Knowledge and wisdom for picking your financial facts

 

"Knowledge is a process of picking up facts, wisdom lies in their simplification" - Martin H. Fischer 

from story on Jane Street's traders:

Jane Street software engineer Ian Henry said the firm's traders all need "fighter pilot eyes" to deal with "extremely high information density" while making trading decisions. Henry said that, when making tools for these traders, he has to fine tune their size by a matter of pixels, in order for traders to maximize what's on the screen.

Henry says one of two main categories of applications built at Jane Street is focused on "managing traders' attention," ensuring they're alerted to interesting things amid that sea of information. He says the challenge for engineers is around "balancing noisiness" and stopping those tools from annoying traders with unnecessary information. 

Is the problem for Jane Street the acquisition of knowledge or its simplification? I want more information because I never know what will be helpful, but then I have to be selective to focus my attention. 

The trend trader will say that I focus my attention on only a limited number of issues—the trend in price. All other information is unimportant. The discretionary trader will argue that all information is essential, and I don't want to be constrained by limits on what I can review. 

Where is the trade-off, and how much information is enough, is one of the key issues for any investor