I admire the famous men from bygone times such as Thomas Jefferson or Leonardo Da Vinci who studied a wide variety of subjects. Unfortunately for me, that’s not in fashion any more. These days, to get ahead, people just focus on one narrow field of study in order to gain dominance and recognition in that one particular field. That’s a shame, because I enjoy learning different things for their own sake. I also think that academic fields would benefit if they did not attempt to limit the discussion to either people or theories that were well established.

In terms of  college education, I have two Bachelor’s Degrees in Chemistry and Geology. I have also completed background (or near backgrounds) in Psychology, Biology, Mathematics, and Economics. What can I say, I enjoy learning. Over my course of study, I was the most amazed at Economics. As a field of study, it lacks any rigor whatsoever. Psychology, a field often mocked for being “soft”, is a far more rigorous field that Economics where the major schools of thought can’t even agree on how to define common concepts. Furthermore, Economic theories are largely nothing more than conjecture that is explained in rigorous mathematics to attempt to conceal the ignorance of the idea or its presenter. Yet, you’d be hard pressed to find any other field of study that so seems to shape our everyday lives than Economics.

Economics has become the discipline that has the most weight in deciding public policy, yet conventional Keynesian or Monetarist Economics defies both logic and common sense. Furthermore, these theories have demonstrated precious little predictive power and have been shown as powerless to end Japan’s depression as they were to end the Great Depression of the 1930s. Yet we all still listen to Economists as if they really did know what they were talking about.

As for me, my other passion other than learning is games. I enjoy studying rules structures and formulating strategies for games as diverse as board games to poker. Strangely, it is my background in poker, not Economics, which has helped me most in picking investments. Poker is, after all,  really just the study of risk management and correct decision making. No sensible professional poker player would ever tell you to pour your money into a volatile thing like the stock market and just hope it goes up over your time horizon, but that’s the advice the mainstream media pours down our throat every day.

I began studying both Investing and Economics through the lens of game theory a few years ago and came to a few conclusions. First and foremost was that the stock market was, like many other areas of American life, far more controlled than most people knew. The politicians and bankers who control things are not interested in any event that would cause such widespread voter unrest. So instead they use whatever inflationary tools they have at their disposal to try to postpone any such event. In game theory terms, postponing recessions is a “dominant strategy” because it rewards those who engage in it immediately while forcing the consequences of such decisions down the line till they become someone else’s problem. Unfortunately for us, this is a losing long term strategy because its just going to make economic downturns far longer and more severe. These events will also prompt an aggressive expansion in government power as they sought to regulate away the problems that they themselves caused- all in the name of protecting people.

I began seriously studying the possibility of economic collapse around 2006. My friends asked me to write a book about it, which I did. It’s for sale on this site. They also asked me for investment recommendation, and those that followed my advice have down quite well in this downturn. I have begun taking clients who seek my investment advice. As I don’t have enough for a full time practice, I do so for tips. Currently, I maintain my income through a mix of investing, writing, and poker. The good news is, it has so far proven recession proof.

Got questions? Comments? Feel free to ask.

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