I have recently discovered that we have many 10 year old adults on ET. In light of this fact-I am going to try and see if any traders here can trade smarter than a 10 year old. The children will become obvious to all as this thread moves on. The General
reminds me of the most comical title I've seen in a long time. Throw out all those TA, and advanced quant books. A second grader will beat you all (yeah, right; maybe if he is of the madoff lineage).
Why trade? To make you money. What do you trade? Whatever makes you money. When do you trade? Whenever your whatever is moving. When do you not trade? Whenever your whatever is not moving. Any 10 year old child can understand this-but very few 10 year old adults can. We shall discuss why this is so-and in so doing will hopefully allow those who are stuck in their pre-teens to advance a bit more-although no guarantee is given-as the calibar of 10 year old adults that I have met is very low-so low that it may be impossible to help them kick the bad habits that they have picked up-but we will try. The General
It's true... I've read academic studies where middle-school students make their own portfolios consisting of a handful of stocks (companies they liked MCD, NKE) and they outperform "professional" managers in bull and bear markets. Also reminds me of the experiment where monkeys randomly choose stocks and outperform hedge fund managers.
Citation please. Any analysis like the one you suggest using a handful of children is highly susceptible to statistical biases. (Moreover, not all manager are concerned or mandated with achieving the highest absolute level of return; many have mandates) Also, not to be pedantic, but no one actually got a bunch of monkeys to throw darts. It was a random number generator - and the point was that most hedge fund managers didn't meet a benchmark of random holdings, and thus, most didn't have "skill".
So what? The ignorant plagiarist who started this thread doesn't even understand that charts are made of past data: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2451729#post2451729 And he stole two quotes from William Eckhardt trying to make himself appear savvy. Here's where I nailed him trying to pass them off as his own: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2451821#post2451821 http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=2451826#post2451826
Hi Sjfan, I remember the 7th grade example from the first book I ever read on the market: Peter Lynch's "Beating the Street". I googled it and came across this link: http://pennysleuth.com/can-you-outperform-a-group-of-7th-graders/ It's a passage from the book. And yes, although portfolio managers adhere to some sort of mandate, the kids outperformed 99% of all stock mutual funds... pretty impressive nevertheless. St. Agnes Portfolio 1990-91 Performance (%) Wal-Mart 164.7 Nike 178.5 Walt Disney 3.4 Limited 68.8 L.A. Gear -64.3 Pentech 53.1 Gap 320.3 PepsiCo 63.8 Food Lion 146.9 Topps 55.7 Savannah Foods -38.5 IBM 3.6 NYNEX -0.22 Mobil 19.1 Total Return for Portfolio: 69.6 S&P 500: 28.08
Gotcha. On the darts, I'll bet that if we can get the OP to throw some darts it would be just as good as monkeys