The Big Trade: Simple Strategies for Maximum Market Returns

Chapter 6

Closing Arguments

The strong man is the one who is able to intercept at will the communication between the senses and the mind.

—Napoleon Bonaparte

Crossing the Great Stream

When I started working on this book, I did not realize how much things would change while the process was going on. While I was and am grateful for the opportunities I’ve had since the phone call I received coming home from my grandmother’s funeral, I was beginning to feel restless again, not unlike the time before I moved here to Vietnam in the first place. This book, along with other complementary projects, was to form the basis for creating the next chapter in my life.

In working on those projects, I came to realize something about knowledge and how to use it to achieve my goals. We’ve talked at length about how we learn and then apply that learning to trading, as that is the focus of the book: to improve your skill set in relation to how the market operates. But the lessons, obviously, are more general than that, or at least I hope they are.

We are living in an age of massive upheaval in so many sectors of the economy because of the rise of the Internet and computing power that has changed the opportunities for communication between people. This has affected the speed at which the markets digest new data, the way the markets trade, and how we as investors and entrepreneurs act in relation to all of this new information.

And we do so solely for the purpose of conserving the one truly scarce resource ...