Diamond Myths – that De Beers Invented the Engagement Ring

Posted on June 11, 2018 by admin

People who say De Beers’ advertising agency is responsible for the tradition of giving a diamond ring to secure a promise of marriage are giving De Beers far too much credit. They point to a famous advertising campaign which started in 1947 by De Beers’ advertising company N. W. Ayer as the source of the diamond engagement ring. But in fact the identification of diamonds with love and the finest female qualities stretches far back in history. Long before the post World War Two era, when the ‘invention’ is said to have taken place.

The identification of rings with love dates back to ancient Rome and the play Curculio (the weevil) written by Plautus in the second century BC. In the play, Phaedromus loves the slave girl Planesium, but he needs money to buy her from her owner, Cappadox. He sends Curculio to borrow the money but Curculio happens to meet a soldier who also wants to buy Planesium. Curculio steals the soldier’s signet ring and he and Phaedromus use it to seal a fake letter to the soldier’s banker to get the money. And so Phaedromus ‘gets the girl’.

Soon the banker and the soldier realise they’ve been swindled and confront Phaedromus. But Planesium recognises the ring and she uses it to prove that she is actually the soldier’s sister. As she is freeborn, Cappadox has to return the money and Planesium marries Phaedromus.

That might not sound very romantic to you, but things were different back then. The Romans used to mercilessly mock Pompey (a great general and politician) when they discovered he was actually in love with his wife, a ridiculous notion in their opinion.

Apart from literature, there is also evidence in the form of inscriptions concerning marriage contracts. By the fourth century AD, Saint Augustine was begging priests to allow marriages for poor people who could not afford rings.

Much was lost to Europe during the early Middle Ages, including a love of diamonds. Ancient peoples rated diamond as the best of all gemstones. But lapidaries written during the Middle Ages rate diamonds seventh or eighth. Scholars have puzzled over this loss in prestige and nobody has a satisfactory reason for it. Some say it was the Christian influence which sought austerity. That may be so, but wouldn’t all gemstones suffer equally from this, not only diamonds? Others say it was the poor quality of the diamonds that were available and the lack of supply due to the wars and social upheavals of the times. But if supply was restricted, wouldn’t that make diamonds even more desirable?

Whether they used diamonds or not, we don’t know for sure, but wedding rings were still an essential part of the Western marriage tradition. In 860, Pope Nicholas I wrote a letter to answer some questions about Western marriages from Boris I of Bulgaria. Importantly the ring is given at the betrothal:

“…our men and women do not wear upon their heads a band of gold, silver, or some other metal when they contract a marriage pact. Instead, after the betrothal is celebrated — which is the promised pact of future marriage made with the consent of both those who contract the pact and those under whose power they are — the betrothed man joins the bride to himself with vows through the finger marked by him with the ring of faith.”

Betrothals were not an essential part of the marriage process, though, they were mostly used when one or both of the partners were underage, or if they were living in different courts while the marriage was being negotiated (we’re still talking about the aristocracy). This was the case until 1215 when Pope Innocent III introduced reforms which included a compulsory cooling off period between the time the marriage was agreed and when it actually took place.

By the Renaissance, wedding rings were being worn set with gemstones, and diamonds were back in fashion. This is noted by Dante in The Divine Comedy in the early fourteenth century. A fifteenth century set of miniatures, painted to celebrate the wedding of Costanzo Sforza and Camilla d’Aragona include one showing the god of marriage, Hymen, wearing a coat decorated with diamond rings standing next to a huge diamond ring holding two torches. There is a verse: 

Two torches in one ring of burning fire,

Two wills, two hearts, two passions,

Are bonded in marriage by a diamond.

The first well recorded engagement ring was given in 1477 by the Archduke Maximillian of Austria to Mary of Burgundy. A letter from her father, Charles the Bold, specified “at the betrothal, your Grace must have a ring set with a diamond and also a gold ring.” In securing Mary’s hand, he also gained the important market city of Bruges in Belgium, which was probably also the location of the invention of faceted diamonds. Previously, diamonds were set in jewellery in their original crystal forms. The diamonds that were set in the ring probably came from Bruges. Numerous other diamond-set wedding rings have survived from those times.

The Protestant Reformation, which started in the early sixteenth century, did not reform the diamond wedding ring tradition. Martin Luther himself, the man who initiated the Reformation, gave his bride one of the fashionable new gemmel (twin) rings. A gemmel ring can be separated into two but can also be combined into one during the wedding ceremony. Sometimes they paired a ruby (representing love) with a diamond (for endurance).

By the seventeenth century, some middle class citizens were able to afford diamonds. The diarist Samuel Pepys wrote in 1668 that his aunt was “mighty proud of her wedding ring lately set with diamonds.” This reflected a greater availability of diamonds to Europe as ships started to sail around Africa to buy luxury items directly from India and other Eastern places.

Since those times styles changed but the basic pairing of a gold ring with one or more diamonds has remained the same. As diamonds became cheaper and more available with the opening up of Brazilian and South African mines, the engagement ring tradition spread to include people from most walks of life. By the 1880’s jewellery trade catalogues showcased solitaire rings from as little as £2 each.

In 1926, Ethel Cushing wrote in ‘Culture and Good Manners’: “An engagement ring is a matter for serious thought on the part of the young man. The best that his pocket can afford is what he desires and a ring that will please his fiancee’s taste is even more important. Either by asking her directly or from someone who knows her preferences he finds out her desire and tries in every way to fulfill it. The solitarie diamond as large and perfect as he could afford has for many years been the standard engagement ring.”

Critics of De Beers say the company invented the diamond engagement ring sometime during the Great Depression or in the years leading to the Second World War, when diamond sales were low. The Great Depression started in 1929, a few years after Cushing wrote the above paragraph. We might not agree with Cushing that young men should spend all their money on a diamond rings. But there is no doubt that the association between marriage, engagement, love, and diamond rings stretches back to ancient times in an unbroken chain.

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The Fate of the Elderly in Japan

Posted on December 6, 2017 by admin

With the breaking down of its traditional society, most elderly Japanese people are facing a lonely end to life. One of the social costs needed to build the economic miracle of the 70’s was developing the ‘nuclear family’. A family consisting of two parents and one or two children. Grandparents were an unnecessary expense. Children were kept to a minimum. The nuclear family was promoted as an ideal, but it is proving to be a nightmare.

Most of us in the English speaking world know that Japan’s failure to increase or even replace its population is one of the main reasons for three decades of economic stagnation. What is less well known is the effects of this social engineering on the elderly.

The New York Times has recently published an article by Norimitsu Onishi which considers two elderly Japanese, a man and a woman living in the same apartment complex, who are ending their lives in loneliness. It is not uncommon for an elderly person to pass away in their apartment and not be found until either the stink becomes obvious to people outside or when their automatic bill payments cease.

The article doesn’t mention what happened to the parents of the two elderly people, whether or not they made an effort to comfort them in the time leading up to their deaths. It is often said that the way you treat your parents will be the way your children will treat you, since children are more likely to follow your example than your advice.

The man featured in the story had a son, but he never had anything to do with him. He made no attempt to contact the son before his death. The woman in the story lost her daughter and husband to cancer when the daughter was in her early 30’s. However she had a stepdaughter who exchanges cards with her on birthdays and New Year’s holidays. Otherwise they are not in contact.

One of their biggest concerns seems to be that nobody will pray for them after they die. I find that astonishing for a society which from the outside seems to be one of the most agnostic.

Despite their loneliness, it seems that most elderly Japanese die at home. In English speaking countries we tend to send them to nursing homes. The nursing home is an uncertain fate. We don’t know for sure how our parents will be treated by the staff. I assume that, even with the strongest intention to be kind, staff are driven by KPIs and simple economics to spend the minimum time on each person under their charge. It isn’t unknown for the aged to die of malnutrition in these homes. Bed sores aren’t uncommon.

Most of us wish to live a long and healthy life. One of the Greek philosophers refused to acknowledge that anyone who is still alive can say they had a happy life. The future is never certain.

We need to prepare a better end for ourselves than the one we have developed for our own parents.

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Money Talks

Posted on April 7, 2017 by admin

‘Money talks’ because money is a metaphor, a transfer, and a bridge. Like words and language, money is a storehouse of communally achieved work, skill, and experience. Money, however, is also a specialist technology like writing; and as writing intensifies the visual aspect of speech and order, and from the other social functions. Even today money is a language for translating the work of the farmer into the work of the barber, doctor, engineer, or plumber. As a vast social metaphor, bridge, or translator, money – like writing – speeds up exchange and tightens the bonds of interdependence in any community. It gives great spatial extension and control to political organizations, just as writing does, or the calendar. It is action at a distance, both in space and in time. In a highly literate, fragmented society, ‘Time is money,’ and money is the store of other people’s time and effort.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1964.

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Papa! What’s money?

Posted on December 2, 2015 by admin

‘Papa! what’s money?’

The abrupt question had such immediate reference to the subject of Mr Dombey’s thoughts, that Mr Dombey was quite disconcerted.
‘What is money, Paul?’ he answered. ‘Money?’
‘Yes,’ said the child, laying his hands upon the elbows of his little chair, and turning the old face up towards Mr Dombey’s; ‘what is money?’
Mr Dombey was in a difficulty. He would have liked to give him some explanation involving the terms circulating-medium, currency, depreciation of currency, paper, bullion, rates of exchange, value of precious metals in the market, and so forth; but looking down at the little chair, and seeing what a long way down it was, he answered: ‘Gold, and silver, and copper, Guineas, shillings, half-pence. You know what they are?’
‘Oh yes, I know what they are,’ said Paul. ‘I don’t mean that Papa. I mean what’s money after all?’

From Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens.

 

Money is hard to define because it serves two separate functions. It is both a store of value and a measurement of value. It’s a bit like asking ‘what is a litre?’ You can buy milk by the litre and you can store a litre of milk in the fridge, and the meaning of ‘litre’ is different in each case.

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Try to Avoid Minsky Moments

Posted on August 10, 2015 by admin

Hyman Minsky was an economist whose theories were largely ignored during his lifetime and forgotten since his death in the mid 1990’s. They were forgotten until they became glaringly relevant during the financial crisis of 2008.

Even today, his work on financial cycles and fragility hasn’t found its way into economics textbooks, but it’s starting to. His work might have been ignored because of his argumentative personality or maybe his ethnicity excluded him from being fully accepted among the elite of economics theorists. I suspect the real reason was that his work went against the thinking of the time, which imagined prosperity without end and demanded freeing the banks and other financial institutions from any restraint.

From what I’ve been able to learn, Minsky’s big idea was that banks and other lenders become increasingly reckless until asset prices eventually collapse. We saw this in the early 2000s when a boom in the US property market was perpetuated by so-called NINJA loans where the applicant had no income, no job and no assets. But immediately the crisis started, getting a bank to lend money was like pulling teeth.

One lesson from this, for any financial system, is that banks should be more conservative when the market is hot, but more liberal in the aftermath of a crisis. That’s not happening in Australia, where the banks have had to increase their capital following the Murray Inquiry. This means they will have to be even more careful about lending money than they are now. So it’s going to be a longer recession here in Australia than it needs to be.

The lesson for me is to take notice when the banks start making it easier to get home loans. Australian banks never offered NINJA loans but there were low doc and no doc loans offered (requiring little or no documentation from the borrower to prove their ability to pay). Next time round they will use different names for these easy loans, it’s a sign the market is topping.

Of course, Minsky wasn’t the first person to notice market cycles. The ancient Romans knew about and documented several. Before the Romans, the ancient Egyptians and Babylonians institutionalised market cycles with their ‘jubilee’ system. A jubilee occurs every 50 years. To mark the jubilee, the Pharoah forgave all debt. If you owed someone money, they could no longer collect it. In this way the market cycles were controlled and predictable.

So Minsky didn’t invent the market cycle, his big idea was fragility. He noticed that the longer the cycle continued and the looser lending practices became, the more fragile the overall market became. So, the longer the cycle and the more stable the system appears to be, the worse it will be when it collapses. Have you ever seen a big tree that got blown over in a storm revealing the termites and fungus that have eaten it out from inside? Me either, but there’s an analogy for you.

How can I apply this idea to trading? What about a company that has long been considered a ‘blue chip’? The share price has risen steadily over many years with a stable board drawn from the elite business circles. Perhaps they’re a bit lazy about defending their interests from disruptors who want to eat their lunch? Perhaps their systems are a bit calcified? Perhaps they’re hiding a few embarassing problems from their shareholders? I think it’s better to buy a good company a little while after it’s started to rise than a famous company many years into its dominance.

For the longest time, Australian banks have been seen as the safe stock market investment. They’re the anchor of any superannuation portfolio, promising a guaranteed dividend. But since Murray is demanding tighter capital adequacy, miners and retailers are doing it tough and the Sydney housing market is looking a bit toppy – maybe now isn’t the time to be buying banks. I hope I’m wrong about that, I bought a fair slice of bank shares just before I came across Minsky’s theories.

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002 Cognitive Bias: Mental Accounting

Posted on August 3, 2015 by admin

Notes from Think Like the Great Investors by Colin Nicholson:

New investors are always looking for a guru or a perfect system to tell them what to invest in. This is flawed because no system is perfect all the time and nobody knows their investment needs better than themselves. The path to successful investing lies within us.

The world is hugely complicated. One way of dealing with the complexity is to put things into categories. This simplifies things by breaking them down into simpler parts. We do this with budgetting, but putting money into categories or accounts makes us see it differently, even though one dollar is the same as any other.

Some people identify some of their funds as “money I can afford to lose” in fact, it is no less valuable than money they can’t afford to lose, but they treat it differently to rationalise bad investment behaviour. When we are up, we consider it ‘the market’s money’ and use that as an excuse not to sell, taking more risk than we would if the stock fell straight after buying. An example is where an investor has bought a stock at $1 and it rises to $2. He will say that he has made $1 profit. If the stock later falls by 20c, he will say that he made 80c profit. In fact he has lost the 20c he would have made if he sold the stock when it was trading at $2.

Your paper profits are real money and you need to protect them as much as if it is money in the bank.

Some strategies to overcome mental accounting are:

  • Revalue each stock at its current price, forget about the price you paid for it.
  • Restart your records each year.
  • Plot the value of your portfolio on a chart so you can see what level it has reached.
  • Take some profit off the table.
  • Write a six monthly report on your portfolio’s performance.
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001 Cognitive Bias: Overconfidence

Posted on August 2, 2015 by admin

Notes from Think Like the Great Investors by Colin Nicholson:

Studies have shown that we are more likely to be confident when we try to estimate something when that thing is difficult to estimate than when it is comparatively easy. An example of this is the fair value of a stock. The reason for this is because our brains simplify the task by focussing only on one or two things and not taking account of the many factors which drive a share’s price.

We tend to be overconfident when the confidence of the general community is high, such as at the peak of a bull market. One way you know that you are at the peak of a bull market is that it’s hard to find someone who isn’t bullish, or when those who aren’t bullish are ridiculed or ignored.

Lack of expertise – Students leaving an exam centre were asked to predict their results. Those who said they didn’t study (and therefore scored badly) expected higher grades than they were actually awarded. Those who said they studied did better at predicting what their final score would be.

Hubris – Those who become experts in a particular field quickly get used to the situation where the people they mostly deal with don’t know as much as them. This causes them to become arrogant about their abilities, not only in their field of expertise, but in other areas in general.

Confirmation bias – Humans tend to seek out information that supports their decisions and ignore that which doesn’t. If you can’t find any reasons against an investment decision then you haven’t searched hard enough to find them. The best decisions are usually the ones you have agonised over the most to get right. There is little profit in easy decisions that are obvious to all.

Selective memory – It is more pleasant to remember and talk about our successes than our failures. So we develop an unbalanced view of how good an investor we are. This reinforces our feelings of superiority and hubris. Keeping good records can help with this.

The notion that more information is better is an illusion. What helps us is not how much information we have but identifying which of it is useful and valid.

Availability bias – We most strongly recall and are influenced by those situations which:

  • happened to us personally or to people close to us;
  • are very shocking; and
  • happened most recently.

These influences lead to poor judgement because of:

  • small sample size;
  • lack of proportion; and
  • we are blinded to what the true probability is.

Some strategies to overcome overconfidence:

  • Seek out contrary views.
  • Concentrate on the critical information, not all the information.
  • Focus on a few stocks rather than many.
  • Keep good records and an investment journal listing reasons why you bought and why you sold and any lessons.
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Women are Better Traders Than Men

Posted on August 1, 2015 by admin

In Think Like the Great Investors, Colin Nicholson points out that studies have shown women tend to be better traders. Some of the advantages women have include are they:

  • are less confident;
  • take less personal credit for their success;
  • spend more time analysing their trades;
  • take more notice of expert advice;
  • make fewer transactions;
  • don’t expect consistently high returns; and
  • buy less small, volatile stocks than men do.

 

For all that, when I think of the famous investors, I can’t think of a single one. Though there must surely be many. Where are the female Soros/Buffett/Tudor-Jones’s? Even female finance writers are thin on the ground. Perhaps that’s due to the second point in the list above.

The key takeaway is that overconfidence leads us into bad trades.

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Think Like the Great Investors: Colin Nicholson

Posted on July 30, 2015 by admin

Colin Nicholson is a finance academic on the finance speakers’ circuit in Australia and this is not his first book on investment. In this book he looks at aspects of the psychology of investing.

The book is in three parts. The first part covers various mistakes in our thought processes which serve us well in our daily lives but make us terrible investors if we don’t find ways to overcome them. They are many and most of them apply to me. My worst fault is cognitive dissonance, but I also discovered mental accounting, which I also suffer from. I will write more about these in future articles.

The second part is a few essays on crowd thinking, which is helpful for understanding market booms. The third part is a collection of essays on investment psychology in general. I found these essays to be less interesting than the content in the first part of the book.

A useful feature is strategies to overcome the problems Nicholson raises at the end of each essay.
Overall, I think the book is worth reading, whether you are an Australian investor or not. I borrowed my copy from the public library and have taken notes from it, so I don’t need to buy it.

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Context Adds Value 03

Posted on March 7, 2014 by admin

Pepsi has often tried to prove that its cola tastes better than Coca Cola. It tried to prove it by conducting blind taste tests which showed people preferred the taste of Pepsi when they didn’t know what they were drinking. Eventually, in 2003, their claim was proven to be a fact when an MRI scan was used to show how the ventral putamen (the part of the brain which processes reward) becomes more active when someone drinks Pepsi than when they drink Coke.

 

So why does Coke continue to outsell Pepsi?

 

The study also showed that if the participant was told they were drinking Coke, their ventral putamen lit up even more than when they were drinking Pepsi without knowing what it was. The researcher concluded we attach so much value to the childhood experience of drinking Coke (and the many years of successful Coca Cola advertising that we’ve been subjected to) that our brain attaches extra value to the brand. So much that it overrides our sense of pleasure derived from taste.

 

My conclusion is, if you are selling an item you will be more successful if you can somehow appeal to the buyer’s positive memories, more than relying only on the superiority of your product.

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