Mind of The Market

A Non Technical Guide To Understanding Financial Markets

Abhishek Kothari
11 min readOct 22, 2017

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Courtesy: Billy Huynh, Unsplash.com

Risk means “getting hurt when it hurts to get hurt the most” — Cliff Asness, AQR Capital Management

Over the years, capitalism has emerged a somewhat imperfect but longer lasting economic order. Key to the success of capitalism has been the institution of free markets and the economy these markets create. One of the frustrations in learning about finance and economics is the fact that a lot of modern financial literature today strays away from common sense and simple explanations towards a more technical and numerical description of finance. Sometimes, it takes a teacher that can simplify seemingly complex concepts to kindle a love of learning. However, it is upto the student to meet the teacher half way. I will try my best to explain markets on the basis of my experiences with them.

This article traces the origins of markets, provides an overview of present day financial markets, imagines the future of markets and provides solutions to improve markets and capitalism itself to create a fairer and less unequal human world.

What Markets Are All About

There is a small joke you often hear about markets — “ no one can figure out the…

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Abhishek Kothari

Futurist@The Intersection of Finance, Tech & Humanity. Stories of a Global Language: “Money”. Contributor @ Startup Grind, HackerNoon, HBR