The best traders in the 1980s commodity pits had a saying: 'The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.' What they didn't realize is that this is actually a precise description of a problem the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead identified in his 1929 work *Process and Reality* — what he called the 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness.' It's the error of treating an abstraction — a valuation model, a thesis, a price target — as though it were the bedrock thing itself, rather than a snapshot of a process that is still unfolding. In markets, this manifests as a specific and ruinous habit: confusing the correctness of your analysis with the correctness of your timing, and therefore sizing as though they were the same risk. The practical correction Whitehead's framework implies is uncomfortable: your position size should reflect not just confidence in the thesis, but your honest estimate of how long the world can ignore it — which is a very different variable, rarely written down.

In your last three significant positions, did you ever explicitly write down an estimate of how long the market could stay wrong? If not, what did you actually use as a proxy for that duration when you sized the trade?

Drawing from Process Philosophy / Whiteheadian Metaphysics — Alfred North Whitehead (Process and Reality, 1929)