One of my all-around favorite quotes on trading is actually about poker.
It comes from cash game pro Tommy Angelo, who says, “The best way to get better at poker is to get better at everything and let poker rise with the tide.”
An intimidating thought for some. To REALLY up your game (be it poker, trading, or something else entirely) you have to improve as a competitor. As a human. As a thinking, acting, decision-making machine.
For others, though, this thought is not intimidating but inspiring. “Raising the game,” i.e. getting better at everything, is part of the attraction in the first place.
To that end, trading is all about making decisions.
And making good decisions is not just an art, but a skill set — an area of focus where you can learn and practice and improve. (more…)
Archives of “favorite quotes” tag
rssMust-Read Interview with Howard Marks
Barron’s had an awesome interview over the weekend with Howard Marks. They made it the cover story for a reason. If you missed it, you must immediately read it here.
For those that don’t know, Howard Marks is the chairman of Oaktree Capital Management ($77 billion under investment). They focus on distressed debt and Warren Buffett is one of his biggest fans. What I found very appealing was his use of sentiment in his overall market thesis.
He’s been in this game longer than I’ve been alive and whenever I see someone willing to share what they’ve learned, it is like Christmas.
Here are a few of my favorite quotes from the story and my take. (more…)
10 Quotes of Jesse Livermore
When seasoned traders get together, we have a sort of “secret handshake” that the uninitiated may not notice. We ask each other if they’ve read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. The insiders reply by telling you the number of times they’ve read the book. Novices ask for the author’s name.
Recently, I’ve been rereading Jon Markman’s wonderful annotated version of this Jesse Livermore classic. This special edition even has a forward written by Paul Tudor Jones. As I revisited Mr. Livermore’s wisdom, I realized that so much of the trading baton that I’ve endeavored to pass on to my readers is directly or indirectly the result of the special batons he passed on to me. In considering this, I feel it’s only appropriate to salute the man. Afterall, I have patterned myself after him and my favorite quotes come from this truly extraordinary trader. As Dr. George Lane, the creator of the stochastic oscillator, once told me over dinner, “Gatis, you can never get enough of that good stuff.”
My trading approach is organized into 10 stages that I call Tensile Trading. For this week’s blog, I’ve chosen a few of my favorite Jesse Livermore quotes for each of these 10 stages.
1. Money Management:
* “I trade on my own information and follow my own methods.”
* “The desire for constant action irrespective of underlying conditions is responsible for many losses on Wall Street, even among the professionals, who feel that they must take home some money every day, as though they were working for regular wages.”
2. Business of Investing:
* “I believe that anyone who is intelligent, conscientious, and willing to put in the necessary time can be successful on Wall Street. As long as they realize the market is a business like any other business, they have a good chance to prosper.”
3. The Investor Self:
* “My satisfaction always came from beating the market, solving the puzzle. The money was the reward, but it was not the main reason I loved the market. The stock market is the greatest, most complex puzzle ever invented – and it pays the biggest jackpot…it was never the money that drove me. It was the game, solving the puzzle, beating the market that had confused and confounded the greatest minds in history. For me, that passion, the juice, the exhilaration was in beating the game, a game that was a living dynamic riddle…” (more…)
* “I believe that anyone who is intelligent, conscientious, and willing to put in the necessary time can be successful on Wall Street. As long as they realize the market is a business like any other business, they have a good chance to prosper.”
3. The Investor Self:
* “My satisfaction always came from beating the market, solving the puzzle. The money was the reward, but it was not the main reason I loved the market. The stock market is the greatest, most complex puzzle ever invented – and it pays the biggest jackpot…it was never the money that drove me. It was the game, solving the puzzle, beating the market that had confused and confounded the greatest minds in history. For me, that passion, the juice, the exhilaration was in beating the game, a game that was a living dynamic riddle…” (more…)
Jim Rogers' Keys to Success
Jim Rogers’ Keys to Success (taken from the titles and sub headings of each chapter of the new book, “A Gift to My Children: A Father’s Lessons for Life and Investing
“)
1. Do not let others do your thinking for you
2. Focus on what you like
3. Good habits for life & investing
4. Common sense? not so common
5. Attention to details is what separates success from failure
6. Let the world be a part of your perspective
7. Learn philosophy & learn to think
8. Learn history
9. Learn languages (make sure Mandarin is one of them) (more…)
10 Market Insights from Mark Douglas
They say that you cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him to find it within himself. “Trading In the Zone” by Mark Douglass is one of those rare books, which has played the role of an eye opener for many seasoned traders. It is a favorite read – not because it shares some hidden algorithms or tells a riveting story, not because it reveals some secret market formula or it analyzes the irrational exuberance of the crowd; but because it deals with the only hurdle that stays between a trader and his profit – his psychology.
Here are 10 of my favorite quotes from the book:
1. The four trading fears
95% of the trading errors you are likely to make will stem from your attitudes about being wrong, losing money, missing out, and leaving money on the table – the four trading fears
2. The proverbial empathy gap
You may already have some awareness of much of what you need to know to be a consistently successful trader. But being aware of something doesn’t automatically make it a functional part of who you are. Awareness is not necessarily a belief. You can’t assume that learning about something new and agreeing with it is the same as believing it at a level where you can act on it.
3. The market doesn’t generate happy or painful information
From the markets perspective, it’s all simply information. It may seem as if the market is causing you to feel the way you do at any given moment, but that’s not the case. It’s your own mental framework that determines how you perceive the information, how you feel, and, as a result, whether or not you are in the most conducive state of mind to spontaneously enter the flow and take advantage of whatever the market is offering.
4. The flaws of fundamental analysis
Fundamental analysis creates what I call a “reality gap” between “what should be” and “what is.” The reality gap makes it extremely difficult to make anything but very long-term predictions that can be difficult to exploit, even if they are correct. (more…)