Wellington Leg: Google has a financial website called Seeking Alpha, a site that aggregates news and opinion about all things financial. You may wonder what Alpha represents and why so many seek it: Alpha is that sliver of outperformance measured against an index everyone accepts as a baseline. One example is the stock market. In literature, before we desperately sought Susan, Dante searched high and low for Beatrice. It’s a quest: seeking alpha in that sense is what we all do when we want to succeed at something or excel at our chosen endeavor.
Institutional Memory: Before we can seek our personal alpha there must be an accepted criteria to test and measure our progress. Your reporter once managed to draw a picture of a tree while staying within the confines of a sheet of paper earning a brief moment of accolades before attempting finger painting. The tree had branches and leaves monkeys and squirrels, the trunk was as lovely as a Snickers Bar in the morning dew. The leaves were yellow and the bark was purple; a troll lived in the root system. He wore a bowler hat and collected taxes.
The big takeaway? I stayed within the lines! This never happened again in my recollection of early schooling.
In the current crisis we suspect that our baseline is dissolving. Our unease is manifest. We don’t know if Alex Rodriguez homers should count or if Bank of America is too big to fail or already gone. The basis of employment ie value for value is now linked to a fate beyond the control of either party in the bilateral agreement between company and worker. We don’t know if the mountain we have to climb is 12,000 feet or just the average Beehive; come to think of it, what is the height of an average Beehive?
Beethoven was a hell of a piano player: some of the kids drop down bunts and run toward third base on the theory that it’s closer and saves a trip to first and second. We all agree that’s cheating. As investment bankers are led away in handcuffs we can only assume they cheated too; their quest for alpha led them directly to third base. Once we all agree what the rules are the crisis will abate. The lure of alpha will stimulate our hearts and brains; we will wear bowler hats and collect taxes ‘neath the lovely purple trees.