Author: Snippet.Finance

How does one find valuable signal in the endless sea of pixels on the screen? What follows are a few tips from a year of curating Snippet Finance and more than a decade in financial markets. Relevant not just to investors but to anyone trying to make sense of the world.

(1) Curation

Good curation is important. Find people, not robots or algorithms, that possess the twin attributes of curiosity and experience and let them lead your exploration. FT Alpaville in finance, Benedict Evans and Stratechary in Media and Tech, and Farnam Street and The Browser in the crucial category of “everything else”.

(2) Skimming

Acquire the ability, through practice, to intelligently scan information. Like the investor searching for ideas or the scientist coming up with a hypothesis, it is often best to rely on the subconscious mind to let information wash over you. A good place to start is the section on skimming in this excellent guide on reading.

(3) Only a few things

Only a few things are worth reading carefully. This scene from Short Circuit 2 where Johnny 5 discovers a bookstore sums this up beautifully. Use an app like Pocket to save down those precious long reads. Change your physical environment and sit down to read.

(4) Finishing is for losers

It’s ok not to finish a book. As Naval Ravikant, Angel List founder said “We’re taught from a young age that books are something you finish. Books are sacred. When you go to school and you’re assigned to read a book, you have to finish the book. So…we get this contradiction where everyone I know is stuck on some book. So what do you do? You give up on reading books for a while. That, for me, was a tragedy because I grew up on books, and then I switched to blogs, and then I switched to Twitter and Facebook. And then I realized I wasn’t actually learning anything. I was just taking little dopamine snacks all day long …. [So] I came up with this hack where I started treating books as throwaway blog posts or as bite-sized Tweets or Facebook posts, and I felt no obligation to finish any book … I’m reading somewhere between ten and twenty books. I’m flipping through them.” [1]

(5) Hupomnemata

Write things down in a notebook. Michel Foucault in his writing on Ethics [2] talks about the hupomnemata, a journal concept from the Ancient Greeks. It is written in order “to capture the already said, to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purpose that is nothing less than the shaping of the self”. It is not meant to be “a detached documentary” but rather “the hupomnemata makes the writer just as surely as the writer makes the hupomnemata” [3].

(6) Repetition

Re-read, as Foucault continues, “from time to time so as to reactualise“[2]. Try to use methods like spaced active repetition so that each repetition leads to efficient retention.

(7) Tell others in order to clarify your own thought

Explain your ideas to someone, ideally someone with no prior knowledge. Here the famous Feynman Technique comes to mind. As America’s greatest thinker Charles Sanders Peirce put it “The very first lesson that we have a right to demand that logic shall teach us is, how to make our ideas clear … To know what we think, to be masters of our own meaning, will make a solid foundation for great and weighty thought.“

(8) Be just the right amount of sceptical

“It makes me nervous when someone believes too deeply or too much. I think that being skeptical and questioning all deeply held beliefs is essential. Of course we must know the difference between skepticism and cynicism because cynicism is as much a restriction of one’s openness to the world as passionate belief is. They are sort of twins.” [4]

(9) Read widely

“Don’t just read in business or finance. Expand the scope into new domains or fields. Follow your curiosity. It is hard to know when an idea from an apparently disparate field may come in handy” Mauboussin [5]