Sweet…best laugh I had all day reading the first line of your previous post. Cahoots… love it!
Jay
The only thing i am afraid of is the Voight-Kampf test.
yeah thats right but he was just saying ))) I think you got the Idea )
and I like what he said because it has got a nice meaning
“If you have a wall in front of you and you don’t see it, don’t blame the wall.”
-Rui
There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live
Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.
When the bogeyman goes to bed every night, he checks his closet for Chuck Norris.
Chuck Norris counted to infinity. Twice.
Someone once tried to tell Chuck Norris that a roundhouse kick is not the best way to kick someone. This has been recorded by historians as the worst mistake anyone has ever made.
Hmm, what is with those who see the wall, still walking? May they blame the wall? 
[B]…by the mere fact that he forms part of an organised crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilisation. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian — that is, a creature acting by instinct.
He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings, whom he further tends to resemble by the facility with which he allows himself to be impressed by words and images — which would be entirely without action on each of the isolated individuals composing the crowd — and to be induced to commit acts contrary to his most obvious interests and his best-known habits.
An individual in a crowd is a grain of sand amid other grains of sand, which the wind stirs up at will.
Gustav Le Bon[/B]
We have this phrase in our town:
[B]
The One Who Gets Angry Lose[/B]
[I]Foremost among the dominant ideas of the present epoch is to be found the notion that instruction is capable of considerably changing men, and has for its unfailing consequence to improve them and even to make them equal.
By the mere fact of its being constantly repeated, this assertion has ended by becoming one of the most steadfast democratic dogmas. It would be as difficult now to attack it as it would have been formerly to have attacked the dogmas of the Church.[/I]
Gustav Le Bon
[B][I]Whats the difference between a bond and a bond trader? A bond matures, trader doesn’t.[/I][/B]
"The game of speculation is the most uniformly fascinating game in the world.
But it is not a game for the stupid, the mentally lazy, the person of inferior
emotional balance, or the get-rich-quick adventurer. They will die poor.”
Jesse Livermore, [I]How To Trade In Stocks[/I] (1940)Ironic as it seems from his suicide that he himself was a person of inferior emotional balance… Being aware of one’s own shortcomings and weaknesses is one of the most difficult things to achieve in life in my belief.
I agree with you, Magnus. Jesse Livermore’s family was plagued by suicide, as we have discussed previously.
If we could have interviewed Livermore before his death — using our 21st century understanding of mental illness in general, and suicide and depression in particular — I wonder how he would have defined “inferior emotional balance”, and I wonder whether he would have included suicide in his definition.
My personal view is that severe clinical depression ran deep in Livermore’s family, although that affliction was poorly understood and poorly treated in his day.
Chances are good that Jesse would have had a much happier life if he had lived today, considering the advances in medicine.
But even today depression and other medical conditions of the mind are among the least understood. There is no doubt that Jesse was a trader whose skill remains but a dream for the rest of us.
I suspect that Jesse wasn’t referring to depression in the above quote but more likely to the ability of keeping your nerves in check. That was obviously something he knew how to do in spite of his other problems.
Agreed. Even the “normal” workings of the mind are mostly a mystery.
Related to that topic, allow me to run off on a tangent. Humor me for a moment, while I run down this rabbit-trail.
Just today, I read an interesting article about a survey, of sorts, of some prominent scientists and thinkers on the question, “what is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful [scientific] explanation?”. Here’s an excerpt —
Every January, John Brockman, the impresario and literary agent who presides over the online salon Edge.org, asks his circle of scientists, digerati and humanities scholars to tackle one question.
In previous years, they have included “how is the Internet changing the way you think?” and “what is the most important invention in the last 2,000 years?”
This year, he posed the open-ended question “what is your favorite deep, elegant or beautiful explanation?”
The responses, released at midnight on Sunday, provide a crash course in science both well known and far out-of-the-box, as admired by the likes of Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, physicist Freeman Dyson and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.
Terrence Sejnowski, a computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute, extols the discovery that the conscious, deliberative mind is not the author of important decisions such as what work people do and who they marry. Instead, he writes, “an ancient brain system called the basal ganglia, brain circuits that consciousness cannot access,” pull the strings.
Running on the neurochemical dopamine, they predict how rewarding a choice will be - if I pick this apartment, how happy will I be? - “evaluate the current state of the entire cortex and inform the brain about the best course of action,” explains Sejnowski. Only later do people construct an explanation of their choices, he said in an interview, convincing themselves incorrectly that volition and logic were responsible.
As soon as I read that, I thought 'that explains most of the discretionary trading decisions made by most of the traders in the world’.
What do you think?
BTW, here’s the article I was referring to, if you want to read it — Science’s most beautiful theories | Reuters
It’s funny that we actually discussed something quite similar today at the course I’m taking this week. I agree wholeheartedly that emotions have a firm grip over our decision-making processes. And afterwards we rationalize the decisions we make.
On another tangent, I hope the answer to the question of the most important invention during the last 2000 years is “electricity”. I can’t imagine what else could have been more important to human development. The gigantic leaps forward during the last 200 years or so imho has largely to do with access to electricity.
“Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy.
You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”
Ivan Boesky, giving the 1985 commencement speech at the University of California -
Berkeley - School of Business Administration (Michael Milken’s alma mater).
(the fictional Gordon Gekko was loosely based on Ivan Boesky)
“Greed — for lack of a better word — is good. Greed is right. Greed works.
Greed cuts through, clarifies, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.
Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge —
has marked the upward surge of mankind.”
Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), rallying support at a shareholders meeting,
in the film [I][B]Wall Street[/B][/I] (1987).
“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”
– John Maynard Keynes
I originally heard this as a Benjamin Graham quote, but the almighty G seems to think outherwise
Never a loser til you quit trying
“A sale is made on every call you make.
Either you sell the client some stock, or he sells you a reason why he can’t buy.
Either way a sale is made. The only question is: Who is gonna close?”
Jim Young (Ben Affleck) in a tyrannical sales-training session, in the film [I][B]Boiler Room[/B][/I] (2000).
Does this remind you of the guys peddling SanDisk stock in the semi-documentary[I][B] Wall Street Warriors[/B][/I]?