Of logic defying dalali & larger truths

Came back early from work today, skipped Gym too. Staring at the screen, nearly braindead - and will probably go back to this

I always thought that Gladwell was a bit of psycho - his columns on the New Yorker were always long winded, majorly wonkish and almost always making 10 screen long cases out of 1 page long issues. 

Well, as a slightly detailed read of the first few chapters of Blink tells that i probably lack the patience, sophistication to deal with such work - let alone appreciate Gladwell. 

So apologies are due, i guess.

Ok, other things:

I am sure every1's been reading the papers - the UPA won big (inspite of my abstinence) and the markets vaulted 15/17% on Monday. Held on to those gains yesterday and today.

Yesterday and today all the action has been in the Non-Index stocks - catching up to the index ones - running up % gains that defy any kind of logic and are historically unprecedented. (The % movement per day)

Did you know that from 15 March 2009 - till date today - 20 May 2009 - (2 months +/-) my stock portfolio returned an amazing 65.04% . Thats an annualized return of 390%. 

I mean, wow!

Now getting back on track - point is - while i was of course confident of the general direction etc. the magnitude of the move is clearly logic defying.  TV experts however have been cooking up justification, rationale to justify such a move, then the actual market holding up etc. 

The whole episode leads one back to the theory that every vocation i seem to involved in appears to be arbit - i mean for all the thought, emailing back and forth, phone calls and newspaper subscriptions taken out - a colourblind monkey could have picked 20 random 'A group' stocks and still would have ended up with a 30-40% gain. Why - just plain blindly buying just the index would have taken me about 50% higher - i only managed a 15% outperformance.

As the old man said, when i gave him these figures - "Hmpf! Lottery ticket" - then went on to his usual lecture about 'how it is hard to find young people to do physical work (as in factory, manufacturing) and how people seem to be gravitating towards 'kaathulaiyum, computerlaiyum panra velai '

But it still does give one some satisfaction - when the actual knowledge of each stock's numbers gives you the confidence to decide on levels, confidently commit larger money into each position and finally still end up outperforming the market, even in such logic-defying circumstances.

For eg. the index has been quiet yesterday and today - but ive made close to 8% - in fact most positions still look as if they have siginificant steam left - more outperformance will depend on how i move my positions around - pull money out of index sensitives - play the momentum and so on...

While there is every reason for me to feel good - i feel like a bit of joker because i still cant figure out if i just was lucky to get caught with the market or was rewarded for what work id done up. 

I guess im just a grumpy greedy b$%$%#d who does not know to have fun!