Can monkeys help your investment?

Quote "This article mainly focuses on the debate on monkey's investment ability and its anecdotes. I've sent it to my friends in finance department but no reply, and to 52brain.com neuroeconomics forum also no rely. What's wrong? The research made by psychologist is interesting and it may cover such topics like the book "Nudge" & behavioral portfolio (company) by famous decision making research scientist Thaler. Huge gap, huh?"

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In "Quirkology", prof. Richard Wiseman mentioned two famous/infamous psychological experiment about monkey like portfolio on stocks. In both two experiments, one invested by a little girl via picking up scraps of paper and another by a champzine called Aula(in Chinese edition, "奥拉") via dart throwing, so called random selections beat financial professionals.

I was surprised at that time. How could this happen? As I know, financial professionals use logical/statistical mathematical tools analyse the stock information and gain market insights. Among them, Black-Scholes Option Pricing model may be the most widely used one. And this field is not magic but has a formal academic name called "Econophysics"(see this book in Chinese). In this industry, Renaissance hedge fund may be the most famous company based on such models and gain great market success as well. Most of its employees are mathematical graduates from top US universities(however they lack Wall Street working background, and Wall Street is the famous place where top financial companies locate). They call themselves "Quants"(in Chinese 宽客）(see this book in Chinese).

Based on these facts, I think it isn't possible for them (those who use rigid mathematical models like Renaissance, not those in Wall Street) to lose. As for those in Wall street, indeed, Wall Street Journal established a contest between random selection of stocks and those financial professionals from 1988 to 2002. It is to respond prof. Burton Malkiel's "A Random Walk Down Wall Street". The contest ended without delaration of any winner. More details can be found here and here. The 14 contest's outcome seems interesting (the graph can be found here).

Though professionals beat the "monkeys" (dart selection), the percentages they outperform over them aren't larger enough.

I hope these words will help readers and myself as well:). For more info, pls google for keywords
"飞镖选股法", "darts portfolio" and "monkey business".

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Term explanation

- In English, monkey business originally means fraud business like Bernard Madoff but here it is really made by monkeys or random dart throwing.

In movie: Nano-robot

About 2 months ago I watched a movie: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (in chinese: 特种部队：眼镜蛇的崛起). I was impressed by the weapon which crimes use to destroy Paris (exactly Eiffel Tower）in just 10 seconds (time in the movie). Which sci-fi weapon has this kind of power? Maybe it's nano-robot. These guys are self reproducible and if without any control, like after n times of self reproduction all guys will detroy themselves, they will soon ruin earth (not only the surface). Gezhi.org has an interesting article on "how to use nano-robot to destroy earth"(in chinese). It mentioned a movie at here ( http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/23426 ). Watch it(from youtube)! It's amazing.

Below is a sci-fi snapshot of nano-robot by artist Adam Baines. Imaging this guy come into your brain, will it be OK?

http://www.321design.com.cn/blog/attachments/month_0912/i20091215111917.jpg

Neural prosthesis and neural engineering

In medicine there are two ways to save people's lives. One is medicine which uses drug to cure without any damage of human body. The other is surgery which uses invasive operation.

Thus we can divide neural scientific applications into those two ways.

Biomedical engineering has a subfield called neural prosthesis, neural regeneration, or neural restoration.(in chinese:神经修复）

Two important techs of neural prosthesis, cyborg( BCI or HMI ) and brain function enhancement drugs, are very similar to them. The former belongs to surgery, and the latter belongs to medicine.

I guess as for some molecule level, surgical operations will be useless because biostructure is too small. But at cell level, it seems both ways are OK. For larger biostructure, surgical operations will take its role. Am I right? Pls tell me your opinion. It would be highly appreciated.

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If disabled people use BCI they get cured. If normal people get it they become cyborg or human v2.0.

If psychiatric patient and those who have brain function disorder get enhancement drugs they get cured. If normal get them they become (no formal term) "superman"?

From patient to normal, neural prosthesis becomes neural engineering.

Psychosocialpharmacology

Almost every stakeholder in today's scientific community know science itself should be unique which probably means beneath its cover there may be found one structure which can explain or unite all relevant concepts or theories. The example in physics may be "string theory".

But in completely different sciences such as social psychology which studies human behavior in social situations and pharmacology a so-called natural science or biological science, history tells us there was a wide gap. Now a Chinese scholar tries to narrow it by exclaiming a new discipline he calls "psychosocialpharmacology".

Chinese information could be retrieved here. His and his colleague's paper about it has been accepted by at least one journal "British Journal of Pharmacology" (in pubmed).