The miltary base where they do the data processing for counterterrorism is just down the road. (In AZ) Its a soft touch for the guys in the know. I thought that easy WWII analog stuff would get the better of you two......LOL.... Even the Nike I and Ajax used quadratics for the missile and target intersection. Cross over...... Trading is done to optimize the money velocity of making money. I am getting more and more acquainted with why you guys have never seen the markets. A chart of a 3 beta stock often doesn't have retraces. But why would you hold it if it isn't performing on the lower positive slope retrace. Watch the pinwheels if anyone does the snippets. I really liked how DH rejected the 1000% a year from beginners. he must really be raking it in at 20 to 80% a year with consistency too. LOL....
At the risk of stretching the analogy too far, if one is possessing of special skills or some other advantage which greatly increase your odds of making it in trading/decrease the odds of failure, the whole point is that these special factors effectively decrease the "volatility" of your career decision. The investment equivalent would be to look at a notoriously volatile sector or industry and select individual issues with some special advantage over the herd, initiating positions when the whole market or sector is being sold indiscriminately. The lesson seems to be less about 'embracing volatility' and more about the importance of looking for opportunities in places others have dismissed as barren.
Whatever you say, dear... As long as you don't try to operate heavy machinery everything is going to be just fine.
trading sucessfully is easy......not giving in to human weaknesses (greed, fear, loss of focus, boredom, envy, jealousy, lazyness) is the hard part.
Yep agreed 100%. Some of the best funds are over subscribed 10 fold. It's only the poor ones where they lose 50% of their clients every eyar that struggle. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "If you build it, they (with the money) will come". "You'll need to beat them away with a baseball bat".
Except for the chicken and egg aspect... embracing volatility may also increase the odds of developing survival skills. Take the pattern in which a great many successful traders fail early on, for example, by either losing a large part of their stakes or blowing up outright. In surviving, the lessons from these smaller scale failures paved the way for later success. The same could be said of entrepreneurs who failed repeatedly, then built great companies on the back of what they learned. And the same could be said of a volatile investment, under the right circumstances. The prize of post-crisis seasoning and knowledge may be worth the volatile swings endured for the company / organization in question. So the notion, "go out and risk failure on a size level that won't kill you - you could learn from it" is a way to evolve via embracing (and surviving) volatile experiences with attendant lessons intact. One could say it is the embodiment of "trial by fire" if the fire ignites new survival patterns and insights. I think Brown's real lesson may be that volatility, while generally perceived as a negative, can have embedded evolutionary payoffs that are not necessarily attainable through safer, low-volatility routes.
I'm not sure this is true. Trading successfully may involve extensive training and a lot of consistent hard work, independent of emotional discipline and motivational control. And this is somewhat an oversimplification of things. There is no magical attracting force.
I can see this, to a degree, but a word of caution is warranted I believe. How many of these "failures" happened at the expense of others, with the culprit walking away scot-free? And are lessons from such failures all that valuable? Case in point, John Meriwether...
I'm not sure Meriwether ever actually learned anything. Also, in making the decision to embrace volatility, evolutionary rewards are not guaranteed. Like making the decision to go off to war - you could come back with the nous of a battle-hardened commander, or you could come back in a casket. (Though of course, when the risk is financial one does not face the prospect of death, merely discomfort.)