We Take Risks Everyday.
We take risks everyday.This morning for example I poured myself a cup of coffee which I held in one hand and I also picked up one of my laptops sitting on a couch by grabbing it by one of it's corners. Then I put down my coffee cup and picked up my cellphone and placed it on my laptop. I then managed to pick up my laptop once again and held it face up so the phone would be less likely to slip off it. With my other empty hand I picked up the same coffee cup and then carefully carried all three of these items from my livingroom to my bedroom. It saved me making two trips.
In hindsight that was a stupid move to make. In this decision making process my brain was telling me that I have two laptops and that the second one is more valuable so if I dropped the first one and broke it then that wouldn't be the end of the world. It's funny why it would think like that. My brain was almost tempting me to take that risk. Also, if my cell phone slipped off my laptop and hit the floor while I was carrying it, then it would most likely survive the crash. It's in afterall a protective covering.
When thinking about taking a risk my brain, without being prompted kicks into overdrive and magically thinks of many of the variables in play. In this case it was reminding me that the coffee cup was only about one third to three eights full so the odds of some of the coffee swishing out of it and making a mess was not all that great. It was also reminding me that I had a gentle landing spot for my laptop when I got into the next room and the path to get there was free of obstacles. I knew that my cellphone had a rubbery protective cover around it which would make it somewhat slip resistant. My confidence level was high. I did not have to second guess why I was trying to move three things at once. It is only now as I write this story I realize that the rubbery cover I thought my phone has is actually like a 90% slippery plastic. Looking at it now I realize that it doesn't even have a protective cover at all. I took it off months ago to clean it and never put it back on again.
What does all this tell me? It tells me that our brain works on assumptions which are sometimes not correct. Warren Buffett aged 95 knows this and he often says that you can't predict with any certainity which way a stock is going to move next. Yet making predictions is sometimes made easier by having your brain search for repeatable occurances. If the stock G.M. jumped on good earnings and if Tesla jumped on earnings that apparently were good enough, then why wouldn't the stock Ford jump upwards after an entire week of the good news about the state of the U.S. auto industry? Here once again is it's five day chart. Now here is how the 12 series of Ford calls traded on Thursday and again on Friday. Sometimes it's worth it to take a risk if your brain thinks that it recognizes a recurring trading pattern. Ford was up 12.16% percent on the week and closed at $13.84, a 52-week high. The Call options popped like crazy. I would suggest that you follow more closely the quarterly earning reports of these three auto companies.



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