“A good sketch is better than a long speech.”
– Napoleon Bonaparte
The written word is faced by an ancient threat today: hieroglyphs.
Kids these days can have entire text conversations with each other, while barely typing a word – just corresponding with emoticons, emojis and memes.
You can express a lot of data, faster, and with less effort by sending a smiley faced image than by typing out how you feel happy. Whoever originally said that a picture is worth a thousand words probably didn’t have this in mind, but the gist is the same.
How information will be displayed when these children grow up and run the show will be interesting. The ‘digital rain’ of The Matrix films, where green symbols tumble down a screen comes to mind…
But for the moment, there’s money to be made helping the grown-ups cope with the huge quantities of data they’re exposed to on a daily basis.
This can mean removing the useless data. A company called Sanebox tells you to ‘Get your life back and remember what free time feels like!’ by using their service to remove the dross from your inbox.
But more often this means finding a way of jamming more information into our skulls in less time. Numerous speed-reading applications are now popular, which yank you through books at a breathless pace. An app called Blinkist condenses entire nonfiction books into 15 minute soundbites, while a friend tells me you can get through audiobooks much faster if you play them at double speed.
With the threat of robots taking jobs on the horizon, my colleague Eoin Treacy thinks devices that amplify human productivity will be in high demand by those who want to remain in employment. In fact, he tipped a company that develops augmented reality devices for this reason to Frontier Tech Investor subscribers. The idea is that by putting more information in our line of sight, our productive capacity is increased. A trader with augmented reality glasses on could keep an eye on the markets at all times, for example.
Elon Musk goes further, aiming to achieve ever closer union between man and machine, not limited by what our hands can type and eyes can read, but only by what we can think. From his appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience:
“Your phone is already an extension of you. You’re already a cyborg. Most people don’t realize you’re already a cyborg. It’s just that the data rate … it’s slow, very slow. It’s like a tiny straw of information flow between your biological self and your digital self. We need to make that tiny straw like a giant river, a huge, high-bandwidth interface.”
While there is an investment case for such technology, I think there is a broader theme at play with how we view and consume data. Reminiscences of a stock operator, a great book recommendation from my colleague Tim Price is a biography of a stockmarket speculator in the early 1900s, first published in 1925. Traders today stare at charts of all kinds, monitoring drifting market averages, viewing the price on a logarithmic scale, etc. But back then, all day traders had were the stock prices on a raw feed. They would make their bets just based on the series of numbers they saw appearing on ‘the tape’, and not from patterns or images they saw displayed in a chart.
How trading has changed. I came across a glimpse of what the future might hold for trading data recently, when looking into a volatility investment for Zero Hour Alert readers. It’s a visualisation of market volatility created by Chris Cole, a fund manager specialising in the ‘vol’ space.
I highly recommend it – it’s quite a spectacle, even if you’ve no interest in the subject matter. If a picture is worth a thousand words, I can barely imagine how many this is worth. You can watch it here.
Until next time,
Boaz Shoshan
Editor, Southbank Investment Research
Category: Investing in Technology