Archives of “ironies” tag

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Trading and Training the Will

  
  Education
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will“Without freedom there is no trading. Trading is a celebration of economic and political freedom. Slaves are traded; they do not trade. All this freedom, however, is for naught if we, ourselves, are not free. It is the deepest of ironies that we experience greater freedom–far broader potentials–than those who came before us. And yet, in our lives, in our abilities to master ourselves, we are no freer.

Amid opportunity, we remain partial: tethered to our conditioning. What it means to be free is to be able to choose, to live with intention.

The free life is one that we guide: a life lived with purpose, direction, and meaning. Trading, like all the great performance activities, is an opportunity to cultivate the intentional life. Pursued properly, it is a path to freedom.”

Light, Taming the Beast

  
  Education
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Larry Light’s Taming the Beast: Wall Street’s Imperfect Answers to Making Money (Wiley, 2011) is perfect summer reading fare. The author, a financial reporter and editor, is a skilled storyteller. In this book he explores a range of investment strategies and instruments, traces their development, and in the process profiles some of the best-known investors and academics.

He covers value investing (Benjamin Graham and Warren Buffett), stocks (Jeremy Siegel), indexes (John Bogle), bonds (Bill Gross), growth investing (Thomas Rowe Price), international investing (John Templeton), real estate (Donald Trump), alternatives, asset allocation, short selling (James Chanos), hedge funds (Alfred Winslow Jones and Steve Cohen), and behaviorism (Daniel Kahneman and his followers).

Light’s thesis is that “investing success does not come in one flavor” and that “the trick is to be sufficiently flexible to dip into any or all of [the approaches he describes], but by the same token, to know their limitations.” (p. 254) He does a good job of spelling out these limitations. Even for more experienced investors who are well aware of many of these limitations, Little’s prose is so quick-paced that the book should be read, not skimmed. (more…)

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