Here is a proverb for you: "Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him"
On the other hand, what is it like to use intellegence and critical thinking to make money? Leon wasn't interested in that, he just wanted to know who can make money in the markets and he found out well equipped people can do that and others can too. Just about everyone can make money in the markets. The ancillary questions about doing it well are just as interesting too. To do it well, you just extract what is available all the time. There is no intellectual demand made of a person to do that. Being operational is not a big deal. The big gap in that the market offers it and people do not take it is not primarily related to operations per se. People do quite well what they think they should be doing. They operate with what they HAVE to operate. These people express satisfaction in how they operate. In fact, they express how others operate in terms of their operations as setting the standard for the comparison. I prefer using the market's offerings as the standard instead. You differ and say: "when the mythical big thinkers with their binders filled with theories go one way and stoney goes the other- to the bank." Everyone goes to the bank in my opinion. We have to because our methods have upper limits of operation and we have to sweep accounts to pick up idle money and take it elsewhere. That is the nature of trading. There are a spectrum of standards and I feel what the market offers is to the right of all others as scales usually go. The artifical limitations people impose on reality comes from things like what you suggest is your reality. It is not intellectualy demanding to get to where you got and stay. There is no test of intellectual demands as a criteria for getting into a given niche. Why should there be? I feel people come equipped to use their intellects productively no matter what the intellectual prowess may be. If they so chose to do some work intellectually, then they can reap those rewards. Intellectual work is accomplished by reasoning primarily. It is not work to recite. Reciting is just enumeration of of knowledge content. To think critically and do intellectual work on what the huge pools of capital represent and how they are tapped and extracted continually is where it is at. Reasoning out just how to see what is going on goes way way past "some idea of". It is a deep search and research of continally being able to take away from anyone else all they are giving to the markets. It has nothing to do with arbitrage and in the imbalances found in the markets. It only deals with the flow of money from one place to another in the present. At some point a trader gets to recognize that the market goes to where its path has not been blocked. Only the people in the market count. The minority rules and they are, concurrently, mistaken. When others are shown this during real trading with real money in real time, they get to see for the first time, what is going on in the markets. To be able to be in a trading room and see every nickel offered continually taken out of the market as time passes is not an easy task. I heard this week that there are some stories floating around the CME. Two kinds of people came to the trading room mentioned above. One group went through a change of intellectual state as a consequence of critical thinking. The other group there had taken the trip previously and on many occasions of confirmations. There are two consideraations, intellectually. Why did you decide to not take the trip intellectually and instead become a picker? And why did I take the trip, intellectually to get the the pragmatic place of extracting the available capital the market offers all of the time? This is not a right or wrong thing. Around the same time, you threw toy building blocks out the window and I taught grad student architects to design Montesorri schools by commuting to their uni periodically. Any trader can decide how he is going to go about making money. There is a spectrum of opportunities. You chose convention and it's orthodoxy. I chose to look at what is there and take what is offered because it is there to take. We do occasional demos and they really shake up the troops.
enough? if your not careful.. the superior intellect will come up with too many ways why "it can't work" i speak from experience mine always tries to keep me in my place, tries to keep me down (for some unknown reason) but i'm on to it now heh i'm on my way now
Superior intellect - is that enough? No. Is superior intellect better than inferior intellect? Of course, in most things. A better question is, how stupid can one person be? All the time? Frequently? Or just enough to always get in the way of making you a killer do-it-on-your-own success story? It is how you engage your intelligence and if you want to engage the intelligence you have, when you come to Opportunity. Lets look at the process for Opportunity. What is the first question? Where can I make the most money? And better still, where can I, with no intellectual or legal barriers to my entry? Choose such a place with big money trees. Thus when you latch on to the idea of financial markets, namely the stock market and the futures markets, you, yes YOU, have come to a fabled place of big money trees. Believe it or not, as stupid or as smart as you may be, you looked for and found or merely stumbled into this place of big money trees. It is an orchard in a fable. And you have arrived. You have done good to arrive. Congratulations. This is the first step. You have taken it. Arrival at Opportunity. The orchard of big money trees. And you need only a small or modest amount of capital. Is this still a fable? Yes. Why? Because many shall arrive but only few may partake of the rich fruits of success. A fortune in money.
The most fertile land on earth, if not properly cultivated, will yield nothing but the most useless of weeds.