Understanding the Obscure
During a casual conversation that I had with a co-worker yesterday, Bitcoin came up. No, we didn’t talk about the idea of cryptocurrency, or who is the real Satoshi, or even the fact that the price for a Bitcoin grew by over $300 in the past few months.
We talked about reading charts, that is reading the chart of the Bitcoin’s pricing. During the conversation, many phrases came up that I was not familiar with, including “support & resistance”.
It’s a new area of obscurity for me – how the financial industry works, as well as understanding the ratio of noise and signal during the day-to-day information broadcast.
Ultimately, according to my co-worker, it comes down to reading the chart. Not the newspaper, blog, TV shows, or Cramer, but charts. The ability to understand it based on your own experiences of trial-and-error, to slowly comprehend the point of buy-in, and sell-off.
Before I dabbed into the world of ‘travel hacking’, it overwhelms me. This feels the same.
It reminds me of a strange phenomenal with watching sports. After watching NBA or EPL for half-a-season or so, I become familiar with the names of the players. And at times, I can recall their name much easier than people around me. That level of familiarity with something that is distant was very interesting to me. Now if you have not watched NBA or EPL for a couple of seasons, you will start seeing names that are “obscure” to you. Then you will have to spend a few games to reacquaint with these names, and to understand who is a good player and who is not.
Buy into an interest, and get familiar with the obscure.
















