Have you ever noticed that the poorest, most miserable people you know tend to be buyers of lottery tickets? C’mon lucky numbers 3, 10, 16, 22, 4, 50. I’m sure there’s a smart-sounding statistic somewhere lodged in a research report by some well-meaning PhD student who had to get funding from the So-And-So Foundation to…
With the market making a valiant effort to push past 6,000 points I have been pondering where the gains in the market have come from over the past few years. In the past I have looked at the distribution of returns across groups of shares simply from the perspective of demonstrating that within a universe…
The problem of trading in uncertain times crept up on the Mentor Program Alumni forum and I have been thinking about my answer. The original answer I gave is shown below – I think one of the things you need to be able to do is to define what is uncertainty. If you opt for…
Let’s just accept that. Most people love to analyze why people are not happy or don’t live fulfilling lives. I don’t necessarily care about the why. I care more about how we can change. Just a few short years ago, I did everything to chase happiness. You buy something, and you think that makes you…
At eight o’clock in the morning of Wednesday April 18th 1906, Jesse Livermore was sound asleep in his New York hotel room after arriving back late from Palm Beach the previous evening. 3000 miles away, across the country in California, it was five o’clock in the morning and the city of San Francisco slept contentedly.…
One of the greatest computer programmers of all time grew up near Seattle. He saw an upstart company, Intel, making computers on a chip and was among the first people to see the potential of these so-called microcomputers. He dedicated himself to writing software for the new device and, by one account, “wrote the software…
My view of the mainstream media is not something I tend to hold back on. Anyone who has had anything more than a cursory glance at this blog knows my low opinion of the vast majority of the financial and general media. I have little time or respect for people who did media studies and…
It’s 6 on a Wednesday morning, and Kabir Ahmed has snoozed his alarm one too many times. He steps softly, barefoot, around his small, second-story apartment in Jamaica, Queens, creaking through the green and pink hall. He is late, but careful not to wake his wife and their three children, or his mother, who will…
I have just finished reading Edward O Thorps autobiography A Man For All Markets which is an excellent little read and a good addition to any traders library. In the book Thorp talks about he value of compounding returns. There is no doubt that success is trading or investing is based upon compounding your gains…
The most precious commodity in life is TIME. We never have enough of it. I personally squandered a lot of time in my twenties and thirties doing all sorts of random things. I was just busy being busy. It wasn’t until I turned 40 that I realized a couple of big things about TIME.…
In the past few decades, the fortunate among us have recognised the hazards of living with an overabundance of food (obesity, diabetes) and have started to change our diets. But most of us do not yet understand that news is to the mind what sugar is to the body. News is easy to digest. The…
It is no secret that I am not a fan of fund managers of any kind, be they the more exotic style of hedge fund that exists as an idiot tax for those who invest in them, the standard vanilla equity investment fund or the legally mandated rip off that are superannuation funds. My objection…
