- Why is it that succes in this business is not a matter of "intellectual capacity" but probably more of discipline?
- The greatest 'intellectual minds' all more or less end up bankrupt due to their a non-tested self-believe and overconfidence in their own abilities...... (Think Long-Term Credit, Lehman et al)
- Why is it some of the most successful traders do their trading in vacuum - i.e without noise, flow and pretty much without consulting charts... ? Even the mighty George Soros, when u look at his trading style, it strikes me more and more as a process dictated not only but mainly by the fact he is the most "connected" guy out there - plus EVERYONE wants to talk to him?
- Why is it when one reads about a succesful investor(as defined as one who have made money year after year) one is always struck at how simple yet intelligent the modus-operandi and thinking is?
- Fitting and overfitting is todays norm in trading - The politicians think they got model for how to unwind all problems - the present model called: inflating/monetising debt ( The response to that is Dylan Crise piece attached)..........Model trading constitutes 60-70% of all trading - indicating some people have given up on finding the "path of least restistance" or maybe rather believe it is the path but making machines do the trading - the ironic truth being, almost like the Heisenberg principle, the more people who 'pbserve' or run these types of model the lower the marginal return. A sign presently is the 15-min "boost" in volumes which one can clearly see in the intraday chart of any Blooomberg machine........¨
- How can a whole industry be built in the media on commenting on the markets by people who clearly do not have for two cents insight to the issues they are discussing ? CNBC US being by far the worst platform for The Sun-like misguidance of investors. I would claim there are more money lost listening to Cramer & CNBC than any other single source in the US today.
- If IMF and the other organisation being used for advise really had any predictive powers in their economic models, why is the world so bad of today? The believe in IMF, OECD is scary - these are bureacrats who NEVER ever had a position, who lives in Ivory Tower of ignorance on liquidity issues and risk understanding. They always seems to think they got plenty of time and that we can be fooled.
- How can so many people be employed in Wall Street servicing others? I would, again, claims there are 10 admin/sales people for every real risktaker (may even 1 to 25) - this number needs to be reduced... NOW!
- Why do anyone care about economic analysis? Its flawed, manipulated and it is entirely impossible to compare unemployment rates even year by year, same with CPI - how come we accept the industry of Dismal Science (i.e: economics) when all know it does not work ? Are we lazy? Overpaid?
- Overpaid is the answer - this industry has too long been based on securing the jobs and bonus' of Wall Street - academia and the true traders long time ago learned that indexing or Beta trading is better than listening to pundits - and trade only stuff where you have an edge (Either size or information)
Conclusion? None - however I think we stand in front of a LARGE DELEVERAGING of the whole industry and the banks inability to "conduct themselves" has been deterimental to the potential for keeping this game a float - the good news being - when the forest fire is over, maybe we, the few honest speculators, can get back to doing what we should be doing best: Allocating to the highest margin return.
Nice weekend,
Steen
