Daily Speculations
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James Sogi
Philosopher, Juris Doctor, surfer, trader, investor, musician, black belt, sailor, semi-centenarian. He lives on the mountain in Kona, Hawaii, with his family. |
9/12/2005
Hearing Market Music, by James Sogi
Hearing is not discussed or used much in markets. Most work is visual. Chair described some primitive and abortive sound experiments in EdSpec. There are squawk boxes. But hearing has some interesting qualities. R has functions for sound generation.
1. When listening to music one does not initially hear the individual notes or instruments in a symphony. Is this similar to S&P trading when not hearing the role of the individual companies? With ear training or study of the score, or watching a performance, the individual notes, the cadences and the individual instruments can be distinguished.
2. Sound has some interesting qualities. Overtones add depth. Overtones extend beyond the range of audible hearing, but are felt, and may go on infinitely in the spectrum. Sound has the power to destroy, boil water, shatter glass, incapacitate humans. Sound can evoke emotional strong responses. Sound is multidimensional in that it has the capacity to convey on many levels. There is speech and meaning, volume, tone, chords, minor chords, seventh chords, timber, bassy, trebley, high pitch, low pitch, reverb, location. Many layers of meaning can be conveyed in a single sound byte. It is an efficient and rich method of communication. The Marvel superhero Daredevil got around fabulously using hearing, like a bat, though he was blind.
3. The mind subconsciously filters noise quite effectively. My wife was standing in the subway in New York during the recent Spec Party and asked, "How can you stand that shrieking sound?" I looked up in the subway oblivious and upon her mention, realized that right overhead sounded like a jet airplane. The mind filters things. What types of information in the market gets filtered out based on prior fixed conceptions. MP3 algorithms filters elements not heard on the forefront of the sound threshold.
4. This weekend I was teaching the guitar part from Gimme Shelter by the Stones to a fellow band member. I played the part many times, but he could not get it in the sense of understanding what the notes were. So I asked him to sing the guitar part. Only when he was able to sing it, was he able to play it. Transferring the music from the ear to the finger required an intermediary step of internalization by singing. Transferring market profits through the fingers requires an intermediary step of analysis.
5. I've written about 'seeing' fish after looking at them, but not seeing their form against the background. Hearing can mask sounds. Songs of birds in a forest. The background hiss on a telephone line, or the stereo. The tell tale rattle in an car engine that your daughter never hears over the loud music.
6. Hearing what people say. You say something, but the other person does not hear you. The spouse says something, but you do not hear it. You tell the kids something, but they do not hear you.
7. Hearing can see through opaque objects, or around corners and has advantages over sight. You can hear many things at once, but see only one. You can hear behind you, but have no eye in the back of your head.
8. These all relate to hearing what the market and economy has to say. These are functions of attention, understanding, analysis, training and transferal. Progress might be made using hearing in analyzing markets This would not be just converting data to sound alerts, but sensing the the deeper layers in the data streams, the harmonies. It might also encompass multilevel data monitoring using sound techniques.
c
Jim Sogi, May 2005
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