Socrates (by way of Plato) identified what I call engineeritis* over two thousand years ago:

“Finally, I went to the craftsmen, for I was conscious of knowing practically nothing, and I knew that I would find that they had knowledge of many fine things. In this I was not mistaken; they knew things I did not know, and to that extent they were wiser than I. But, men of Athens, the good craftsmen seemed to me to have the same fault as the poets: each of them, because of his success at his craft, thought himself very wise in most other important pursuits, and this error of theirs overshadowed the wisdom they had.”

Though I do not think that poets and writers are guilty of this flaw any longer; perhaps because they have been so beaten down by society in general for so long. No one would now hold up an engineer and a writer side by side in societal status these days, though Socrates would have.

*Engineeritis: the tendency to believe because one is an expert in one narrow STEM field (could be engineering, math, physics, etc.) that one is an expert in all areas. Named after engineers because their symptoms of this debilitating ailment are typically the worst, but can be found in any STEM or near-STEM field with varying severity.

To those of you shorting Amazon and AMD, thank you for your money. I will spend it on frivolous and unnecessary things that you can no longer afford, just like a good capitalist.

If you short on the basis of which stock “deserves” to be worth what money, you are forever doomed. This is not how the market works. There is no “deserve.” There is only what is and what is not. Fundamental analysis is not sensible when the market is not rational. Hint: contrary to what you’ve been told, most of the time the market is not rational. Examining the fundamentals except over the very long term will not help you here. Your algorithms also will not help you as they can only use past data. Past data cannot determine the future.

It’s actually easier to make money now that the market is so algorithmic. I worried that the opposite would be true a few years ago, but the algorithms by nature are far dumber than humans, and far easier to predict.