Books are some of the most vital tools used by an arbitrager on acid. They are the risers and landings on the stairway to heaven. They often provide the mental and psychological construct on which the doors of perception are framed enabling the arbitrager on acid to pass through to the realms of enlightened analysis. The work of any arbitrager on acid is mental and emotional, perhaps even spiritual, it is only vaguely physical.Market technicians will tell you the futility of curve fitting. They will tell you how little the past can mean.
“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.” -Aldous Huxley
Books are history, every one of them. Here and there authors have transmitted breakthroughs. The psychedelic state of mind is one wherein conditioning is erased and free thought is embraced. A good arbitrager knows when to get out of a position, a great one knows when to reverse. An arbitrager on acid is totally open, completely unbiased, ready to take in the universe as it is, not as it is pleasing, but as it is.
Thinking about the global economy and the battles waged in the markets is an endeavor that by definition means stepping into the unknown. The massive volume of variables and possibilities makes prognostication of future exchange rates on the basis of any collection of information completely impossible. That information does not transmit to market participants the nature of prices, rather prices transmit the pertinent information to market participants about what action will best respond to the ever changing variables in the global society.Famous for detailing the economic calculation problem of central planning, economist Friedrich A. Hayek wrote and spoke at length about the futility of efforts to detect and even manipulate the variables of the global economic system by central planners.
"The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design. " - Friedrich .A. Hayek
There is no better proof of the ignorance of men in these matters than the attempts and failures of those who pick tops and bottoms in financial markets. The considerations an arbitrager on acid may have made in studying economics and markets will lead to the conclusion that such attempts were always and will always remain futile. Thus, the books most adored and pondered in the mind of an arbitrager on acid are those that explore the capacity of one to confidently conduct arbitrage in the face of such uncertainty. The books covered here are such books.
