Here’s a great speech by Mark Sellers to Harvard graduates.
It’s titled So You Want to Be the Next Warren Buffett and discusses 7 traits you need to be different.
Trait #1 – Ability to buy and sell stocks against the market
Trait #2 – Obsession
Trait #3 – Willingness to learn from past mistakes
Trait #4 – Inherent sense of risk based on common sense
Trait #5 – Confidence and Conviction
Trait #6 – Get both sides of your brain working
Trait #7 – Ability to live through volatility
One of intelligent honest things that Livermore did was to get out of one market by selling a related market, inducing the other traders to think that there was weakness in one market which would carry over to the related market. The art of indirection and letting people use their own intelligence and inferences to come to their own conclusion. for example if he wanted to get out of cotton, he’d sell some coffee. If he wanted to get out of a common, he’s sell the preferred or a related company that owned a big chunk of it, like sell Christiana which owned general motors et al. This technique one wonders how often is it used today. When it happens, is it artful indirection or chance? How to quantify and what predictions to be made? Would the robots be smart enough to do this?
