Does it Take a “Special Brain” to Make Serious Money?

No, this isn’t a crash.  That comes later.

But the Market’s going to tank this morning, so we begin first-off  with a hat tip to Madison Avenue Mike (in reality a scion of the NYC fashion industry/glitterati) who has a keen eye for the important as opposed to the “obvious” and generously shares his findings.

What he tipped us to is the story out of the Virginia Tech (Carilion) Research Institute that reveals “High-earning investors have neural signals that successfully predict stock market bubbles and crashes.”

They musta missed this website, but we continue…

The key part of the article goes into how more than 300 research subjects were hooked up to functional MRI machines and they were put into an artificial trading environment.  Here’s where it gets cool:

“Traders who bought more aggressively based on activity in one brain region, the nucleus accumbens, earned less.

In contrast, the high earners seemed to ignore nucleus accumbens activity in favor of the anterior insular cortex, a brain area active during bodily discomfort and unpleasant emotional states.

Just before a bubble peaked – as their brain scans were revealing an increased activity in the anterior insula – the high earners would begin to sell their shares.

The scientists believe the high earners’ brain activity may represent a neural early warning signal of an impending crash.”

Even with the market set this morning to blow off 150-points to the downside, we aren’t really in “crash country” yet on the major markets.  But this research has terribly important implications in terms both of learning to trade and (perhaps) one day being screened for that “big job” at a GS or somewhere with a brain scan in addition to the usual HR tools.

By extension, there are a lot of other jobs which functional MRI’s might be useful for spotting real talent:  I can see airline pilots, for example, or neurosurgeons having key areas of brain “lighting up” at precisely the right moments as being a predictor of success or failure..

No More Free Money

Oh, about the market drop this morning?  Part of it is due to the Bank of England not giving the Bankster class more free money to play with. 

This comes at an awful time for the EU because most of the region’s manufacturing just sucks, but then we knew what the problem was from the get-go:  New Millennialism is going to cause the biggest crash in the history of the world, but we’ll work through the moving parts of that one for Peoplenomics readers this weekend.

The main feature this morning is to look at the price of gold and silver.  (Charts up top of this page if you’re not on a mobile device — otherwise this is where I say neener-neener I told you to stick with a laptop and Skype, you idiot!)

Gold is up almost $25 and silver was up to $21.55 and pretty soon, I will hit the phone and call the boys over at CB-Mint (shameless advertiser plug) and ask them if selling my lone gold coin and my lone silver one, will buy us a steak dinner before beef prices disappear into the stratosphere due to the drought…

More after this…

         

Speaking of Drought and such…

The latest US Drought monitor picture looks grim as ever this morning:  The dark patches, which is where things aren’t growing, continue to be most all of the Central and San Joaquin Valley in Veggifornia and the old home of the Dust Bowl, up toward Amarillo and extending into Oklahoma and threatening the “square states” region.

For us carnivores, the bad news is (according to the Drover’s Cattle Network) that meat prices are expected to remain high.  I suppose you already noticed this overs the Fourth.

I can hardly wait to see how the government papers this over in the cost of living report due out next week.  We’ve seen hedonics cut out steak by substituting ground sirloin on the logic thast sirloin is sirloin, I suppose.  But pretty quick, we’ll all be on veggie-burgers and even then prices won’t come down.

So for breakfast this morning’s we’ll be having soy bacon, scrambled air and dried toast as we bulk up for another hard day of “Recovery” and “Change.”

When I look at the cats here lately, I can’t tell if my eyes are watering….or drooling

Like to thank the prices who clearcut and wreck rainforests, for the help toward turning this into lizard planet.

Madness on Bordering

Conservatives (people who can spell b-o-r-d-e-r without the XXI or apology after it) are incensed with what’s being called an act of war by Mexico and Guatemala: “The Southern Border Program to Improve Passage” which is like putting a human freeway in to dump even more people into Texas and the other border states.

And John Boehner’s control file must have been opened because he’s backed off talk of impeachment.

The real reason?  Border XXI and Canamex and TransTexas Highway are all issues where republicorps have previously screwed the pooch and the democorps have them by the goanies on this one.

With so many Americans on drugs, it’s a wonder we can even get dressed as a country any more….or is this all proof we can’t?  This border crap is the narcomoney coming to America after buying it’s way in through the K-Street Mafia which has no heart, no soul, and will sell anything for a price.

I give up.  I’ll just report on the sun-setting of America and wonder which will go first: Me or the country I used to love but which has smashed her moral compass and burned the Constitution?  (…all enemies, foreign and domestic…” remember?)

You’re just gonna love Agenda 21 and no b order, just a Zone…foo!

Prison Products

My buddy ‘cynical Bruce’ sent along this fine note for responsible consumers:  11-surprising things made by prison labor. Not in China. but here and competing with non-prison labor,

As I’ve said before, putting people in jail is a huge business so rather than have inmates do something useful (like load up the NSA computer surveillance system with enough BS to make it useless) they instead are competing with you for real jobs.

But hey!  With the arrival of all those “dreamers” what a fine increase in crime rates and other social ills….now THAT is a Recovery in the making, right comrade?

Pandering

How many times have I told you that websites will do anything – even resort to T&A in order to bump up their numbers?  Here’s our latest example of the T part:  JuicyCeleb has a pictorial of  “28 of the Biggest BALLONS in Hollywood”

(If you clicked, it worked…I only clicked in the name of…uhscience and…uh… journalism and investment opportunities research. Yeah, dat’s it!  But wait!  Are silicone futures trading, yet?)