We used event benchmarks instead of time benchmarks. Every time someone executed a trade, cancelled a bid, updated an offer, was counted an event. Any change in the state of the order book reflected someone pricing in new information about the world. We would then benchmark our trading to the market price say 1000 events in the future. For some stocks, this would be milliseconds. For others, minutes. This normalized our performance benchmarks across all different types of stocks and made us more effective in generalizing our strategies. It was my first lesson that event based time perception mattered more than subjective time.

Those three years felt like the longest stretch I’ve ever lived.

What is striking is the asymmetry between the experience of the individual and the collective. The individual experiences subjective time contraction with each passing year while the collective experiences subjective time expansion. Every year is increasingly more eventful within the context of human history than the last with an exponential acceleration in the last three centuries. Which raises the obvious question: why has time been expanding for the collective?

The acceleration makes sense once you normalize by life-years, not by centuries. It’s one more “truth fractal” I keep bumping into: the idea that time is better counted in events than in subjective time shows up in my day to day trading, stretches across an individual lifetime, and scales to the whole span of human history.

Touch was completely new at the time, so it wasn't intuitive for the users that a flat round circle would represent a clickable action. So by mimicking physical buttons, elements studently felt interactable

Because people wouldn’t have recognised a flat shape as a button. We had to replicate the real world to show people what their on screen analogs were. It’s only now that we have transitioned to and are comfortable with digitally-native ideas and designs that we can understand objects without needing a basis in a real world equivalent.

Markets act like the nervous system of civilization. Prices encode scattered local scarcities and surpluses into a single global number that channels societal resources to where they are needed most. They behave more like living and adaptive ecosystems than engineered machines, a collective intelligence probing for truth. Beautiful, misunderstood, and endlessly complex.

Fundamentals are not about forecasting the weather for the next day, but rather noticing that it is raining currently. It is hard enough to know what is, let alone what will be.