Stock Selection & Stock-Market Timing Author 'Copernicus'

'Copernicus'

Stocks, stock research, stock and mutual fund selections plus stock market timing . . . and here, a portrait of me at age 37.

I write from the centuries. My mother's brother, Bishop of Allenstein and then of Frauenburg, arranged a sinecure for me as a canon in the Cathedral, leaving me good time to observe, measure, and derive conclusions---a continual process, I might add---in my studies of Mathematics, Medicine (at the practice of which I was pretty good), Astronomy, and Finance while I was living in Heilsberg. And I had cut back my medical practice to give me more time for observing, measuring, and pondering the behavior of Certain Celestial Bodies. One particularly bitter, cold night when I chose not venture out to the top turret of my favorite tower on the east side of the town, my beloved wife said to me, "Dear Kopernik, what in the name of all that is Holy does a grown Man like you do upon the very roof tops the whole Night long staring at the Stars in the Sky? Dear Man, get a Life! Sei ein mensch. Bitte."

(Even now she is prone to patois on its way to cliche, but her Compeers at Court are given to the same fashionable malady. If a Celebrity used the phrase on your Oprah show in Chicago this morning, this afternoon the Whole World will say, Sei ein mensch. --But I am no fellow to complain of my beloved Wife's small faults--guilty as I am of large ones, among them towering pride and vaulting ambition.)

She forgets, I suppose, that I have my man's work, my Obervations, my Measurements, my Conclusions to attend to (these are most important in my life; they must proceed). . .always to be extended and refined. (Your Dr. Freud's remarks are close to the mark: "Woman. What does she want?") Well, the winter of 1510 I remember was in fact an unusually cold and stormy one, and, I might add, with too few nights conducive to my usual perusal of the Heavenly Stars...so I made use of the extra time I had in a diversion which has always interested me: The Behavior of Market Prices.

I had noticed how the cost of Wheat, Cheese, Beeves, Woolen Goods, and Various and Sundry and the like, would rise and fall much like the Nile of Joseph's time and even now, and how there was a seasonality to their movements, up and down, even as to the Planets and to the Stars--where they would appear in which part of the Sky from Winter to Spring to Summer thence to Winter again, or as the Sun rises and sets giving the Fair Earth God's Good Light by Day and His Respite by Night, or as Moon Herself wanders far from her home, the Night, during the course of the month, only to return by waxing and waning again in the blackness of Evening Time, rising and setting like the other Heavenly Bodies to be seen.

Thus, I set about as a diversion, as I say, some preliminary Observations, Measurements, and nascent Conclusions concerning what I perceived to be analogous phenomena in the behavior of prices in what is now your modern Stock Market particulary in North America, and more especially in the land known as the United States. I observed, time and time again, the Rise, Culmination, and Setting of individual stock prices over many spans of ages similar in operative behavior to the concepts which were to be included in my then long forthcoming Six Books De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium which I was for so long reluctant and ever loathe to publish (but that's another story for another time).

So now, you have before you the fruits of my early 16th Century Winter's Diversion (which I to this day nurture and nudge in the background) addressed to you under the impossibly shamelessly bold and promiscuously promotional title with a totally unscientific subtitle to which you now vouchsafe to give a small measure of your attention for study and reflection. In fact, this diversion of mine is not so unrelated to my later, parallel, definitive studies in Finance and subsequently my Treatise on Monetary Reforms in 1527, well received by the King and no doubt a factor in my being named Deputy Counsellor for the Financial Regulations of Prussia for eight years.

Nor are these studies of Stock Prices which you see here entirely unrelated to my main life's work on the Celestial Movements of the Spheres (regarding the latter, I hold in disdain the condemnations of that saucy polemical priest, Luther, angry fomenter of rebellion at Wittenberg [forever a hotbed of Radical Activism], a Man of Outstanding Conviction, nevertheless, to be sure {may God help him!}, but with equally outstanding Ignorance in certain Matters of Science, and equally those of his facile disciple, Melanchthon, meddling in matters which they do not understand in the least).

At the very least, His Holiness Leo (blessed be his name) thought favorably enough of my theses on the Celestial Bodies at least until his successors heeded bad counsel and hassled poor Galileo into Public Recantation. But, as they say, it's all in a day's work--or, in my case, a night's. (And Mrs. Kopernik wound up pretty well pleased with her Station in Life and Life at the Court, I can tell you, and all of our trips to Rome and Rimini and other Wondrous Places, along with the excellent Patronage of some Highly Placed Persons, urbe et orbe, you see.) At any rate, I hope you make lots of zlotys using the site.

My incarnate curriculum vitae : short version / long version