The Method

These tales are a trading philosophy, told in the oldest language the mind has for things that are sudden, slow, dangerous and fruitful.

Conceptual metaphor

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson showed in Metaphors We Live By that we do not merely decorate thought with metaphor; we think through it. We understand argument as war, time as money, a life as a journey. A metaphor maps one domain onto another, and the mapping carries inferences with it: once time is money, it can be spent, saved and wasted.

This site does the same thing on purpose. Trading is the target domain. Myth is the source. Each tale is a mapping, and each mapping brings its inferences. If a convex trade is lightning, then it cannot be summoned, only stood under; it falls on no schedule; and it strikes only an open field.

Correspondences

The older word for this is correspondence: "as above, so below", the Hermetic idea that one order of things mirrors another, which Baudelaire made into a sonnet. Here the correspondences are between the sky and a small allotment exposed to it, between the earth and a large core planted in it, and between an ancient law and the rules that divide what falls from one to the other.

A memory palace

The ancient art of memory placed each thing to be remembered in a room of an imagined building, so the mind could walk the building and find it. This site is that building made public. The two realms are its floors; the figures are its rooms. Hestia keeps the reserve. Saturn keeps the rules. Mars steps forward. A reader who has walked it once can find a concept again by finding its god.

The two realms

The cosmology has two realms, because they are what a living person meets. The Sky is a small allotment, open to sudden, unpredictable strikes whose size has no ceiling. The Earth is a large core, slow and seasonal, that grows by patience. Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls the shape a barbell; Hesiod gave it first, telling his brother to ship the lesser part and leave the greater ashore. Between the realms stands Themis, whose law divides what the lightning brings, fixed before the storm.

There is no underworld realm here, and no hidden wealth: only what is planted in the open and what falls from the open sky.

Why the myths are told whole

Each tale presents the finished myth, as it lives in collective memory, rather than arguing over its sources; the further reading is there for anyone who wants the history. The shadows are told too. The same figures that teach the philosophy also foretell how it fails: hubris, oversizing, drawdowns, overfitting, bad data. Myth to Market reads the metaphor backwards, from what each figure is famous for to what a trader should expect.

The paintings

Each tale hangs with one painting, made with an image model in the manner of Gustave Moreau, the Symbolist who painted many of these same myths — Jupiter and Semele, Prometheus, Phaethon — in jewelled detail, lapis night and burnished gold. They are not his works, and they are not reconstructions of ancient art. They are the tales as the memory palace sees them.

A philosophy that runs

This is not only a way of thinking. The philosophy runs, every day, as an automated trading system called Ouranos, built so that the rules Themis keeps are kept by code. The site describes the philosophy; it does not describe the system's strategies or allocations, and it offers no service. If you are curious about the system, write.