Prolumine is bastardised Latin for ‘the throwing of light’. This sounds more pompous that what I intend this blog to be. Rather, this blog is intended as a repository of concepts that interest me and which I’d like to build on and learn more about. My hope is to—over time—attract people with similar interests.
While I began my career in the life sciences, I realised over time that my true passion is philosophy. By a twisted route, I eventually came to work as a financial analyst (and, finally, as an investment manager); a strange role that is neither science nor philosophy. Altogether, I think that the anastomosis of my past and present interests has likely afforded me a relatively unique perspective on the world, which I hope might be of interest to some.
In particular, this unorthodox background has made me very much an outsider, where I’m neither an investor nor a scientist. Instead, I found myself learning more about science the further away I went from academia, and I found myself asking more interesting questions the deeper I went into finance. Today, much of my thinking is dominated by a desire to understand the underlying workings of complex systems and how they relate to more proximal concerns. For example, I have, over time, started to appreciate that superficially different complex systems have much more in common than you’d think at first glance. In fact, I am increasingly starting to think that the topic itself is generally irrelevant, and that what really matters are the underlying dynamics at work, and that mastering these allows us to apply them to more specific problems.
What drives the flow of money through the world’s stock markets, and can we predict these, ahead of time?
What drives the valuation of stocks, companies, derivatives, and physical assets, and can we apply this understanding to help improve our own professional processes?
What does the flux of money through capital markets tell us about the flow of energy through the natural world, and if we understand one, can we understand the other?
Many of the thoughts offered on this blog will be in the form of either general observations or more detailed thoughts that are either directly or tangentially relevant to complex systems. In the first instance, subjects that are likely to be covered include topics relevant to economics, finance, and the stock market (and also investing more generally). However, I’m sure that I’ll be adding to this list as my interests continue to evolve. To a great extent, this blog will also function as an online notebook of sorts, where I explore new concepts that I’ve come across and where I try to better delineate my thinking in topics I’m already familiar with. As such, this website will, over time, develop into a growing repository of my (evolving) thoughts on the role of the investment manager; the structure of our financial markets; and the nature of companies and other complex systems. Of course, the only way that I can justify the existence of this blog as anything other than a vanity project is adding value to others. I hope to do so by sharing my own learnings, with the ambition to help accelerate a more collective understanding of the topics that I’ve chosen to write about in this blog.
Importantly, much of what I write about will be qualitative. While I have a background in the sciences I regrettably never paid much attention to mathematics (the language of science). For this reason, I cannot cover any of my chosen topics in much detail. Instead, I hope to add value to my readers by making the complex more intelligible for non-experts and to make these sometimes complicated topics more approachable for people who might be interested in them, but never knew where to start.
Finally, I am a great believer in the power of serendipity, and in leaving no stone unturned. Chance encounters that mean little at the time can often stand out in hindsight, and I believe that the greatest ideas condense out of a succession of many small, insignificant ones. This blog will have served its purpose if it invites further serendipity, perhaps by introducing me to new ways of seeing the world, or by providing someone else with the insignificant seeds that could—one day—help crystallise previous observations into meaningful insight.
– Prolumine