It happens. I had so many wins the past two weeks I placed myself into bear mode, trying to have my cake and eat it too. That’s the problem with fat people, always scheming ways to eat cake and look good too. You cannot have both. You can either look great and have abs, or you eat cake. Which will it be?
Life is a game of choices. Some of us do not have many choices, however. For example, one simply doesn’t choose to go to an Ivy League school or better yet one simply doesn’t choose to be smart. That comes with DNA. But you can learn to the point of being wise. You have a choice in the matter, especially when investing. You can make bad choices and keep repeating them, or maybe you can identify the issues with your choices and switch it up.
That’s the thing about intelligence and I don’t mean this to be too heavily philosophical — but often times the difference between the moron and the dimwitted is a matter of awareness. The moron is dumb and unaware, so he goes throughout life happy, fucking and drinking until he dies. He also thinks everyone else around him is an idiot, due to narcissistic tendencies. The dimwitted man is a tragic story, but not sad. He understands his limitations and purposely tries to improve his situation by self education, creating an air of sophistication around himself with books and hobbies, employing wisdom as a pseudo-intellectual replacement for actual intelligence. And he knows not to make the same errors over and over again, which is why he rarely heeds his own advice, but instead has learned to accept the advice of others. In a way, the dimwitted man has it made, enjoying the benefits of smarter men without the burden of making those decisions and being responsible for others.
You as the dimwitted man have a good life. You visit Le Fly daily, never meeting him in real life at all, and profit from his insight into capital markets — insight that has been honed and sharpened like a knife for decades of investment experience. But even I have a bad day, today being one of them.
I sold the following stocks today, and booked the losses.
(CPHI -20%)
(SOXS -8.3%)
(LABD -15.8%)
(JNUG -10.1%)
The silver lining is, I was 65% cash in my trading account coming into today, so those losses aren’t magnified by leverage or anything. And, if I might say so, my trading account is only 25% of my overall portfolio, the rest is invested fully and enjoying the nectar of today’s supple rally.
HOWEVER, I do not take lightly this sojourn into loss. The CPHI, for example, was a 25% winner yesterday and I watched it sour and go bad almost immediately after markets opened today. The X factor here is greed and I must be mindful not to permit base behavior, the inner beast in me, get the better of me.
Does the market go higher? No real idea. I’ll just judge it on a stock by stock basis and buy what I like when I like to.
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