FREUD ONCE SAID “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful”. What pain are you willing to go through to become a profitable trader? So many of us want to skip the struggle and go straight to the reward. Life doesn’t work that way. The traders who decide…
“AHHH… STOCKBOT… What an insightful, mechanical trader you are!” I said, as I sipped my margarita. “Teach us your ways, oh wise one. We are but mere fallible trading humans, struggling to achieve your level of perfection.” And… at that… Stockbot took a liberal gulp of his own cocktail – a long, cool glass of…
Norman Triplett was a pioneer in the psychology of magic, and back in 1900, he published a wonderful scientific paper on magic that, among many other things, discusses an experiment on an intriguing magical illusion. A magician sat at a table in front of a group of schoolchildren and threw a ball up in the…
It’s seven in the morning on the beach in Santa Monica, California. The low sun glints off the waves and the clouds are still golden from the dawn. The view stretches out over thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean. In the distance, white villas of wealthy Los Angeles residents dot the Hollywood hills. Here by…
If you have ever wondered why the world is like it is consider the image below which is a snip of an email I received this morning. Apparently in their largess the UN has decided to give me $7.5M if I send them $12,000. Intriguingly scams like this are like any other business, you wouldn’t…
Sometimes when you look at a group of prices what you see is not necessarily what you get as I found out when I had a quick look at base metal prices. What triggered this little foray into a segment of the market I dont really deal in was the piece below that appeared on…
Dry heaves racked Dan Stoddard’s body as he bent his 6-foot-8, 325-plus-pound frame awkwardly over a toilet, shaking as he vomited up the Gatorade and other fluids he had consumed in an attempt to stave off dehydration. The 39-year-old hadn’t slept well in days, and even when he did manage some shut-eye, it was only…
“Mistakes are the portals of discovery” wrote the author James Joyce. I recently spoke with a young analyst in Private Equity who wanted to take a pragmatic look into regrets with one qualifier – “not the deathbed kind.” He wondered aloud, what were some common regrets of people ten or twenty years older? And did they…
Growing up, did you know you were wealthy? At least when I was young, my parents weren’t really showy people. The money didn’t really change them until later. Actually, they were really proud of being humble people — an oxymoron, I know. They wanted to raise us with the sense that we weren’t any better…
If ever there were a parable about saving money and not splurging your bonus on the first car or watch that crosses your path, the sorry tale ofJPMorgan’s employee benefit trust (EBT) would seem to be it. Well over a decade since bonuses were allocated, some JPMorgan recipients are being asked to pay money back – to…
Nearly everything people think is true about living their best life is wrong A few years ago, when I began to focus more on my writing career, my mom, a former writer herself, gave me a book titled Passion: Every Day. It was filled with inspiring quotes like “I dare you, while there is still time, to…
Thanks to remarkable new technologies and the widespread use of social media, we are more “connected” than ever before. Yet as a nation, we are also more lonely. In fact, a recent study found that a staggering 47 percent of Americans often feel alone, left out and lacking meaningful connection with others. This is true for all…
My guest this week is with Annie Duke, and the topic of our discussion is how to improve decision making. We break decisions down into their component parts: values, beliefs, decisions, randomness, and outcomes. After diving into each, we discuss how to make better decisions, how to work in group settings, and how to harness…
You’re a Russian criminal with millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains but one big problem: Transferring slugs of money or carrying suitcases of cash will raise eyebrows. You need to “launder” the dough — make the dirty money appear to be the proceeds of legitimate enterprise. Then it can be spent anywhere in the world…
