Shorting NKE: part 28

6 words.

No not the short story thing, ie Hemingway’s “For sale. Baby Shoes. Never worn”.

Instead, I mean, the * words currently defining our Age. Our Zeitgeist. Our external, intangible, waver of collective feeling that controls us and the way we see things.

1. endemic uncertainty

2. opposing/opposed systems

3. universal inaccuracy

WE have no idea what will happen? Sure.

We have no idea WHAT IS HAPPENING.

1. RAND have made it clear, since 1968, that the risk we are facing is based on the words of Albert Wohlstetter:
   

   1. I also had an uncomfortable suspicion that the devastating remark of the great French mathematician, Henri Poincaré, about sociology ("The most methods, and the least results") might only too accurately describe the way one might dally in the approach to any social science in order to avoid actually going in and getting lost in a very dense jungle. Maps, brochures, the purchase of compasses, machetes, bush jackets and rakish tropical helmets can be used as a substitute for a hot and sweaty journey. In short, I sympathize with Johan Galtung's misgivings about theories about theory in a theory-poor field. (And with the feeling expressed by Burton Marshall since I first wrote these lines: reading the behaviorist literature in international relations seems a bit like sitting through an overture that never ends.^[1] But I find that traditionalist critiques of behavioral essays on methodology, with rare exceptions like Marshall's own laconic contributions, have their own longeurs.)

In other words, we are convincing ourselves that certainty is the goal when we do not have the methodologies in place to increase certainty. More recently RAND have used ‘endemic uncertainty’, their phrase, to explain the Geopolitical risks we face.

2. opposed/opposing systems

   1. Conflict. Creating uncertainty because we do not know which way the wind will blow? No. More like we have low probability/high impact scenarios and nothing in the middle. In other words, the outcomes are 2 or 12 (as the sum of 2 six-sided dice when rolled), odds of 36:1. There is no field. No easy bet.

   2. Arbitrage emerges from opposing systems. Hedging, in part, or exploiting discrepancies, between 2 markets, products, contracts, times, or entities. Systems that price them, value them, trade them, supply them, demand them, and create them. NKE is at the mercy of a buyback program in direct conflict with an aggressive Options market keeping the Put:Call ratio convincingly bearish.

      Then there is universal inaccuracy. Something that has emerged because of the AI traffic dominating the internet and social media sites.

      We do not have the bandwidth to process the data we are creating and receiving simultaneously.

The point here is that we are experiencing an inaccurate world. From prices of NKE shares to bank balances, everything is at the mercy of the velocity of data, and we are doing a terrible job keeping up.

News, prices, and even flood warnings are struggling to pierce the lack of bandwidth we have globally.

To be continued…