If anyone is serious about raising capital for their product--- start by attending these types of events: http://network.managedfunds.org/2012/ This is how the real money is networked. surf
Yes, there are multiple venues like this. The key test is who will be there, in terms of accredited investor $$ in the room. Attending the swankiest events is like having skyscraper office digs with floor to ceiling windows. Cool if you can swing it, but by no means necessary (and a wasteful expense too early in the game). Also, re, "real money," as in shades of discussion previous, I would argue that money is money, e.g. five million in AUM gathered from 10 individual accredited investors is no less "real" than 5MM from a single institutional (and in fact may well be more stable, and negotiated on superior terms).
Trading Wisdom 13: Growing Wise Beyond Your Years "One of the advantages of trading the way I do â being a long-term investor, short-term trader, individual stock selector, market timer, sector analyst - is that I have made so many decisions and mistakes that it has made me wise beyond my years as an investor." - Michael Steinhardt, Market Wizards JS Comment: What steps have you taken to become "wise beyond your years" as a market participant? Do you habitually record and analyze your mistakes, so as to extract maximum tuition value? Do you add to your cumulative repertoire of wisdom, knowledge and experience each year, or repeat the same year over and over? Buy Market Wizards on Amazon Get Trading Wisdom via e-mail
I have yet to meet a hedge fund manager or commodity trading advisor who places much gravitas in all of these standard platitudes regurgitated from the much cited and published "masters". I am not suggesting that they would disagree with any of it - my impression is that their performance and accomplishments came from their own sweat equity and intelligence and competence in terms of reading and understanding market behavior and market price action, and of course very rational position management. My point being that I'm not seeing the stuff being floated here in this thread sitting front and center around on desktops or coffee tables or prominently stacked eye level in a nice bookcase. I mean, I'll spy a copy of "Modeling Financial Time Series with S-Plus" by Zivot and Wang - but no Jack Schwager or Edwin LeFevre or Jesse Livermore or Mark Douglas. I think that there is a mighty wide difference between stating the obvious and providing substantive and actionable intelligence.
Well of course success came from their own sweat equity, intelligence, competence etcetera. Where else would it come from? As for platitudes etcetera... to each his own. Some people like trading books, others don't. Those who see no value in revisiting old wisdom for a few minutes each day can self-select out and not pay attention to this thread. I personally started this project because I get a lot out of these old tomes. I enjoy going back over the texts. I like the mental thought processes they stir up, the old connections they dust off. Like a professional basketball player shooting baskets in the gym, remembering the John-Wooden-style fundamentals. I intend to become one of the greatest traders of my generation. Someone has to take the mantle from the current crop of greats, who are mostly at or beyond retirement age. Is it about the money? No. It's about the game. I love the game, and so I look for every edge I can find. And that is why I love the old books, and new ones too. I love going over this stuff, even after being immersed in markets for 15 years, because my passion for trading is insatiable. And because I know the extra edge it can bring me. That little extra edge, that extra sharpening of the razor blade, can compound into a major difference. Not to mention that, with some of the newer books and ideas -- and even with some of the older ones -- there is the potential to come across an insight, methodological innovation, or psychology adjustment shift that doesn't just incrementally improve performance, it radically enhances performance. Sometimes you just aren't "ready" for a breakthrough until a later time, after you've worked on a batch of other things. I've gotten major "a-ha!" moments from books on the second or third go-round, that I totally missed on the first. So yeah, some see platitudes and boring bullshit. Which is fine. Others will see great value, and perhaps extract that value on their way to making millions. Or tens or hundreds of millions, or even billions. Follow your own path, seek out what has worth to you, and who gives a fuck about what's said from the side the road. p.s. Never read Zivot and Wang - but I'm sure that, when the time comes, I can hire a guy to explain it to me.
i love reading books... everything from mechanical stuff that is the nitty griddy math of things.. to philosphical things like "fooled by randomness" and everyone loves the romance of Livermoores life... you can gain so many insights from traders lives... I don't buy plasticky stuff.. anything under the genera "trade and make millions" is a fucking scam.. i like your ambition.. i hope to beat this game into the ground.. a crack a few hundred million out of it.. and i'll love to have said.. i started out with a 30k account..
Fuck you. I wouldn't go on a quant thread and shit on the guy because he isn't knowledgeable as to the deeper workings of macroeconomic theory. There are generalists and specialists, visionaries and number crunchers; as a rule the latter generally end up working for the former.
Trading Wisdom 14: Slow Adjustment, Dramatic Result "Although beliefs tend to be driven by fundamentals, people and markets are very slow to fully incorporate macro information, and when they do the results can be overly dramatic. The uncertain nature of the economic future and our flawed attempts to understand it are a permanent source of market mispricing. The economy is not easily predictable, but the reactions of policy makers and the persistent errors in human expectations are. The natural extension of Keynes' beauty contest is that animal spirits are not irrational and because they are not irrational they can be anticipated. To illustrate this idea let's imagine there are two states of the world, and although each is quite reasonable, one is more likely than the other. Unfortunately, the human brain is not wired to understand probability very well. We are particularly bad at understanding low probability events, which we tend to think of as either inevitable or impossible. Therefore, a very small change in the underlying fundamental probability can sometimes cause wild swings in sentiment because the potential outcome went from impossible to inevitable, whereas the underlying fundamentals did not move substantially. Such shifts in sentiment cause markets to move much more frequently and violently than shifts in fundamentals do." - 'The Philosopher,' Invisible Hands: Hedge Funds Off the Record JS Comment: What are the implications of markets being 'slow to fully incorporate macro information,' and 'overly dramatic' when they do so? Can you think of examples where a tipping point sentiment shift led to a dramatic price action shift? What type of trade structures might work best for anticipating such? Buy Invisible Hands: Hedge Funds Off the Record on Amazon Get Trading Wisdom via e-mail
About books... this is a good quote.. my antilibrary ââ¬ÅThe writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with ââ¬ÅWow! Signore, professore dottore Eco, what a library you have ! How many of these books have you read?ââ¬Â and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you donââ¬â¢t know as your financial means, mortgage rates and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menancingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.ââ¬Â ââ¬â¢ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable