The Big Trade: Simple Strategies for Maximum Market Returns

Chapter 4

As the Market Turns . . .

Opportunities multiply as they are seized.

—Sun Tzu

Subconscious Implications

Here I am, having made a lot of money in a relatively short period of time, and I’m becoming bored with it. Money is not an end unto itself; it is a means to an end, and now that I had the means, I had to think about how I could do something with it to create something bigger. Not to be boastful, but life was pretty good at that point. I had made much more money than I had expected and I felt a little bit like I owed the world. In trading as a profession, it is arguable that you are not creating value but rather simply helping to discover what the real value of a company is. So in that sense, traders perform an extremely valuable service as appraisers of assets, and for that they get paid, but there is nothing lasting about what they produce.

There’s no legacy, unless you take what you’ve earned and build something great with it. I was young and unmarried (except to the market), so at that point it made more sense to take a risk and try my hand at something completely different.

Bayesian Statistics

A subset of the field of statistics in which the evidence about the true state of the world is expressed in terms of degrees of belief or, more specifically, Bayesian probabilities.

In this way, I was starting from scratch. So it’s important to step back for a bit and review the process of how it is that we learn to become experts.

We’ve discussed a lot of the nuts and ...