Here’s a video that’s been circulating showing the mass hysteria that normally civilized people succumb to when there are deals to be had. Black Friday is that symbolic day when holiday shopping season starts, and retailers hope that the sales fueled by all the insanity will bring them back in black (profitability) for the year. What a great example of herd mentality and bandwagon effect.
For me, it’s also a day that symbolizes the never changing attitude of the American public in drowning themselves in insurmountable debt. In a way, it really parallels the debt driven anomaly that caused the massive housing bubble and over-leveraging of America. Countless people will buy gifts on credit and finance purchases that they can barely afford. They’ll buy things they don’t really need, or don’t really want to buy because it’s in the holiday spirit to give and receive. There was a quote in an article on CNN Money about a guy who went into debt last year from holiday purchases. How do you let that happen to yourself? My parents always taught me to never carry a balance on a card or finance purchases of luxury items like flat screen TVs. People will always submit to irrational behavior when they see everyone else doing the same thing, so it must be ok. The behavior of spending now and worrying later doesn’t seem to have disappeared. Bubbles never really disappear, they inevitably come back in one form or another. People don’t know what to do but repeat the insanity until the next one. That’s a topic I’d like to expound on, but it’s beyond the scope of this post, so I’ll save it for another time.
I’m on the last leg of my studying for Level 1 of the CFA. It is brutal. At this point, it’s all about doing as many practice problems as you can in a day without going mad, which for me is about 500 questions in a few hours. It was around this time last year that I was doing a similar amount of studying for the Series 7 and Series 63. There were times when I wondered if life was really worth living if all there was to do was bury my head in books all day. I have to say, I’m really no different than anyone else. Although my insanity is relegated to relentless studying rather than mass market hysteria, it’s still insane to live this way.
Wall Street Broker 