Comment by 3am | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3am | Hacker News Reader

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To the point of your edit, you see identical behavior on Gold investor boards in the typical sites (Motley Food, Seeking Alpha, et al). Everything is good news for gold. If "A" is good for gold, so is "!A". This money flowing in to ETF, inventory levels, chart technicals... almost anything. In the event that something is difficult to justify immediately as good news, it is the product of a malicious conspiracy (market makers, central banks).

I'm only comparing the group dynamic and the hostile reaction to any suggestion that triggers cognitive dissonance. I haven't checked the chart on Mt Gox in ages, last I saw 1 BTC was ~ 125 USD. As a disinterested observer, this Thailand development doesn't seem very important one way or the other, but it's hard to interpret as positive.

For what it's worth, I see identical behavior with stock market enthusiasts as well. Good job numbers? Market goes up. Bad job numbers? Market goes up -- clearly Ben Bernanke must keep printing until employment stabilizes. "A" is good for the stock market and so is "!A." It really is a crazy time we live in. Cognitive dissonance everywhere you look.

There's nothing necessarily crazy about what you describe. The markets reaction to news that everyone knows is going to be released (that is, we know job numbers will be published at this time on that day, but not what the numbers will be) won't necessarily track the good-ness or bad-ness of the news, because the market will have moved in advance based on the best estimates of those playing that game, and they might have overshot.

Why do you make fun of gold investors?

Given all the financial scandals and outright fraud that have been revealed over the years, you still feel that legitimate concerns of gold investors are nothing more than wild conspiracy theories?

I'm not making fun of gold investors. Why do you feel that I am? Nor did I make any statement about the place of gold in an individual's investment strategy. I'm observing a behavior in a small subset of gold investors, and comparing it to a small subset of Bitcoin enthusiasts.

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