Gather around the fireside as I speak to you about investing.
What makes a successful investor? We all want to know. After all, everyone is here to glean a nugget or two, to get the edge you need to succeed. Plainly, I will tell you it is a combination of two very important things.
1. Skill set. Natural born traders are as real as organic plastic or healthy hamburgers. The fastest path to success is to emulate those who have already achieved it. After possessing the tools you need to succeed, through endless hours of toiling about the computer, researching methods and disciplines, you need one more thing.
2. Time.
If you have #1, all you need is time to fulfill your goals. If you fail, due to so called black swan events or simple mistakes through happenstance, you will always have the skills necessary to succeed available to you. With this in mind, let me tell you about my failures.
On more than one occasion I let a short term trades turn into a longer term one, based solely on my inability to take a loss.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sold a stock, after getting a quick 10% pop, after originally hell bent on holding for the long term.
What is long term, after all?
As a wounded veteran of the 1997, 2000, 2001 and 2008 market crashes, I am prone to err on the side of caution. But this cynical thinking, this outright cowardice, has robbed me of what is rightfully mines on dozens of separate occasions.
I’ve averaged down into death and sold into epiphany. I’ve spoken to idiots who ran publicly traded companies and held the stock because I thought no one else would get clued in. I’ve betrayed disciplines because I let emotion get in the way of rational thinking, the gut wrenching agony of being wrong was too much to bear on more than one occasion. Hell, I’ve even set myself up for failure, by leveraging into a market that proved to be too dangerous.
All of these failures, AND MORE, were fleeting. I’ve always been able to pick myself up by the bootstraps and press forward. Why is that? Am I so much different from every one else? Clearly, I am just a simple man made from organic material, just like you– the same as my idiot neighbors. But i’ve been able to overcome abomination and carnage and manage to crush the markets, year in and year out. Nevertheless, I am not done going higher.
Trust yourselves before you can trust others.
I’m gonna tell you something that you already know and is a cliche, but true. Surround yourselves with successful people and kick the losers into idle sewers of trash. You don’t have enough time to waste on being unproductive. We have a task at hand and that is to trade to the very best of our abilities. There will be persons of interest and disinterest in our paths, trying to dissuade us from it. They will take your dreams and flush them down the toilet, if given the opportunity. Blackguards. Misery makes for great company.
There is a cornucopia of ideas waiting for you to take hold. Extricate yourselves from the unproductive underclass of mountebanks and forge ahead, as if your head was on ablaze–soaked with jet fuel and frenched fry grease.
As time fribbles away and the years pass, your skills will diminish, until you’re left with abject poverty and despair–regular booze hounds and road slobs–victims of your own idiocy.
Rest assured, you can avoid this dreadful fate by simply combining the skill set necessary to succeed, with the time allotted to you by the Gods of nature. Our brothers at iBankCoin refuse to lose and will make sure the murderholes are neatly paved over and the hand grenades properly pinned, all for your convenience.
Next year I will discuss failure, though moronic design and how the NYSE and the NASDAQ are denizens of pure evil. Until then, I bid you adieu and thank you for attending iBankCoin’s first annual investor conference.
Ciao.
Comments »