How And Why We Choke
The capacity to execute under pressure is one of the key components of any high performance endevour. In trading vapour locking at the wrong time can see the end of your career.
Ten Minutes With Tate – It Isn’t How Much You Make – Its How Much You Keep.
Ask a novice what the most important thing in trading is and you will probably get the response – it’s whatever moving average is flavour of the day. Wrong – it is how you manage both your trades and yourself. Markets can generate extraordinary wealth but they can also take that wealth away if you…
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Diversification is Not a Free Lunch
Harry Markowitz is reported to have said that “diversification is the only free lunch in investing”. This is the notion that holding a broader range of assets can result in better returns without assuming more risk. Over the decades this has become accepted wisdom – but it is not true. Diversification isn’t free; it is…
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Is Resmed Having Its Nokia Moment
It is often strange how two disparate thoughts coalesce into some form of narrative pointing you in the direction of something. Coincidentally I came across an article by some domestic fund manager telling me that because RMD had collapsed it was the buy of the century at the same time I was cleaning out one…
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How Hard is it to Become the Michael Jordan of Trading?
I have been meaning to get to this interesting article Heidi N. Moore wrote over at Marketplace radio. “They Are Day Traders. Hear them Roar.” A terrific looking commercial for OpenTrader accompanies the article (video here). The video is pretty slick. But as intriguing as it looks, it overstates what I believe is the true criticism of…
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With the Best of Intentions
In those long-forgotten days when high quality bond yields were close to (or even below) zero, most investors longed for a return to a ‘normal’ environment. When a staple element of most multi-asset portfolios would once again provide an adequate return. For a time, it seemed that this day would never arrive and we would…
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A Few Laws of Getting Rich
There are 13 divorces among the 10 richest men in the world. Seven of the top ten have been divorced at least once. Correlation isn’t causation, and that sample size is tiny. But a statistic that is so much worse than the national average, on a topic so fundamental to happiness, among a group whose…
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The Kiss of Fortune
I have just started making my way through the Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski and I came across the following passage – The concept of oil expresses perfectly the eternal human dream of wealth achieved through lucky accident, through the kiss of fortune and not by sweat, anguish, and hard work. In this sense,…
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This is Water David Foster Wallace
“Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one…
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