Signs

My wife is a big M. Night Shyalaman fan. She loves all his moves, even the terrible ones, and there have been some terrible ones. My personal favorite is Signs, from 2002, about an Episcopal priest (Mel Gibson) who loses his faith after his wife dies in an accident, and regains it after an alien invasion. The movie is also a nifty IQ test—dumb people will watch it and say, “The aliens looked stupid!” And smart people will watch it and just be in awe of the writing and the plot. I cry every time.

The plot is a bit too complicated to go into here, but basically (spoiler alert), the family is saved from the aliens by three coincidences—Mel Gibson’s daughter’s habit of leaving half-empty glasses of water around the house, his son’s asthma, which prevents from inhaling the alien’s poison, and Mel Gibson’s wife’s dying words, telling his brother Merrill, a former minor league baseball player, to “swing away.” Mel Gibson can’t comprehend the heaps and heaps of coincidences that led to his family being saved, and in the final scene, you see him putting his clerical collar back on. It’s a move about faith, obviously, and the fact that there are no coincidences.

Carl Jung first explored the concept of coincidences and something he called “synchronicity.” From Perplexity:

Carl Jung introduced the concept of synchronicity to describe meaningful coincidences that appear to have no causal connection. He defined synchronicity as "meaningful coincidences that cannot be explained by cause and effect.” Jung believed these events were not random occurrences but manifestations of a deeper order in the universe.

Jung's most well-known example of synchronicity involved a patient describing a dream about a golden scarab beetle. At that precise moment, a real scarab beetle (similar to a golden scarab) flew into Jung's office window. Jung caught the beetle and presented it to the patient, stating, "Here is your scarab.” This event had a transformative impact on the patient, breaking through her defensive rationalism. Jung believed that synchronicity could serve as a tool for personal growth and self-understanding. He suggested that most people experience synchronicities at moments when they most need them, and rather than over-intellectualizing these occurrences, one should remain open to their potential significance. In essence, Jung's concept of synchronicity invites us to consider a broader perspective on reality, one that acknowledges the potential for meaningful connections beyond simple cause and effect relationships.

I have several such moments in my life, some of which I can’t even talk about because they are so personal, but the one I like to talk about all the time is when I was touring the P. Coast Options Exchange in 1999, someone went to throw a water bottle in the trash which almost hit me in the head, which led to a job offer—and that’s how my Wall Street career began. Back then, I was a very rational person, and I didn’t see the synchronicity. Looking back, I can see how there is a greater order in the universe, that it was meant to happen, that God or someone else had a plan for me, which I was not aware of at the time. But like I said, I’ve had several of these, including a few where I was “saved” during times of distress. You can be religious and say that God did it, or you can be secular and say that there is a greater order in the universe, but the older I get, the more I believe that nothing happens by accident in God’s world.

Last week I listened to the “This Is Water” commencement speech by David Foster Wallace. First of all, let me say that David Foster Wallace had an absolutely superhuman intelligence. Infinite Jest is 577,608 words, using 20,584 unique words—absolutely unheard of. Infinite Jest is sitting on my shelf, waiting for me to dig into it, but I read a bunch of his essays in my MFA program. Anyway, Wallace tells the following story in his commencement speech (paraphrasing):

There are two men deep in the wilderness of Alaska. There is a bar in town, and they go to the bar to drink and argue about the existence of God. One of them is a believer, and the other is an atheist. They’re about six beers deep and arguing about the existence of God in the way that people on the way to getting drunk often do.

“Look,” says the atheist, “I’ve tried the whole God thing, I really have. Just last week, I was lost in the wilderness, and it was 50 below, and it was dark, and I was lost, and I really thought I was going to die, so I was in the snow and I raised up my arms and said, “God, I believe in you, just save me now!”

And the believer says to him, “Well, you must believe, then, right? Because you’re here!”

And the atheist says, “No, man, two Eskimos just happened to be walking by, found me, and took me back to camp.”

As I like to say, “Life is full of miracles, if your eyes are open.”

I think about this a lot. Maybe some things aren’t meant to happen? I’m going to say something a bit egotistical—I’ve had many people tell me that I’m the best “undiscovered” writer they’ve ever seen. They can’t believe that a book like NIGHT MOVES only sold 2,250 copies when absolute dreck goes on to be a bestseller. Yeah, I agree. But what if it isn’t meant to happen? What if God doesn’t want me to become a bestselling author? What if I’m meant to be doing something else? What if I’m supposed to be a legendary trader? What if I’m supposed to be a radio show host? What if I’m supposed to be none of these things, and my purpose is to serve my fellow man? What if my purpose is to rescue cats? The point is that I am constantly looking for signs, those moments of synchronicity to give me guidance.

That moment in March of 2006—when I was sitting at my desk having a meltdown—and I picked a psychiatrist “randomly” off the internet and went to her office, and landed on her couch, sobbing, and she checked me into New York Presbyterian, where I would be given the best possible medical care, and given the lifesaving medication that would sustain me to this day—did I really choose that psychiatrist randomly? Why would I pick a psychiatrist with an unpronounceable 12-letter Russian name when there were other alternatives? The answer: it’s not random. I’ve done pieces about luck, and I will tell anyone who will listen how lucky I am, except the thing is—it’s not luck. It’s meant to happen, or it’s not meant to happen. We don’t get to choose. We do the work and leave the results up to someone else. So maybe I will never get that bestseller, even though I want it with every cell in my body. You know why I am not getting it, probably? Because my ego wants it. Because I want to go on a 96-city book tour with TV appearances and red carpets. If it is meant to happen, it will happen. Barry Hannah sold no more than 7,000 copies of any of his books while he was alive. In his death, he was considered one of the greatest writers in history. Maybe that is my path. Or maybe not!

David Foster Wallace died on September 12^th, 2008 (ironically, three days before the Lehman bankruptcy) by suicide. He hung himself off his back porch in Claremont, California. He had struggled with depression for 20 years. He left a two-page suicide note and arranged the manuscript of his unfinished novel, The Pale King. He had been on and off his medication and even underwent ECT. So—was this “supposed to happen” in God’s world, where a bright, shining light like David Foster Wallace was taken from us prematurely, without explanation? What about other tragedies? What about 9/11? Was that supposed to happen? What about mass shootings? If you believe in good synchronicity, do you believe in bad synchronicity? If your child dies from an overdose, and someone tells you that it was “God’s will,” you pretty much want to land an uppercut to their chin.

Going further, do you believe that the bullet in Butler, Pennsylvania, missed Trump’s head by a whisker—by accident? Too good to be true, right?

The rationalists will tell you that this is all human beings being irrational trying to make sense of randomness. If you read enough Taleb, you will believe this to be true. As someone who trades, I deal with a lot of randomness. But one of the weird things about technical analysis is that when it works, which it often does, then you start believing in deterministic markets—stuff is meant to happen. And so there is a lot of faith in my financial writing—when there is absolutely no reason for a stock, a currency, a bond, or a commodity to go down, when the fundamental bull case is as bullish as ever—it does. You had no reason to believe that it would. Shorting it was an article of faith—but it worked.

Go ahead and try raising money for a faith-based hedge fund, and see how well you do. There is no place for faith in finance, right? Is there a faith section in the CFA? It’s not crazy talk. There is faith in every trade. Anytime you buy something, it is an act of faith, because we can’t possibly know the future. Even when you have an ironclad investment case, markets are unpredictable. The people who fail are the ones who doubt.

I am writing this while I am sitting here at the car dealership, waiting for my car to get serviced. They told me I needed new tires, brakes, and spark plugs. It will take 3 hours. Instead of resisting, and saying, I’ll do it later, I said to myself, well, I don’t really have anything going on today, and I can sit in the waiting room and write something. It was meant to be. All the pain in my life comes from when I am resisting. And so it was meant to be that you are getting this essay.

Life is full of miracles, if your eyes are open.