With the recent release of Oz the Great and Powerful, a film that many are describing as the Tin Man in the Emerald City – no heart and a lot of money spent – despite the fact that the original was an allegory on US monetary policy (who’d have thought), people are wondering several things. Has James Franco done it again.  Let’s leave that rhetorical question unanswered. Notwithstanding Rise of the Planet of the Apes and now the links to the flying monkey (see how far Zach Braff has come since Scrubs ended), many are also wondering when it comes to simians, if the flying monkey is the best mythical pet.  (Or minion, if you want to do evil.  Perhaps being the anti-Google.) You may know exactly what you’re thinking, that’s easy enough. Predicting what the crowd is thinking is another matter. Maybe you should discard your brain of straw for a moment ...

In 1936 English economist John Maynard Keynes famously compared investing in the stockmarket to choosing the winner of a beauty contest. Keynes described a newspaper contest involving photographs of the faces of 100 pretty women. Readers were asked to pick six women and a prize was offered to the reader whose list of six guesses came closest to the most popular guesses of all of the other contestants. In a game like this the best strategy, Keynes said, isn’t to pick the faces that are your personal favourites. The best strategy is to select the faces you think others will think are the prettiest. Similarly in speculative markets, he said, you win not by picking the soundest investment, but by picking the investment that others, who are playing the same game, will soon bid up higher. Play uthinki Feature Image Credit: Paul Chin