Broker to Trading

There are things you think, say and do. Of those you say, one tends to make them contextual. This post is looking at a question, what is internet content, referenced to context. A few years ago, I felt that perhaps this was the way forward, but I couldn't answer as precisely as I would like, what is internet content. Why, because perhaps it hadn't so precisely happened, but perhaps it now is.

I look at content, and I have seen a style emerge on it that is something different from the way content is expressed in other media platforms. I think of the way cable and tv diverged in terms of speech, maybe it is something like this. Internet speech tends to be what I see as the heart of internet expression, free, with a raw edge.

It is actually in the more raw environments that the crucible of creative expression seems to thrive. Yet, at the same time, there is something like an intelligence that structures this content and always has (from its users and its textual base). It makes for a unique kind of content, no matter what state its evolution may be.

The question is how does one monetize this kind of content. The solutions in other media may or may not be applicable, partly because one may be monetizing something in development (the content itself) and monetization tends to be for products of such development.

But obviously it is possible, but is it possible to generalize this possibility, as it were. One might hope to move away from start-up models, but that may be all there is.

I saw this kind of expression though in the 90s, on the Internet and now. And it is a creativity, with that edge to it. So perhaps we can say, that internet content is that which has always been there, but it is a matter of structures to enable it and evolve it.

By always there, perhaps one can say that it is simply a way that humans can express themselves. So structural evolution may not be so much a factor for the content itself, but nonetheless it may become a factor over time (something like, how media changed speech, art and commerce). For the internet that may be a bit like bringing words and actions together.

Structures and content are so closely aligned on the internet, that we can say perhaps that structure and content on the internet are potentially equivalent. But this might suggest that content itself can drive the development of structures, at a certain point. Is this happening already ?

The evolution of this way of speech (if not the speech itself) does seem to be partially contingent on the structures for it evolving, with the key internet element, the capacity to reach many. It does not mean one will reach many, but one may.

It is like the roll of the dice in your expressions in everyday life, that great motivation that drives people to create things, for potential rewards. As long as one still feels the dice can roll. Internet content is driven by the many, not the few, that is a big difference.

However a question could be, is that expression independent of those structures, that is, does it need a certain structure to exist properly or does it adapt to those structures. That is a very crucial question, being explored right now, in effect.

My feeling would be that structures need to adapt to it, but without knowing what they can do to evolve it. That is the great roll of the dice in and of itself, and the question that lies at the heart of picking companies at a very early stage.

So can we see the Internet as a kind of distributed creative platform, which may or may not stay this way. This touches on that interesting issue of crucibles which work for a time. Like various industrial revolutions. They seem in the past to have been location dependent. And it seems extremely difficult to get them back.

Many things have been written about decline and fall of empires in all their senses. But is the internet a similar thing. Which touches on, can it be killed as a creative crucible. If this does happen would this reveal causes of the past deaths.

Well, maybe but one must always factor in the extent to which the internet is structured not only by the creative minds who make structure for content, but as well by the fact it is based around programming languages. It is hard to get away from that, especially if you want to control the content you create.

But does the fact that the level of abstraction that html, for example, provides away from the machine, mean that this is a softened logic, closer to that way humans work around logic (if indeed they do). That is, does this predispose the internet to the same fate of all creative crucibles, which themselves had a grounding in logic, even if the logic of manufacturing processes.

This touches on sales and how do sales work with the Internet. Obviously the desire is to bring content creation and selling of some kind closer. In these internet content posts I am looking for ways to cohere activity in the Internet with the way the Internet functions, based on its structure, expressed as behavior.

This behavior can be modified, but any modification makes more logical sense, if it coheres with this activity and structure (with the question being how are these equivalent). This may enable a longevity of the crucible.

Crucibles tend not to be argued with, they provide a cornucopia (bull markets being an amplified expression of this). Indeed, one can view the US as a neverending crucible, which does what has not been done in the past, when the crucible expires, it remakes it.

As I have noted in a past post, my feeling is that this comes from a number of factors, of course, but not least, that constitution itself evolved in a crucible where there was not freedom, but an extraordinary chance was given to create it, in the full knowledge of what it was not.

That is one way to describe the conditions of a crucible, indeed. But the constitution itself created a space for the crucible to live as a nation. It does seem this can be enabled time and again.

It is a sense of newness, which the US seems to find again, and again, and perhaps the Internet can as well. But is the content new. My feeling is that there is a constancy to it, but the endless newness of it, is the capacity for realizing it, as technology evolves and develops. So sales need to adapt then to that stable form of internet expression.

That is a very difficult issue, as sales are thoroughly grounded in the non internet world. My feeling on this, is to evolve a new way of selling from the realization of that freed capacity to express content. What might this be, well it is already here, in the liquid ways ads target. But perhaps we need more liquid ideas of product.

That can be contextual, the crucible that exists in hot areas like SF, but can it exist sui generis on the internet. Is the internet a crucible in and of itself. The logic in this post is that is can be and there may be a fire of creative freedom to be released.

However all of this may come from its heart, which is the US. This raises the question of the consequences of a domesticization of the internet, which is another way of looking at recent actions taken to the internet in various places.

So what is internet content. It may be a way of expression that exists but that is being enabled, but the issue is whether structures need to adapt to it or can be structured in some way and perhaps evolve a new kind of expression, perhaps from a merging of some kind. With the very interesting possibility of monetization being part of this.

Blog Posted by Broker to Trading at 2:04 PM

Can we regard the market as capable of rising on its own initiative. What we mean by this is divorced from fundamentals. Well, one might say, no, not if the fundamentals are negative to this. But what if the fundamentals are not clear at all. That is, the typical state of an extended downturn, where what would be negative before the fall becomes commonplace.

This is a state the market may not necessarily value as negative, over time, changing the nature of a bull and bear market, in certain circumstances. In this market interest rates, a hugely significant variable input over time, have been effectively taken offline. As time wore on (update 4/14/15) this seems to have become hardened. So it could be said that the market will tend to compute in reduced ways over time, on something that does not change. Raising question about what may have changed in the way interest rates may alter value, when they come back online.

The assumption here is that the market will tend to compute by its own internal processes, but will not state change unless given external inputs, but that it may change the way it changes states. The regularity of pattern formation and they way this may change over time is seen as a symptom of this. However it should be noted that markets may also revert back to earlier states, to some extent.

By this I mean news shock valuations which tend to have the effect of re-setting the market into a new state. So the market can be expected to maintain its state. That is those random ranges we have seen, random not because they point to random processes, but because they are temporally ordered by external inputs.

But the ordering is a state change, once in the new state, internal processes apply. One might note that repeated shocks create a lesser effect. This may be because to find a new state requires as well a temporal ordering within the internal processes to enable it. But it may be that news effects change in the way they can effect value as well.

That is, the internal processes work to process external inputs. This may apply to the equity market as a whole, which can behave like a forex pair, or perhaps a set of forex pairs. But for individual companies, this seems to be a different matter.

We do have company news shocks, but this tends to come from the tech sector, which the market seems not to view in the same way it would view financials coming back to their rude health. However the rise above 13,000, may be that temporal ordering in internal processes of the equity market as a whole.

That is, simply the concept of tech as a blue chip, is being processed. This may not be the case, it maybe another rise contingent on that input of interest rate rises being removed in tandem with very cheap money. Time will tell, in more ways than one.

In forex we can indeed have rallys that are divorced from fundamentals, with the caveat that there is not the same kind of symmetrical causality between fundamentals and pair valuations. In that post I wrote at the beginning of the Euros run from its post crisis bottom, I questioned its validity (in this blog).

I wanted to see as well if it could make a sustained run back above 1.6, despite fundamental issues behind it. It seems it could not. But there was juice behind it, perhaps from the attractiveness of forex. It is just it ran out, absorbed by the massive absorption powers of barrier options. But it was a matter of time.

That juice now seems to be in equities. But can they do more than EUR/USD, the pair which I would characterize as being closest to a kind of stock aggregation, a collective blue chip of a kind.

To put it another way, the equity market runs on that blue chip juice, but can it run on a mixture of tech juice, money flow and its long term structures that enable growth. Well, these structures need to be started, do they have the correct environment for this.

That is can tech juice and money flow start them. The issue is party this, for a new run above the global high (in 2007) do we need a new Dow, where tech and internet tech can provide that sustained juice and are we seeing its systemic evolution now.

If this is happening, perhaps that is the argument for raising interest rates, that this long term recovery may be happening (because it gives texture to the structure that money flow needs to act on, if it is not simply to slosh about, with decay factors).

But the beginnings of such a process could well be characterized by retracements along the way. However when and if a surge comes, it may come hard.

It is interesting to note how technicals seem to be a function of fundamentals in this sense, that technicals tend to have more effect when the fundamentals are driving a market.

However they are always there, either from structure built up over time, or from new structure from programs, which may themselves contribute to temporal instability, but not necessarily in a bad way, just on ways hard to trade on, if you do not adapt to the way a computer will trade.

Of course these tend to trade in technical ways, one way or another but by this instability, may change the ways technical function in this market.

That is we assume technicals are something of an imposition on the market. The question is to what extent computers forcing technical validity and any inherent technical validity (that is pointing towards action in the market, that may be structurally persistent and hence predictable), may make this kind of trading more amenable to the human as well, to the extent that we can consider human traders in this market.

This is a question for equities as well and an interesting question in that one can ask to what extent tech companies are more congruent with this kind of structure. I believe though that temporal instability (that is a even less reliability in directionality) may be something that a human trader can make use of more than a machine. That after all, is the reality of the world, that we tend to mask, but we are aware of and we naturally adapt to.

In all event one might expect that a rise of a market like this, would be complex in its structure and not so clearly directional. But we might assume that long running structure in the Dow will allow it to rise, but perhaps in different ways. So this might override interest rates, fundamentals and so on. But it does need something, growth from somewhere.

(edited to update some ideas about change in the market, 4/14/15, 1:09 EST)

Blog Posted by Broker to Trading at 1:57 PM