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Nine Business Lessons From Celebrities

  
  Education
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If you pay attention, you can find inspiration and lessons that you can apply to your business everywhere you look…

  • Lance Armstrong: Be disciplined. No business will succeed without a lot of hard work and discipline. Commit to it. Stick with it. Eventually, you’ll reach your destination.
  • Paula Deen: Be yourself (and be bold about it). You will naturally succeed if you build a base of followers who are naturally attracted to your personality. Don’t worry about being liked by everybody. Just let your own unique personality shine through.
  • Mr. Rogers: Be positive. I can’t imagine making it in business without a whole lot of optimism.
  • Ellen Degeneres: Have fun. The daily grind, even when you work for yourself, can be dull at times. Doing something you love, surrounding yourself with clients and connections that energize you, and taking time to appreciate the good things in life make it all worthwhile, and who doesn’t enjoy a good laugh every once in a while? (more…)

Nine Business Lessons From Celebrities

  
  Education
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If you pay attention, you can find inspiration and lessons that you can apply to your business everywhere you look…

  • Lance Armstrong: Be disciplined. No business will succeed without a lot of hard work and discipline. Commit to it. Stick with it. Eventually, you’ll reach your destination.

  • Paula Deen: Be yourself (and be bold about it). You will naturally succeed if you build a base of followers who are naturally attracted to your personality. Don’t worry about being liked by everybody. Just let your own unique personality shine through.

  • Mr. Rogers: Be positive. I can’t imagine making it in business without a whole lot of optimism.

  • Ellen Degeneres: Have fun. The daily grind, even when you work for yourself, can be dull at times. Doing something you love, surrounding yourself with clients and connections that energize you, and taking time to appreciate the good things in life make it all worthwhile, and who doesn’t enjoy a good laugh every once in a while?

  • Bill Cosby: Keep learning. I used to be so intimidated by what I didn’t know. But I’ve come to realize that such a list is endless, so I just continue to work at it, and I learn more and more each day about how to build a successful business.

  • Carol Burnett: Be creative. Sometimes you have to improvise. You figure it out, and you come to enjoy the journey.

  • Oprah: Build a platform. To succeed in business, you have to have a group of people who believe in you, who want to hear what you have to say, and who want to support you in everything you do.

  • Jim Carrey & Steve Carell: Don’t take it all so seriously. You’re going to mess up, and you will look silly on occasion. Learn to be OK with that.

  • Maya Angelou: Be resilient. Things will not always be easy, but if you refuse to give up and keep bouncing back, they manage to work themselves out.

Three things to make trading less hard

  
  Education
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Trading is not easy but it also isn’t as hard as we make it.  Here are three things that will help it be less hard.

Trading Plan

Have a plan already.  You are just guessing and putting yourself through unnecessary stress if you don’t.  You are taking a test without studying.

Fall in love with the L’s

You have to live with the idea of loss and learning.  They are connected.  They are always fighting each other. Losses makes you want to ignore the learning and not losing makes you think you don’t need it.

Perspective

When you lose your optimism shrinks, when you win it expands.  Chances are you have only accepted winning. One trade does not make a trend, either direction.  But it is easy to connect the losses.  Step back and see it for what it really is.

12 Insightful Thoughts from “The Most Important Thing” by Howard Marks

  
Education, Life
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1. People usually expect the future to be like the past and underestimate the potential for change.

2. When everyone believes something is risky, their unwillingness to buy usually reduces its price to the point where it’s not risky at all. Broadly negative opinion can make it the least risky thing, since all optimism has been driven out of its price.

3. In investing, as in life, there are very few sure things. Values can evaporate, estimates can be wrong, circumstances can change and “sure things” can fail. However, there are two concepts we can hold to with confidence: • Rule number one: most things will prove to be cyclical. • Rule number two: some of the greatest opportunities for gain and loss come when other people forget rule number one.

4. Very early in my career, a veteran investor told me about the three stages of a bull market. Now I’ll share them with you. • The first, when a few forward-looking people begin to believe things will get better • The second, when most investors realize improvement is actually taking place • The third, when everyone concludes things will get better forever

5. Investors hold to their convictions as long as they can, but when the economic and psychological pressures become irresistible, they surrender and jump on the bandwagon.

6. Even when an excess does develop, it’s important to remember that “overpriced” is incredibly different from “going down tomorrow.” • Markets can be over- or underpriced and stay that way—or become more so—for years.

7. If everyone likes it, it’s probably because it has been doing well. Most people seem to think outstanding performance to date presages outstanding future performance. Actually, it’s more likely that outstanding performance to date has borrowed from the future and thus presages subpar performance from here on out. (more…)

The 14 Stages Of Trading Psychology

  
  Education
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1. OPTIMISM – It all starts with a hunch or a positive outlook leading us to buy a stock.

2. EXCITEMENT – Things start moving our way and we get giddy inside. We start to anticipate and hope that a possible success story is in the making.

3. THRILL – The market continues to be favorable and we just can’t help but start to feel a little “Smart.” At this point we have complete confidence in our trading system.

4. EUPHORIA – This marks the point of maximum financial risk but also maximum financial gain. Our investments turn into quick and easy profits, so we begin to ignore the basic concept of risk. We now start trading anything that we can get our hands on to make a buck.

5. ANXIETY – Oh no – it’s turning around! The markets start to show their first signs of taking your “hard earned” gains back. But having never seen this happen, we still remain ultra greedy and think the long-term trend is higher.

6. DENIAL – The markets don’t turn as quickly as we had hoped. There must be something wrong we think to ourselves. Our “long-term” view now shortens to a near-term hope of an improvement.

7. FEAR – Reality sets in that we are not as smart as we once thought. Instead of being confident in our trading we become confused. At this point we should get out with a small profit and move on but we don’t for some stupid reason.

8. DESPERATION – All gains have been lost at this point. We had our chance to profit and missed it. Not knowing how to act, we attempt to do anything that will bring our positions back into the black. (more…)

Rosie’s Rules to Remember (an Economist’s Dozen)

  
  Education
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1. In order for an economic forecast to be relevant, it must be combined with a market call.
2. Never be a slave to the date – they are no substitute for astute observation of the big picture.
3. The consensus rarely gets it right and almost always errs on the side of optimism – except at the bottom.
4. Fall in love with your partner, not your forecast.
5. No two cycles are ever the same.
6. Never hide behind your model.
7. Always seek out corroborating evidence.
8. Have respect for what the markets are telling you.
9. Be constantly aware with your forecast horizon – many clients live in the short run.
10. Of all the market forecasters, Mr. Bond gets it right most often.
11. Highlight the risks to your forecasts.
12. Get the US consumer right and everything else will take care of itself.
13. Expansions are more fun than recessions (straight from Bob Farrell’s quiver!).

Optimism for Traders

  
  Education
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  • When good things happens to an optimist, he says it’s permanent, pervasive, and personal. When a bad thing happens to an optimist, she says it’s temporary, specific, and not personal.
  • Because the optimistic trader looks with bright enthusiasm towards the future, she is able to be realistic about what has happened in the past and is happening in the present. A pessimistic trader who has limiting doubts about his future trading, may be unwilling to admit what has happened or is actually occurring.

Ten Core Ideas of Trading Psychology

  
  Education
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1) We are most likely to behave in inhibited or impulsive ways, violating trading rules and plans, when we perceive events to be threatening;

2) What we perceive to be threatening is a joint function of events themselves and how we think about those events;

3) A key to gaining control over trading and maintaining consistency is to be able to reduce the threat associated with market events and process adverse outcomes in normal, routine ways;

4) We can reduce the threat associated with adverse market events through proper money management (position sizing) and through proper risk management (limits on losses per position);

5) We can reduce the threat associated with adverse market events by training ourselves to respond calmly to adverse outcomes (exposure methods) and by restructuring how we think about those outcomes (cognitive methods);

6) Optimal skill development in trading will occur in non-threatening environments in which learners can sustain concentration, optimism, and motivation;

7) A proper mindset is therefore necessary to the development of trading skills, but does not substitute for such development;

8) The cultivation of trading expertise is a function of the amount of time and effort devoted to learning and the proper structuring of that time and effort;

9) Proper structuring of learning involves the setting of specific, doable, cumulative goals and the provision of rapid feedback and correction regarding the achievement of those goals;

10) Practice does not make perfect in trading or anything else; perfect practice makes perfect. Training must gradually build competencies and correct deficiencies in a manner that sustains a positive mindset and optimal concentration and motivation.

Time Tested Rules (Part 1)

  
  Education
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timetestedrulesOptimism means expecting the best, but confidence means knowing how you will handle the worst. Never make a move if you are merely optimistic.
Take a trading break. A break will give you a detached view of the market and a fresh look at yourself and the way you want to trade for the next several weeks.
It is a safe bet that the money lost by (short term) speculation is small compared with the gigantic sums lost by those who let their investments “ride”. Long term investors are the biggest gamblers as after they make a trade they often times stay with it and end up losing it all. The intelligent trader will . By acting promptly—hold losses to a minimum.
People who buy headlines eventually end up selling newspapers. (more…)

Does Religion Serve a Purpose?

  
Analysis, Education, Video
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This lecture by professor Paul Bloom of Yale starts with the observation that religion serves no obvious adaptive purpose. I find that a little surprising since it is well documented that people who have a make generally accurate appraisals of themselves and their environment are depressed (notice it is not clear which way causality runs). Since optimism is considered to be adaptive, and most religions have a point of view as to what death is all about and what if anything happens afterwards, I would think that giving people coping strategies about the inevitability of death would be adaptive. As I wrote last year:

In the Indian epic Mahabharata, Yudhisthira goes looking for his missing brothers, who went searching for water. He finds them all dead next to a pond. In despair, but still parched, he is about to drink, but a crane tells him he must answer some questions first. The last and most difficult: “What is the greatest wonder of the world?” Yudhisthira answers, “Day after day, hour after hour, countless people die, yet the living believe they will live forever.”

And as Americans have become more and more work focused, and as job tenures become shorter and people often have to move in search of gainful employment, the idea of community as a place seems quaint. As this video suggests, houses of worship may be the only place most people find community these days. I doubt that is a healthy development.

And this DOES relate to the Super Bowl! The Center for Public Religion has found that 1/3 of Americans think God decides the outcome of sporting events. He does not do so directly, by having favorite teams (too tacky!) but by favoring teams with more God-fearing athletes.

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