… if there was one business that was antifragile, well, you got it. Outdoor advertising
OOH …Here’s One Thing
Time Waits for No One
by Jim Johnsen,
Managing Director, Johnsen, Fretty & Company
https://youtu.be/sDEL4Ty950Q?si=2syV_Tv79LcLk-B7
How funny is that! Johnsen, where are you going this time? Well, just read the cliff notes for Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (which by the way wasn’t written yesterday…where was I?) and it got me thinking. How much of our lives do we spend analyzing one inch of the Elephant’s ass without realizing we are in this incredible jungle with a whole ecosystem around us? Johnsen, sounds like you have been hanging with George Harrison of late. You okay? Here is one quote from the book that will renew your faith in me (assuming you ever had any):
“The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionately likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal); hence the higher the noise-to-signal ratio.
And there is a confusion which is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself. Say you look at information on a yearly basis, for stock prices, or the fertilizer sales of your father-in-law’s factory, or inflation numbers in Vladivostok. Assume further that for what you are observing, at a yearly frequency, the ratio of signal to noise is about one to one (half noise, half signal)—this means that about half the changes are real improvements or degradations, the other half come from randomness. This ratio is what you get from yearly observations.
But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95 percent noise, 5 percent signal. And if you observe data on an hourly basis, as people immersed in the news and market price variations do, the split becomes 99.5 percent noise to 0.5 percent signal. That is two hundred times more noise than signal—which is why anyone who listens to news (except when very, very significant events take place) is one step below sucker.”
How’s that contemplation to start your week?
The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionately likely to get …
Long short, as hard as it is to remember this mantra…play the long game. Anything else is an exercise in futility. The weekly, monthly, quarterly data doesn’t mean merde. And btw, if there was one business that was antifragile, well, you got it. Outdoor advertising.
https://youtu.be/YsH2In5r2sM?si=1tZ0pWiifO4v3UFF
“Men, they build towers to their passing
Yes, to their fame everlasting
Here he comes, chopping and reaping
Hear him laugh at their cheating
And time waits for no man, and it won’t wait for me
Yes, time waits for no one, and it won’t wait for thee
Drink in your summer, gather your corn
The dreams of the nighttime will vanish by dawn”
The Rolling Stones
jfco.com
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