Heuristics and the Importance of Confessing Stupidity

I don't offer this definition to treat you like an imbecile. The first time one of my colleagues mentioned that we were going to embark on a discussion and example that had heuristic value, I had to ask him what it meant.

But, it is a very good word, which I've used here before. I did something so unbelievably stupid, that I'd really prefer NOT to share it with you. However, if I were NOT to, then I would not be true to the purpose of my blog nor to my commitment to being honest about my process. As you know, I share with you one account which I call my spec account. It is here where I take license with spec positions. However, it is still real money. I started out with 5-7K, and it went has high as $23K (kissed it for a moment). My account is now about $16.3K. This account has suffered mightily from my entry (early) into SMN when I thought that it had bottomed, but it was merely resting. While my account was crawling on it's knees in a weakened state, I introduced LNG--I'll skip why I thought it was a good idea. I've got to control my public humiliation!

Below behold the LNG chart, and my notation of where I capitulated. Of course, I was on an entire boat-load filled with such such ninnies as you can see from the volume bar. There's a reason why they tell you not to sell into a panic. In fact, I'm generally more likely to buy into one (yeah, I know that falling knife thing). And for several volume bars, I was pretty darn cool. I reminded myself that you don't sell into these rampages. Then, my inner dumb ass got very courageous told my anti-DA alter ego to step aside. You'll remember, of course, that this is the very same joker that told me that my shoes were just fine when I did the dog rescue and broke my foot.


Lack of discipline translates into lack of money. But I was already chastising my inner DA for not researching this a bit better. There was a terrible, horrible Barron's article on Thursday that I missed. I rarely miss those. Anyway, that is today's heuristics.

While in the middle of my post, my daughter called me with a vital piece of information that I wanted to share with you. This piece of information had to do with the smell of one's urine after eating asparagus. Her information was that one of her friends told her that there is a specific gene that determines whether or not you can smell this odor--a gene that makes you smell blind. I found this article, which you can link to HERE.

As archived in the Boston Globe at www.boston.com, below are more details about why asparagus causes urine to have a unique odor:

Asparagus is filled with sulfur-containing amino acids that break down during digestion into six sulfur-containing compounds. These can impart a unique smell to urine as they are excreted. "It's the same sulfur group that makes skunks smell," said Barbara Hodges, a dietician with Boston University's nutrition clinic, the Evans Nutrition Group.

Scientists remain divided on why people have different urinary responses to eating asparagus. One camp thinks only about half of the population have a gene enabling us to break down the sulfurous amino acids in asparagus into their smellier components. Others think that everyone digests asparagus the same way, but only about half of us have a gene that enables us to smell the specific compounds formed in the digestion of asparagus.

"There's something of a dispute," said Dr. David Stollar, chairman of biochemistry at Tufts University Medical School.

Now, in honor of the title of this post, we could conduct a pretty easy experiment. All of us in our family appear to have the gene that both allows us to process AND smell the compound. Not that I would want to volunteer for an experiment to smell another's urine, it would seem to me that you would ask someone like me to smell the urine of one who claims to be unaffected by the noxious chemical breakdown to validate if that is indeed the case--or if that person's urine smells, but they just cannot detect the odor (bad breath and armpits come to mind).

There. I've confessed about my selling into a panic as well as some chemical processing and detecting proclivities of mine. Please do not judge me harshly, but understand that I'm laying myself prostrate on the alter of heuristics.