“Jesse Livermore described Wall Street as a ‘giant whorehouse,’ where brokers were ‘pimps’ and stocks ‘whores,’ and where customers queued to throw their money away.” Another psychological aspect that drives me to use timing techniques on my portfolio is understanding myself well enough to know that I could never sit in a buy and hold strategy for two years during 1973 and 1974, watch my portfolio go down 48 percent and do nothing, hoping it would come back someday. With the title alone causing hysterics, placing this on your coffee table will elicit your guests to share their best dot-com horror story. How they invested their $100,000 second mortgage in Cisco Systems at $80 after reading about it, waiting for it to become $500 (as predicted in this very book) only to see it dive to $17. Just the thought of this book gives me the chuckles. You will run out of money before a guru runs out of indicators. There is little point in exploring the Elliott Wave Theory because it is not a theory at all, but rather the banal observation that a price chart comprises a series of peaks and troughs. Depending on the time scale you use, there can be as many peaks and troughs as you care to imagine. If you want a guarantee, buy a toaster. You have to say, “What if?” What if the stocks rally? What if they don’t? Like a catcher, you have to wear a helmet. There is no greater source of conflict among researchers and practitioners in capital market theory than the validity of technical analysis. The vast majority of academic research condemns technical analysis as theoretically bankrupt and of no practical value…It is certainly understandable why many researchers would oppose technical analysis: the validity of technical analysis calls into question decades of careful theoretical modeling [Capital Asset Pricing Model, Arbitrage Pricing Theory] claiming the markets are efficient and investors are collectively, if not individually, rational. The biggest cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid people are so sure about things and the intelligent folks are so full of doubts. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Forecasts are financial candy. Forecasts give people who hate the feeling of uncertainty something emotionally soothing. Never let the fear of striking out get in your way. The Henry theory— statistically corroborated, of course—is that assets, once in motion, tend to stay in motion without changing direction, and that turns the old saw— buy low, sell high—on its ear. Enron stock was rated as “Can’t Miss” until it became clear that the company was in desperate trouble, at which point analysts lowered the rating to “Sure Thing.” Only when Enron went completely under did a few bold analysts demote its stock to the lowest possible Wall Street analyst rating, “Hot Buy.” “If you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.” “No matter what kind of math you use, you wind up measuring volatility with your gut.” |
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Graham and Dodd’s Definition of Speculation
Graham and Dodd’s Definition of SpeculationIn their 1934 classic text, Security Analysis, Benjamin Graham and David Dodd provided a general definition of speculation: “An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and a satisfactory return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.”
By this definition, most people who buy stocks are speculators. We can attempt to sharpen Graham and Dodd’s definition by including time-scale. Speculators are not interested in putting their money into a stock or commodity for a long time. They want to see a good profit quickly – on a time scale of minutes to months. If their money does not quickly perform well in a situation, they move it into another situation.
In pursuit of greater gain, speculators take greater risks with their capital than people who put their money into Savings & CD Accounts.
Jesse Livermore’s Definition of Speculation
Jesse Livermore, the 20th century’s most (in)famous speculator provided his own definition of speculation – preceding Graham and Dodd’s by several years. In Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, under his pseudonym of Lawrence Livingston, he said: “The speculator is not an investor. His object is not to secure a steady return on his money at a good rate of interest, but to profit by either a rise or a fall in the price of whatever he may be speculating in.” (more…)