus you get a great tradition of stories about hot mortal-on-immortal zoophilic intromission. "Well, but people were stupid back then," you might say. And you might also say, "And apparently they were also much kinkier than the people of today, since the gods of the time tended to pursue their Olympian nut-busting in the form of bizarre animals like swans." And you might even say something like "I mean, damn, if I was going to be some kind of animal with a crazy fuck jones for human poontang, I’d rather be something well-hung, like a horse or a bull or something, you know? What the hell’s up with the swan thing?" And you’d even be right in saying all that. But people are just as stupid now as they were back then, even if their level of sexual inventiveness has dropped off a bit. And for proof, we need look no further than the stock market. Wall Street, and the rest of the world for that matter, is full of people with bullshit ideas about how to make money in the market. Ideas like "I only invest in companies with strong fundamentals and incredible growth stories," or "I try to find companies that currently look undervalued relative to the products they’ve got in the pipeline" or "My cats walk upright in my dreams and take me to meet the oneiric avatar of Bast, who’s a great little stock-picker, in addition to having a bodacious rack" or whatever the fuck. Eventually one of these chumps makes some money, and their bullshit idea is enshrined as the gospel of the moment. The problem with this is, there’s never an attempt to establish a causal link between the bullshit idea and the outcome. Wall Street fund manager types usually at least make a pretense of having some mysterious system behind their decisions, since if no one invested in their funds, they’d have to give up the daily "one o’clock meetings" in their corner offices snorting cocaine off the tits of $500-an-hour call girls and start jerking off to Internet porn like the rest of the huddled masses. We know it’s all bullshit, but at least their blather gives the plebes something to believe in. But the real chumps here are the bottom-feeding day-trader types. They trade on the thinnest of excuses, like "It’s been going up all morning, so it’s got to keep going up at least another hour." The sun’s been going up all morning too, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to go any higher after noon. Why not just abandon all pretense and read stock movements in chicken entrails or tea leaves? Or better yet, invent an elaborate neo-pagan sex ritual, preferably one that involves blasting shot after shot of foamy cock-cheese into willing pagan décolletage, then claim that the exact bead pattern of the resulting pearl necklace will predict the next hour’s stock movements, and generously offer a few points off the front end, so to speak, to anyone willing to help you out. At least that way you can blow your wad two different ways at the same time. Stock ownership is like the lottery—almost random, but that doesn’t stop players from having elaborate, delusional ideas about how they can increase their odds of winning. There are two problems with this, though. The first one is that no one has ever demonstrated the ability to beat the market indices for any length of time. So whatever their bullshit ideas are, they’re not working out in real life. The second problem is that the market is a feedback system that automatically acts to counter any strategy used to make money from it. Say that some Gordon Gekko wannabe or hotshot physicist-turned-financier comes up with a new idea about how to pick stocks. He starts using the idea, and it starts making him money. Then other people notice he’s big pimping, spending cheese, and start copying what he’s doing. That increased demand drives up the price of the stocks he’s trying to buy, thereby destroying the profit he’s trying to make. So even if you come up with an idea that works, it won’t work for long. Right now some people can pay big bucks to get more timely market information, which helps out these strategies a bit. But even that’s going to go away as soon as the Internet hits its full stride and we’ve all got 3G cell phones with 57 channels of real-time stock quotes vibrating into our asses in code. So why not just invest in index funds, sit back, and stack your mad riches? After all, the Fed increases the total supply of money regularly to allow the economy to grow at whatever rate they think is reasonable, and that money has to go somewhere. In the long term, barring a complete collapse of the economy, you’re going to make money. Invest wisely now, and you’ll have enough when you hit retirement to smoke, drink, and screw just as much as when you were young, and no one’ll say jack shit because you’ll be all Mr. The Muthafuckin Rich Guy, and no one wants to piss off the one who’s footing the bill for the champagne and strippers. But people can’t ignore the siren song of the circle of bullshit. Once they come up with that first bullshit idea that makes them some money on a stock, they think they’re onto something. The few that win big this way become insufferable, since they think they’re huge geniuses and now they’re rich so people won’t tell them to shut the fuck up. The few that lose big end up pulling a "Polyphemus meets Fight Club", walking back into their day-trading firms with a an Armalite AR-180 carbine gas-operated semiautomatic and moistening the earth with the brains of their former colleagues. I wish both of them would cut it out so the index funds wouldn’t jiggle around so much.
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