Author: Aibek Burabayev

Another year has passed, and we have started 2018 looking for new opportunities and facing new challenges. It is time to see the result of the 4th Pendulum swing published in the middle of 2017. To remind you, we had pitted palladium against orange juice in that race and below are your bets for that experiment.

Chart 1. Poll results

Chart courtesy of INO.com

These poll results show a good split of opinions as it wasn’t ultra-biased in favor of the metal. The majority of readers hit it right as their prediction came true and palladium (+23.5%) could easily beat not only the orange juice (1.7%) but most of the futures over the last half of the year, ranking the 6th. Moreover, this is the first failure of the experiment as it was thought that the previous loser orange juice would beat the last winner palladium, but it didn’t happen.

I am not upset about this outcome because when you start an experiment, you like to see how your hypothesis works out. Any success or failure is the part of a test, and quite often you find out something genuinely new, which is outside of your initial thought. Many things in this world are invented during the experiments that were meant to find something different.

From the very beginning, I knew that one thing was inevitably imperfect in this experiment, I always choose the top performing/underperforming metal instead of the top losing/gaining futures against the other futures to stay focused on the metals. Another thing is the period of the experiment. This is also a crucial variable of the experiment. So far it works pretty well, and I would tune only the first imperfection to let the futures, not metal to be picked against each other from now on. Continue reading "Pendulum Experiment No.4: The First Failure" →