Trader Of The Week Quotes

Making money in the markets is tough. The brilliant trader and investor Bernard Baruch put it well when he said, “If you are ready to give up everything else and study the whole history and background of the market and all principal companies whose stocks are on the board as carefully as a medical student studies anatomy—if you can do all that and in addition you have the cool nerves of a gambler, the sixth sense of a clairvoyant and the courage of a lion, you have a ghost of a chance.” In retrospect, the mistakes that led to my crash seemed embarrassingly obvious. First, I had been wildly overconfident and had let my emotions get the better of me. I learned (again) that no matter how much I knew and how hard I worked, I could never be certain enough to proclaim things like what I’d said on Wall $ treet Week: “There’ll be no soft landing. I can say that with absolute certainty, because I know how markets work.” I am still shocked and embarrassed by how arrogant I was. Second, I again saw the value of studying history. What had happened, after all, was “another one of those.” I should have realized that debts denominated in one’s own currency can be successfully restructured with the government’s help, and that when central banks simultaneously provide stimulus (as they did in March 1932, at the low point of the Great Depression, and as they did again in 1982), inflation and deflation can be balanced against each other. As in 1971, I had failed to recognize the lessons of history. Realizing that led me to try to make sense of all movements in all major economies and markets going back a hundred years and to come up with carefully tested decision-making principles that are timeless and universal. Third, I was reminded of how difficult it is to time markets. My long-term estimates of equilibrium levels were not reliable enough to bet on; too many things could happen between the time I placed my bets and the time (if ever) that my estimates were reached. Staring at these failings, I realized that if I was going to move forward without a high likelihood of getting whacked again, I would have to look at myself objectively and change—starting by learning a better way of handling the natural aggressiveness I’ve always shown in going after what I wanted. Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have an ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you approach that choice? Take a moment to think about it because it is the sort of choice that, in one form or another, we all have to make.

She turned her head and stared at this sudden stranger in her bed. She wanted to deny that he had ever spoken such words, wanted to pretend that they did not reflect his feelings but had been said out of some kind of spite. Coldness welled up within her now. Spite words or true, did it not come to the same thing? All these years, she had been married to a fantasy, not a real person. She imagined a husband to herself, a tender, loving, laughing man who only stayed away so many months because he must, and she put Kyle’s face on her creation. Easy enough to ignore or excuse a few flaws or even a dozen when he made on of his brief stops at home. She had always been able to pretend he was tired, that the voyage had been both long and hard, that they were simply getting re-adjusted to one another. Despite all the things he had said and done in the weeks since her father’s death, she had continued to treat and react to him as if he were the man she had created in her mind. The truth was that he had never been the romantic figure her fancies had made him. He was just a man, like any other man. No. He was stupider than most. He was stupid enough to think she had to obey him. Even when she knew better, even when he was not around to oppose her. Realizing this was like opening her eyes to the sun’s rising. How had it never occurred to her before?

DOES HARVARD MAKE YOU SMARTER? Swimmer’s Body Illusion As essayist and trader Nassim Taleb resolved to do something about the stubborn extra pounds he’d be carrying, he contemplated taking up various sports. However, joggers seemed scrawny and unhappy, and bodybuilders looked broad and stupid, and tennis players? Oh, so upper-middle class! Swimmers, though, appealed to him with their well-built, streamlined bodies. He decided to sign up at his local swimming pool and to train hard twice a week. A short while later, he realised that he had succumbed to an illusion. Professional swimmers don’t have perfect bodies because they train extensively. Rather, they are good swimmers because of their physiques. How their bodies are designed is a factor for selection and not the result of their activities. Similarly, female models advertise cosmetics and thus, many female consumers believe that these products make you beautiful. But it is not the cosmetics that make these women model-like. Quite simply, the models are born attractive and only for this reason are they candidates for cosmetics advertising. As with the swimmers’ bodies, beauty is a factor for selection and not the result. Whenever we confuse selection factors with results, we fall prey to what Taleb calls the swimmer’s body illusion. Without this illusion, half of advertising campaigns would not work

Many aspects of the modern financial system are designed to give an impression of overwhelming urgency: the endless ‘news’ feeds, the constantly changing screens of traders, the office lights blazing late into the night, the young analysts who find themselves required to work thirty hours at a stretch. But very little that happens in the finance sector has genuine need for this constant appearance of excitement and activity. Only its most boring part—the payments system—is an essential utility on whose continuous functioning the modern economy depends. No terrible consequence would follow if the stock market closed for a week (as it did in the wake of 9/11)—or longer, or if a merger were delayed or large investment project postponed for a few weeks, or if an initial public offering happened next month rather than this. The millisecond improvement in data transmission between New York and Chicago has no significance whatever outside the absurd world of computers trading with each other. The tight coupling is simply unnecessary: the perpetual flow of ‘information’ part of a game that traders play which has no wider relevance, the excessive hours worked by many employees a tournament in which individuals compete to display their alpha qualities in return for large prizes. The traditional bank manager’s culture of long lunches and afternoons on the golf course may have yielded more useful information about business than the Bloomberg terminal. Lehman

The Dakota 38 refers to thirty-eight Dakota men who were executed by hanging, under orders from President Abraham Lincoln. To date, this is the largest “legal” mass execution in US history. The hanging took place on December 26, 1862—the day after Christmas. This was the same week that President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. --- These amended and broken treaties are often referred to as the Minnesota Treaties. The word Minnesota comes from mni, which means water; and sota, which means turbid. Synonyms for turbid include muddy, unclear, cloudy, confused, and smoky. Everything is in the language we use. -- Without money, store credit, or rights to hunt beyond their ten-mile tract of land, Dakota people began to starve. The Dakota people were starving. The Dakota people starved. In the preceding sentence, the word “starved” does not need italics for emphasis. -- Dakota warriors organized, struck out, and killed settlers and traders. This revolt is called the Sioux Uprising. Eventually, the US Cavalry came to Mnisota to confront the Uprising. More than one thousand Dakota people were sent to prison. As already mentioned,“Real” poems do not “really” require words. --- I am a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship, I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.

Cohen continued to struggle with his own well-being. Even though he had achieved his life’s dream of running his own firm, he was still unhappy, and he had become dependent on a psychiatrist named Ari Kiev to help him manage his moods. In addition to treating depression, Kiev’s other area of expertise was success and how to achieve it. He had worked as a psychiatrist and coach with Olympic basketball players and rowers trying to improve their performance and overcome their fear of failure. His background building athletic champions appealed to Cohen’s unrelenting need to dominate in every transaction he entered into, and he started asking Kiev to spend entire days at SAC’s offices, tending to his staff. Kiev was tall, with a bushy mustache and a portly midsection, and he would often appear silently at a trader’s side and ask him how he was feeling. Sometimes the trader would be so startled to see Kiev there he’d practically jump out of his seat. Cohen asked Kiev to give motivational speeches to his employees, to help them get over their anxieties about losing money. Basically, Kiev was there to teach them to be ruthless. Once a week, after the market closed, Cohen’s traders would gather in a conference room and Kiev would lead them through group therapy sessions focused on how to make them more comfortable with risk. Kiev had them talk about their trades and try to understand why some had gone well and others hadn’t. “Are you really motivated to make as much money as you can? This guy’s going to help you become a real killer at it,” was how one skeptical staff member remembered Kiev being pitched to them. Kiev’s work with Olympians had led him to believe that the thing that blocked most people was fear. You might have two investors with the same amount of money: One was prepared to buy 250,000 shares of a stock they liked, while the other wasn’t. Why? Kiev believed that the reluctance was a form of anxiety—and that it could be overcome with proper treatment. Kiev would ask the traders to close their eyes and visualize themselves making trades and generating profits. “Surrendering to the moment” and “speaking the truth” were some of his favorite phrases. “Why weren’t you bigger in the trades that worked? What did you do right?” he’d ask. “Being preoccupied with not losing interferes with winning,” he would say. “Trading not to lose is not a good strategy. You need to trade to win.” Many of the traders hated the group therapy sessions. Some considered Kiev a fraud. “Ari was very aggressive,” said one. “He liked money.” Patricia, Cohen’s first wife, was suspicious of Kiev’s motives and believed that he was using his sessions with Cohen to find stock tips. From Kiev’s perspective, he found the perfect client in Cohen, a patient with unlimited resources who could pay enormous fees and whose reputation as one of the best traders on Wall Street could help Kiev realize his own goal of becoming a bestselling author. Being able to say that you were the

The symposium was a closed-doors, synod-style assembly of people who would never have mixed otherwise. My first surprise was to discover that the military people there thought, behaved, and acted like philosophers—far more so than the philosophers we will see splitting hairs in their weekly colloquium in Part Three. They thought out of the box, like traders, except much better and without fear of introspection. An assistant secretary of defence was among us, but had I not known his profession I would have thought he was a practitioner of skeptical empiricism. Even an engineering investigator who had examined the cause of a space shuttle explosion was thoughtful and open-minded. I came out of the meeting realising that only military people deal with randomness with genuine, introspective intellectual honesty—unlike academics and corporate executives using other people's money. This does not show in war movies, where they are usually portrayed as war-hungry autocrats. The people in front of me were not the people who initiate wars. Indeed, for many, the successful defence policy is the one that manages to eliminate potential dangers without war, such as the strategy of bankrupting the Russians through the escalation in defence spending. When I expressed my amazement to Laurence, another finance person who was sitting next to me, he told me that the military collected more genuine intellects and risk thinkers than most if not all other professions. Defence people wanted to understand the epistemology of risk.

If we had days and weeks I could begin to tell you the story of the subtle knife, and the Guild of the Torre degli Angeli, and the whole sorry history of this corrupt and careless world. The Specters are our fault, our fault alone. They came because my predecessors, alchemists, philosophers, men of learning, were making an inquiry into the deepest nature of things. They became curious about the bonds that held the smallest particles of matter together. You know what I mean by a bond? Something that binds? “Well, this was a mercantile city. A city of traders and bankers. We thought we knew about bonds. We thought a bond was something negotiable, something that could be bought and sold and exchanged and converted…. But about these bonds, we were wrong. We undid them, and we let the Specters in.” Will asked, “Where do the Specters come from? Why was the window left open under those trees, the one we first came in through? Are there other windows in the world?” “Where the Specters come from is a mystery—from another world, from the darkness of space…who knows? What matters is that they are here, and they have destroyed us. Are there other windows into this world? Yes, a few, because sometimes a knife bearer might be careless or forgetful, without time to stop and close as he should. And the window you came through, under the hornbeam trees…I left that open myself, in a moment of unforgivable foolishness. There is a man I am afraid of, and I thought to tempt him through and into the city, where he would fall victim to the Specters. But I think that he is too clever for a trick like that. He wants the knife. Please, never let him get it.

The tyro knows nothing, and everybody, including himself, knows it. But the next, or second, grade thinks he knows a great deal and makes others feel that way too. He is the experienced sucker, who has studied not the market itself but a few remarks about the market made by a still higher grade of suckers. The second-grade sucker knows how to keep from losing his money in some of the ways that get the raw beginner. It is this semisucker rather than the 100 per cent article who is the real all-the-year-round support of the commission houses. He lasts about three and a half years on an average, as compared with a single season of from three to thirty weeks, which is the usual Wall Street life of a first offender. It is naturally the semisucker who is always quoting the famous trading aphorisms and the various rules of the game. He knows all the don'ts that ever fell from the oracular lips of the old stagers excepting the principal one, which is: Don't be a sucker! This semisucker is the type that thinks he has cut his wisdom teeth because he loves to buy on declines. He waits for them. He measures his bargains by the number of points it has sold off from the top. In big bull markets the plain unadulterated sucker, utterly ignorant of rules and precedents, buys blindly because he hopes blindly. He makes most of the money until one of the healthy reactions takes it away from him at one fell swoop. But the Careful Mike sucker does what I did when I thought I was playing the game intelligently according to the intelligence of others. I knew I needed to change my bucket-shop methods and I thought I was solving my problem with any change, particularly one that assayed high gold values according to the experienced traders among the customers.

Then the bitterness came to darken his soul. So, too, had Cress seemed fair and bright, but it had still been a city of greedy, grasping, men. He turned his back on it and slid down to sit flat on the deck. “It’s all a trick,” he observed. “All a rotten trick men play on themselves. They get together and they create this beautiful thing and then they stand back and say, ‘See, we have souls and insight and holiness and joy. We put it all in this building so we don’t have to bother with it in our everyday lives. We can live as stupidly and brutally as we wish, and to stamp down any inclination to spirituality or mysticism that we see in our neighbors or ourselves. Having set it in stone, we don’t have to bother with it anymore.’ It’s a trick men play on themselves. Just one more way we cheat ourselves.” Vivacia spoke softly. If he had been standing, he might not have heard the words. But he was sitting, his palms flat against her deck, and so they rang through his soul. “Perhaps men are a trick Sa played on this world. ‘All other things I shall make vast and beautiful and true to themselves,’ perhaps he said. ‘Men alone shall be capable of being petty and vicious and self-destructive. And for my cruelest trick of all, I shall put among them men capable of seeing these things in themselves.’ Do you suppose that is what Sa did?” “That is blasphemy,” Wintrow said fervently. “Is it? Then how do you explain it? All the ugliness and viciousness that is the province of humanity, whence comes it?” “Not from Sa. From ignorance of Sa. From separation from Sa. Time and again I have seen children brought to the monastery, boys and girls with no hint as to why they are there. Angry and afraid, many of them, at being sent forth from their homes at such a tender age. Within weeks, they blossom, they open to Ada’s light and glory. In every single child, there is at least a spark of it. Not all stay; some are sent home, not all are suited to a life of service. But all of them are suited to being creations of light and thought and love. All of them.

If we had days and weeks I could begin to tell you the story of the subtle knife, and the Guild of the Torre degli Angeli, and the whole sorry history of this corrupt and careless world. The Specters are our fault, our fault alone. They came because my predecessors, alchemists, philosophers, men of learning, were making an inquiry into the deepest nature of things. They became curious about the bonds that held the smallest particles of matter together. You know what I mean by a bond? Something that binds? “Well, this was a mercantile city. A city of traders and bankers. We thought we knew about bonds. We thought a bond was something negotiable, something that could be bought and sold and exchanged and converted…. But about these bonds, we were wrong. We undid them, and we let the Specters in.” Will asked, “Where do the Specters come from? Why was the window left open under those trees, the one we first came in through? Are there other windows in the world?” “Where the Specters come from is a mystery—from another world, from the darkness of space…who knows? What matters is that they are here, and they have destroyed us. Are there other windows into this world? Yes, a few, because sometimes a knife bearer might be careless or forgetful, without time to stop and close as he should. And the window you came through, under the hornbeam trees…I left that open myself, in a moment of unforgivable foolishness. There is a man I am afraid of, and I thought to tempt him through and into the city, where he would fall victim to the Specters. But I think that he is too clever for a trick like that. He wants the knife. Please, never let him get it.” Will and Lyra shared a glance. “Well,” the old man finished, spreading his hands, “all I can do is hand the knife on to you and show you how to use it, which I have done, and tell you what the rules of the Guild used to be, before it decayed. First, never open without closing. Second, never let anyone else use the knife. It is yours alone. Third, never use it for a base purpose. Fourth, keep it secret. If there are other rules, I have forgotten them, and if I’ve forgotten them it is because they don’t matter. You have the knife. You are the bearer. You should not be a child. But our world is crumbling, and the mark of the bearer is unmistakable. I don’t even know your name. Now go.

By now, though, it had been a steep learning curve, he was fairly well versed on the basics of how clearing worked: When a customer bought shares in a stock on Robinhood — say, GameStop — at a specific price, the order was first sent to Robinhood's in-house clearing brokerage, who in turn bundled the trade to a market maker for execution. The trade was then brought to a clearinghouse, who oversaw the trade all the way to the settlement. During this time period, the trade itself needed to be 'insured' against anything that might go wrong, such as some sort of systemic collapse or a default by either party — although in reality, in regulated markets, this seemed extremely unlikely. While the customer's money was temporarily put aside, essentially in an untouchable safe, for the two days it took for the clearing agency to verify that both parties were able to provide what they had agreed upon — the brokerage house, Robinhood — had to insure the deal with a deposit; money of its own, separate from the money that the customer had provided, that could be used to guarantee the value of the trade. In financial parlance, this 'collateral' was known as VAR — or value at risk. For a single trade of a simple asset, it would have been relatively easy to know how much the brokerage would need to deposit to insure the situation; the risk of something going wrong would be small, and the total value would be simple to calculate. If GME was trading at $400 a share and a customer wanted ten shares, there was $4000 at risk, plus or minus some nominal amount due to minute vagaries in market fluctuations during the two-day period before settlement. In such a simple situation, Robinhood might be asked to put up $4000 and change — in addition to the $4000 of the customer's buy order, which remained locked in the safe. The deposit requirement calculation grew more complicated as layers were added onto the trading situation. A single trade had low inherent risk; multiplied to millions of trades, the risk profile began to change. The more volatile the stock — in price and/or volume — the riskier a buy or sell became. Of course, the NSCC did not make these calculations by hand; they used sophisticated algorithms to digest the numerous inputs coming in from the trade — type of equity, volume, current volatility, where it fit into a brokerage's portfolio as a whole — and spit out a 'recommendation' of what sort of deposit would protect the trade. And this process was entirely automated; the brokerage house would continually run its trading activity through the federal clearing system and would receive its updated deposit requirements as often as every fifteen minutes while the market was open. Premarket during a trading week, that number would come in at 5:11 a.m. East Coast time, usually right as Jim, in Orlando, was finishing his morning coffee. Robinhood would then have until 10:00 a.m. to satisfy the deposit requirement for the upcoming day of trading — or risk being in default, which could lead to an immediate shutdown of all operations. Usually, the deposit requirement was tied closely to the actual dollars being 'spent' on the trades; a near equal number of buys and sells in a brokerage house's trading profile lowered its overall risk, and though volatility was common, especially in the past half-decade, even a two-day settlement period came with an acceptable level of confidence that nobody would fail to deliver on their trades.

Usually royals believed that going down to shop or eat in the lower part of the city was beneath their station. That’s why Talis and Mara almost always went there to escape prying eyes. Especially now, since if they were seen together, it would mean trouble for the both of them.   As they strolled down the freshly-washed cobblestone street, Mara whispered to Talis that her mother was still upset and they had to be careful.  “I told her it was my fault, but she still feels you were partially to blame. I feel awful, Talis.” Mara studied him, her eyes filled with apprehension. “You warned me not to go after that boar. I should have listened to you. I’m sorry.” “It’s alright. You’re safe, that’s all that matters to me.” Mara reached out and took his hand, eyes warm and tender. They continued walking together and took the trader’s way to Fiskar’s Market. Around the upper shops, down an alleyway stacked with crates, inside a warehouse door, past workers loading crates, until they reached the dark warehouse room that led to a corridor winding around and down to a lift.  The workers averted their eyes when they used the lift, as if they thought it wasn’t their business to notice a few royal kids stalking around in the building. Talis and Mara hopped on the lift. She grabbed his hand as the lift jolted, starting their descent several hundred feet down into the darkness.  Talis always felt a thrill from the descent as if uncertain whether they would ever arrive at the bottom. It was pitch black without a source of light. Mara cuddled close to Talis, her arms snaking around his waist, the soft exhalations of her breath landing on his neck. He felt uncomfortable and his heart raced. Her small fingers felt along his chest and she wormed her way even closer and started to whisper something in his ear.  The lift suddenly jolted as they reached the bottom. What was she going to say? She jumped out of the lift and dashed down the passageway until they reached Shade’s Gate next to the upper part of Fiskar’s Market. Talis frowned and wondered if he ever would understand the minds of girls. Today was Hanare, the sacred day of the Goddess Nacrea, eighth day of the week—a day free from study and work. At least for the royals. In Fiskar’s Market, most commoners still toiled, preparing for Magare, the first day of the week and market day. But still, children chased chickens lazily through the market stalls and old men played Chano, staring at the chipped granite pieces as if waiting for a mystery to unfold.

Since they are in the hands of a few manipulators, the stocks will rarely show any pullbacks. They will run up for a week or a month without a stop and once many traders get interested, they will reverse course. A

I use two other methods to determine price targeting. The first involves a technique known as swing objectives. The principle of a swing objective is that markets tend to advance or decline in legs that are of approximately equal distance.

As a general rule, the minimum move following the completion of a chart pattern should be equal to the height of the pattern itself,

Continuation patterns offer the opportunity to both pyramid an initial position and to tighten up the protective stops on the initial position.

Reversal patterns offer the opportunity to avoid riding the initial position back to the starting gates (or what I call a popcorn or round-trip move).

A continuation pattern during the course of a major trend allows me to advance my initial protective stop in the direction of a profitable trade. A breakout of a continuation chart will be accompanied by its own Last Day Rule. I may elect to move the protective stop from the initial Last Day Rule to the new Last Day Rule created by the continuation pattern.

It is also possible that a pattern implying a reversal of trend could develop prior to the attainment of an expected target. I may elect to move my protective stop in relationship to a pattern that carries trend implications counter to my position.

Actually, because of fluctuations in the business, employees often alternate between four-day and six-day weeks (38.5 hours to 57.5 hours). This generates a lot of three-day weekends, which is quite popular with the troops.

less than a week after arriving in Moscow I was able to hire three good people: Clive, a British junior trader and researcher; Svetlana, a secretary who spoke perfect English; and Alexei, an experienced driver who spoke only Russian.

My first surprise was to discover that the military people there thought, behaved, and acted like philosophers—far more so than the philosophers we will see splitting hairs in their weekly colloquium in Part Three. They thought out of the box, like traders, except much better and without fear of introspection.

When a young employee gasped at his blue language, Simons flashed a grin. “I know—that is an impressive rate!” A few times a week, Marilyn came by to visit, usually with their baby, Nicholas. Other times, Barbara checked in on her ex-husband. Other employees’ spouses and children also wandered around the office. Each afternoon, the team met for tea in the library, where Simons, Baum, and others discussed the latest news and debated the direction of the economy. Simons also hosted staffers on his yacht, The Lord Jim, docked in nearby Port Jefferson. Most days, Simons sat in his office, wearing jeans and a golf shirt, staring at his computer screen, developing new trades—reading the news and predicting where markets were going, like most everyone else. When he was especially engrossed in thought, Simons would hold a cigarette in one hand and chew on his cheek. Baum, in a smaller, nearby office, trading his own account, favored raggedy sweaters, wrinkled trousers, and worn Hush Puppies shoes. To compensate for his worsening eyesight, he hunched close to his computer, trying to ignore the smoke wafting through the office from Simons’s cigarettes. Their traditional trading approach was going so well that, when the boutique next door closed, Simons rented the space and punched through the adjoining wall. The new space was filled with offices for new hires, including an economist and others who provided expert intelligence and made their own trades, helping to boost returns. At the same time, Simons was developing a new passion: backing promising technology companies, including an electronic dictionary company called Franklin Electronic Publishers, which developed the first hand-held computer. In 1982, Simons changed Monemetrics’ name to Renaissance Technologies Corporation, reflecting his developing interest in these upstart companies. Simons came to see himself as a venture capitalist as much as a trader. He spent much of the week working in an office in New York City, where he interacted with his hedge fund’s investors while also dealing with his tech companies. Simons also took time to care for his children, one of whom needed extra attention. Paul, Simons’s second child with Barbara, had been born with a rare hereditary condition called ectodermal dysplasia. Paul’s skin, hair, and sweat glands didn’t develop properly, he was short for his age, and his teeth were few and misshapen. To cope with the resulting insecurities, Paul asked his parents to buy him stylish and popular clothing in the hopes of fitting in with his grade-school peers. Paul’s challenges weighed on Simons, who sometimes drove Paul to Trenton, New Jersey, where a pediatric dentist made cosmetic improvements to Paul’s teeth. Later, a New York dentist fitted Paul with a complete set of implants, improving his self-esteem. Baum was fine with Simons working from the New York office, dealing with his outside investments, and tending to family matters. Baum didn’t need much help. He was making so much money trading various currencies using intuition and instinct that pursuing a systematic, “quantitative” style of trading seemed a waste of

1. Don’t buy stocks that are hitting 52-week lows. We have already discussed this point, but it bears repeating, simply because so many new traders lose a lot of money trying to catch the proverbial “falling knife.” In spite of what everyone will tell you, you are almost always much better off buying a stock that is hitting 52-week highs than one hitting 52-week lows. Has a company that you own just reported some really bad news? If so, remember that there is never just one cockroach. Bad news comes in clusters. Many investors recently learned this the hard way with General Electric, which just kept reporting one bad thing after another, causing the stock to crash from 30 to 7. There is no such thing as a “safe stock.” Even a blue chip stock can go down a lot if it loses its competitive advantage or the company makes bad decisions. A cascade of bad news can often cause a stock to trend down or gap down repeatedly. If you own a stock that does this, it is often better to get out and wait a few months (or years) to reenter. Again, there is never just one cockroach. Never buy a stock after you have seen the first cockroach. When a stock goes down a lot, it can affect the company's fundamentals as well. Employee and management morale will deteriorate, the best employees may leave the company, and it may become more difficult for the company to raise money by selling shares or issuing debt. Conversely, when a stock goes up a lot, it can improve the company's fundamentals. Employee and management morale will be high, everyone at the company will want to work harder, it will be easier to recruit new talent, and it will become easier for the company to raise money by issuing stock or debt. If you stick to stocks that are trading above their 200-day moving averages, or that are hitting 52-week highs, you will do much better than trying to catch falling knives.

At the same time, a single-issue current 10 Year Note can get very Special, and no one likes to pay the Special Repo rates. Thus, the dilemma. Traders want to be short the current issue and buy it back at the reopening auction. However, if too many shorts roll into the current issue, it will trade extremely Special. It’s a game of cat and mouse. “Did the shorts roll forward?” When all the stars are aligned, there’s a deep short base in the 10 year sector, and a majority of the shorts roll into the new issue. That’s when a severe shortage occurs. Most 10 Year Notes won’t trade extremely Special, but when one does, it can be big! The graph below illustrates the 1.125% 2/15/2031 as a current 10 Year Note. During the week before the first reopening settled, it averaged below -3.00%, and even traded as low as -4.25% one day.

Damien arrived home after his usual Saturday afternoon visit to the Botolph Museum. He lay down on the living room couch before supper. Just as he was about to slip into a doze, a key rattled in the front door. He sat up, alert and eager, sleepiness gone, “What did the doctor say?” “More tests,” his wife Adita replied. “And more waiting,” Damien sighed as she stooped to embrace him. He lay back down afterwards. “We’ll get through it.” He had a few minutes before supper and went to the third floor study of the house they rented from his father when they moved to Botolph. Old Professor Higginbotham was now living in Florida, Damien ran a hand along a half-shelf of books his father wrote or edited about Prabashtan, an ancient mountainous country in Central Asia. His great-grandfather, a merchant trader, had many contacts there. Adita’s parents left the country for Canada after a war started. These family connections, along with the fact that he and Adita had spent a two week holiday there earlier in the year, inspired Damien to visit the Prabashtan galleries at Botolph’s art museum on Saturday afternoons and whenever he felt adrift. The only thing that came of his gallery-haunting so far was a hundred or so unformed notes he meant as a present for Adita that he based on items in the exhibits. He sat at his father’s old desk and wrote another: Winsome Lady Well-proportioned figure at rest. Leafy fan, lark headdress, A smile that’s fading. Green and ochre, brown. He watched, pleased, Deceived by scenes He imagined taking place In a distant court.

I was once asked in one of those meetings to express my views on the stock market. I stated, not without a modicum of pomp, that I believed that the market would go slightly up over the next week with a high probability. How high? “About 70%.” Clearly, that was a very strong opinion. But then someone interjected,“But, Nassim, you just boasted being short a very large quantity of SP500 futures, making a bet that the market would go down. What made you change your mind?” “I did not change my mind! I have a lot of faith in my bet! [Audience laughing.] As a matter of fact I now feel like selling even more!”The other employees in the room seemed utterly confused. “Are you bullish or are you bearish?” I was asked by the strategist. I replied that I could not understand the words bullish and bearish outside of their purely zoological consideration. Just as with events A and B in the preceding example, my opinion was that the market was more likely to go up (“I would be bullish”), but that it was preferable to short it (“I would be bearish”), because, in the event of its going down, it could go down a lot. Suddenly, the few traders in the room understood my opinion and started voicing similar opinions. And I was not forced to come back to the following discussion.

Most of all I hate the rich old ladies. Each one conceals some vileness. Lucky traders of their cunts. They lucked out. I hate them either with or without their puny dogs. And I hate them in the stores too. And when they eat. Even young women are disgusting when they eat. Usually they're voracious and greedy, especially after a few weeks of having sex with you, when they're certain that you are theirs and they can relax. This is when you see them the way they are. Poor boy, you imagined she was a princess, an angel. She gobbles the pieces of meat like a python, grunts over the brown sauce, wraps her lips in thick red wine, hisses voluptuously with the mixture of pineapple and coconut – she copulates with the food.

stocks or other investments over a period of time that can range from 1 day to a few weeks or more. In this book,

How do you know all of this?” Siobhan asked. “Some, from our whisperers that still circulate among the human kingdoms. Some, from the traders that pass through. And some…” She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was tighter. “We had visitors, around four months ago. A group of humans seeking refuge after their home was destroyed. We had never accepted so many humans into our walls at once before, but none of us could bear to turn them away. They were here for two weeks before I realized…their intentions were not what they claimed.

The firm’s conservative culture continued into the early 1970s, when it still did not employ a single salesman or trader. In 1974 Business Week called Morgan Stanley “still the most prestigious of the investment banking houses.” The firm had built a sturdy relationship-oriented business, based on its impeccable reputation as a straight shooter. As esteemed money manager Sanford Bernstein once said, “If Morgan Stanley is in it, that means we’re kosher.” By the 1970s Morgan Stanley, white shoes and all, had become the rabbi of investment banking.

As I described in the “Uncorked!” chapter, the economic background in 1970 was turning grim, and sales were weakening. I was concerned. And then, once again, Scientific American came to the rescue. Each September that wonderful magazine devotes its entire issue to a single subject. In September 1970, it was the biosphere, a term I’d never seen before. It was the first time that a major scientific journal had addressed the problem of the environment. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, of course, had been serialized in the New Yorker in the late sixties, so the danger to the biosphere wasn’t exactly news, but it could be considered alarmist news. The prestige of Scientific American, however, carried weight. In fact, it knocked me out. I Suffered a Conversion on the Road to Damascus Within weeks, I subscribed to The Whole Earth Catalog, all the Rodale publications like Organic Gardening and Farming, Mother Earth, and a bunch I no longer remember. I was especially impressed by Francis Moore Lappé’s book Diet for a Small Planet. I joined the board of Pasadena Planned Parenthood, where I served for six years. Paul Ehrlich surfaced with his dismal, and proved utterly wrong, predictions. But hey! This guy was from Stanford! You had to believe him! And in 1972 all this was given statistical veracity by Jay Forrester of MIT, in the Club of Rome forecasts, which proved to be even further off the mark. But I bought them at the time. Bob Hanson, the manager of the new Trader Joe’s in Santa Ana, which was off to a slow start, was a health food nut. He kept bugging me to try “health foods.” After I’d read Scientific American, I was on board! Just how eating health foods would save the biosphere was never clear in my mind, or, in my opinion, in the mind of anyone else, except the 100 percent Luddites who wanted to return to some lifestyle approximating the Stone Age. After all, the motto of the Whole Earth Catalog was “access to tools,” hardly Luddite.

The advent of the Apple Macintosh in 1985 made a tremendous improvement in publishing the Fearless Flyer. Using a piece of software called Adobe® PageMaker, we were able to dis-intermediate most of the printer’s function and produce camera-ready copy entirely in our office. Pat St. John, whom Alice recruited for us in 1986 as head of advertising, made a great contribution here, cutting lead time by almost a week. Anyone who has been in advertising can appreciate the nerve-racking problems of products that are advertised but didn’t arrive in time to cover the advertising. I would have had a coronary without the Macintosh, which had made it possible to expand the Fearless Flyer from twelve pages to twenty. This created all the more space to advertise products, but it also potentiated the coronary potential, and the almost-as-bad requirement for still more cartoons! Please remember: Trader Joe’s was a low-overhead operation with all of us wearing several hats. Sure, some of the above could have been done pre-Macintosh, but at vastly greater expense.

We fundamentally changed the point of view of the business from customer-oriented to buyer-oriented. I put our buyers in charge of the company. From 1958 through 1976, we tried to carry what the customers asked for, given the limits of our small stores and other operational parameters. Each store manager had great latitude in what was carried and from what supplier it was ordered. There was very little central distribution except for Trader Joe’s labeled California wines or imports. Each store probably had access to ten thousand stock keeping units (SKUs), of which about three thousand were actually stocked in any given week. By the time I left in 1989, we were down to a band of 1,100 to 1,500 SKUs, all of which were delivered through a central distribution system. The managers no longer had any buying discretion and there were no “DSDs,” or direct store deliveries. And along the way not only did we drop a lot of products that our customers would have liked us to sell, even at not-outstanding prices, but we stopped cashing checks in excess of the amount of purchase, we stopped all full-case discounts, and we persistently shortened the hours. We violated every received-wisdom of retailing except one: we delivered great value, which is where most retailers fail.

Whatever. Anyway, why did you interrupt me? I’m practicing for a gig in Zombie Bane in a few days. Leave me alone.” “Fine,” I said, “and thanks for the warning.” “What do you mean?” “We’ll be sure to avoid Zombie Bane for the next couple weeks.

Conrad spent six months working for a cargo company in the EIC in 1890, three weeks of it aboard a steamship traveling up river to today’s Kisangani. There is no mention of rubber in the novel because Conrad was there five years before rubber cultivation began. Kurtz is an ivory trader. So whatever sources Conrad was using when he began work on Heart of Darkness in 1898, his personal experiences would at most have added some color and context. Hochschild will have none of it, insisting that Conrad “saw the beginnings of the frenzy of plunder and death” which he then “recorded” in Heart of Darkness. The brutalities by whites in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now were inspired by the novel, Hochschild avers, because Conrad “had seen it all, a century earlier, in the Congo.” In another example of creative chronology, Hochschild cites a quotation that he believes was the inspiration for Kurtz’s famous scrawl, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The quotation was made public for the first time during a Belgian legislative debate in 1906. Whatever its authenticity, it could not be a source for a book published in 1902.

Wash trading, as it was called, would have been illegal on a regulated US exchange, though the sight of it did not bother Sam all that much. He thought it was sort of funny just how brazenly many of the Asian exchanges did it. In the summer of 2019, FTX created and published a daily analysis of the activity on other exchanges. It estimated that 80 percent or more of the volume on the second- and third-tier exchanges, and 30 percent of the volume on the top few exchanges, was fake. Soon after FTX published its first analysis of crypto trading activity, one exchange called and said, We’re firing our wash trading team. Give us a week and the volumes will be real. The top exchanges expressed relief, and gratitude for the analysis, as, until then, lots of people assumed that far more than 30 percent of their volume was fake. Sam was less surprised that Binance was wash trading than by how badly they were doing it. “They were doing a B-minus job at market manipulation,” he said. One Binance bot would make a wide market in Bitcoin futures, and another Binance bot would enter and lift its high offer. If, to keep the numbers simple, the fair value of bitcoin was $100, the first Binance bot would insert a bid at $98 and an offer at $102. No normal trader would trade against either—why sell for $98 or buy for $102 on Binance what you could buy or sell on some other exchange for $100? But then, at regular and predictable intervals, the second Binance bot would enter the market and buy at $102. It looked as if a trade had occurred between two different parties, but it hadn’t. It was simply Binance buying from Binance.

On November 29, 1883, only two days after his ship arrived in New York and he had boarded the overnight train for Washington, Sanford was received by President Arthur at the White House. Leopold’s great work of civilization, he told the president and everyone else he met in Washington, was much like the generous work the United States itself had done in Liberia, where, starting in 1820, freed American slaves had moved to what soon became an independent African country. This was a shrewdly chosen example, since it had not been the United States government that had resettled ex-slaves in Liberia, but a private society like Leopold’s International Association of the Congo. Like all the actors in Leopold’s highly professional cast, Sanford relied on just the right props. He claimed, for example, that Leopold’s treaties with Congo chiefs were similar to those which the Puritan clergyman Roger Williams, famed for his belief in Indian rights, had made in Rhode Island in the 1600s—and Sanford just happened to have copies of those treaties with him. Furthermore, in his letter to President Arthur, Leopold promised that American citizens would be free to buy land in the Congo and that American goods would be free of customs duties there. In support of these promises, Sanford had with him a sample copy of one of Leopold’s treaties with a Congo chief. The copy, however, had been altered in Brussels to omit all mention of the monopoly on trade ceded to Leopold, an alteration that deceived not only Arthur but also Sanford, an ardent free-trader who wanted the Congo open to American businessmen like himself. In Washington, Sanford claimed that Leopold’s civilizing influence would counter the practices of the dreadful “Arab” slave-traders. And weren’t these “independent States” under the association’s generous protection really a sort of United States of the Congo? Not to mention that, as Sanford wrote to Secretary of State Frederick Frelinghuysen (Stanley was still vigorously passing himself off as born and bred in the United States), the Congo “was discovered by an American.” Only a week after Sanford arrived in Washington, the president cheerfully incorporated into his annual message to Congress, only slightly rewritten, text that Sanford had drafted for him about Leopold’s high-minded work in the Congo: The rich and populous valley of the Kongo is being opened by a society called the International African Association, of which the King of the Belgians is the president. . . . Large tracts of territory have been ceded to the Association by native chiefs, roads have been opened, steamboats have been placed on the river and the nuclei of states established . . . under one flag which offers freedom to commerce and prohibits the slave trade. The objects of the society are philanthropic. It does not aim at permanent political control, but seeks the neutrality of the valley.

Instead of working/studying from home every day, pick two to three days to do it from a café. -          Try and pick a café that’s nearby an upscale shopping area. Take a walk through it after work or on your lunch break. -          Skip out on the lower quality grocery store and try out Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s once or twice a week to get your groceries. -          Instead of reading a book or listening to a podcast from home, go take a walk

Usually royals believed that going down to shop or eat in the lower part of the city was beneath their station. That’s why Talis and Mara almost always went there to escape prying eyes. Especially now, since if they were seen together, it would mean trouble for the both of them.   As they strolled down the freshly-washed cobblestone street, Mara whispered to Talis that her mother was still upset and they had to be careful.  “I told her it was my fault, but she still feels you were partially to blame. I feel awful, Talis.” Mara studied him, her eyes filled with apprehension. “You warned me not to go after that boar. I should have listened to you. I’m sorry.” “It’s alright. You’re safe, that’s all that matters to me.” Mara reached out and took his hand, eyes warm and tender. They continued walking together and took the trader’s way to Fiskar’s Market. Around the upper shops, down an alleyway stacked with crates, inside a warehouse door, past workers loading crates, until they reached the dark warehouse room that led to a corridor winding around and down to a lift.  The workers averted their eyes when they used the lift, as if they thought it wasn’t their business to notice a few royal kids stalking around in the building. Talis and Mara hopped on the lift. She grabbed his hand as the lift jolted, starting their descent several hundred feet down into the darkness.  Talis always felt a thrill from the descent as if uncertain whether they would ever arrive at the bottom. It was pitch black without a source of light. Mara cuddled close to Talis, her arms snaking around his waist, the soft exhalations of her breath landing on his neck. He felt uncomfortable and his heart raced. Her small fingers felt along his chest and she wormed her way even closer and started to whisper something in his ear.  The lift suddenly jolted as they reached the bottom. What was she going to say? She jumped out of the lift and dashed down the passageway until they reached Shade’s Gate next to the upper part of Fiskar’s Market. Talis frowned and wondered if he ever would understand the minds of girls. Today was Hanare, the sacred day of the Goddess Nacrea, eighth day of the week—a day free from study and work. At least for the royals. In Fiskar’s Market, most commoners still toiled, preparing for Magare, the first day of the week and market day. But still, children chased chickens lazily through the market stalls and old men played Chano, staring at the chipped granite pieces as if waiting for a mystery to unfold. 

Usually royals believed that going down to shop or eat in the lower part of the city was beneath their station. That’s why Talis and Mara almost always went there to escape prying eyes. Especially now, since if they were seen together, it would mean trouble for the both of them. As they strolled down the freshly-washed cobblestone street, Mara whispered to Talis that her mother was still upset and they had to be careful. “I told her it was my fault, but she still feels you were partially to blame. I feel awful, Talis.” Mara studied him, her eyes filled with apprehension. “You warned me not to go after that boar. I should have listened to you. I’m sorry.” “It’s alright. You’re safe, that’s all that matters to me.” Mara reached out and took his hand, eyes warm and tender. They continued walking together and took the trader’s way to Fiskar’s Market. Around the upper shops, down an alleyway stacked with crates, inside a warehouse door, past workers loading crates, until they reached the dark warehouse room that led to a corridor winding around and down to a lift. The workers averted their eyes when they used the lift, as if they thought it wasn’t their business to notice a few royal kids stalking around in the building. Talis and Mara hopped on the lift. She grabbed his hand as the lift jolted, starting their descent several hundred feet down into the darkness. Talis always felt a thrill from the descent as if uncertain whether they would ever arrive at the bottom. It was pitch black without a source of light. Mara cuddled close to Talis, her arms snaking around his waist, the soft exhalations of her breath landing on his neck. He felt uncomfortable and his heart raced. Her small fingers felt along his chest and she wormed her way even closer and started to whisper something in his ear. The lift suddenly jolted as they reached the bottom. What was she going to say? She jumped out of the lift and dashed down the passageway until they reached Shade’s Gate next to the upper part of Fiskar’s Market. Talis frowned and wondered if he ever would understand the minds of girls. Today was Hanare, the sacred day of the Goddess Nacrea, eighth day of the week—a day free from study and work. At least for the royals. In Fiskar’s Market, most commoners still toiled, preparing for Magare, the first day of the week and market day. But still, children chased chickens lazily through the market stalls and old men played Chano, staring at the chipped granite pieces as if waiting for a mystery to unfold.

Usually royals believed that going down to shop or eat in the lower part of the city was beneath their station. That’s why Talis and Mara almost always went there to escape prying eyes. Especially now, since if they were seen together, it would mean trouble for the both of them. As they strolled down the freshly-washed cobblestone street, Mara whispered to Talis that her mother was still upset and they had to be careful. “I told her it was my fault, but she still feels you were partially to blame. I feel awful, Talis.” Mara studied him, her eyes filled with apprehension. “You warned me not to go after that boar. I should have listened to you. I’m sorry.” “It’s alright. You’re safe, that’s all that matters to me.” Mara reached out and took his hand, eyes warm and tender. They continued walking together and took the trader’s way to Fiskar’s Market. Around the upper shops, down an alleyway stacked with crates, inside a warehouse door, past workers loading crates, until they reached the dark warehouse room that led to a corridor winding around and down to a lift. The workers averted their eyes when they used the lift, as if they thought it wasn’t their business to notice a few royal kids stalking around in the building. Talis and Mara hopped on the lift. She grabbed his hand as the lift jolted, starting their descent several hundred feet down into the darkness. Talis always felt a thrill from the descent as if uncertain whether they would ever arrive at the bottom. It was pitch black without a source of light. Mara cuddled close to Talis, her arms snaking around his waist, the soft exhalations of her breath landing on his neck. He felt uncomfortable and his heart raced. Her small fingers felt along his chest and she wormed her way even closer and started to whisper something in his ear. The lift suddenly jolted as they reached the bottom. What was she going to say? She jumped out of the lift and dashed down the passageway until they reached Shade’s Gate next to the upper part of Fiskar’s Market. Talis frowned and wondered if he ever would understand the minds of girls. Today was Hanare, the sacred day of the Goddess Nacrea, eighth day of the week—a day free from study and work. At least for the royals. In Fiskar’s Market, most commoners still toiled, preparing for Magare, the first day of the week and market day. But still, children chased chickens lazily through the market stalls and old men played Chano, staring at the chipped granite pieces as if waiting for a mystery to unfold. Old women

Usually royals believed that going down to shop or eat in the lower part of the city was beneath their station. That’s why Talis and Mara almost always went there to escape prying eyes. Especially now, since if they were seen together, it would mean trouble for the both of them. As they strolled down the freshly-washed cobblestone street, Mara whispered to Talis that her mother was still upset and they had to be careful. “I told her it was my fault, but she still feels you were partially to blame. I feel awful, Talis.” Mara studied him, her eyes filled with apprehension. “You warned me not to go after that boar. I should have listened to you. I’m sorry.” “It’s alright. You’re safe, that’s all that matters to me.” Mara reached out and took his hand, eyes warm and tender. They continued walking together and took the trader’s way to Fiskar’s Market. Around the upper shops, down an alleyway stacked with crates, inside a warehouse door, past workers loading crates, until they reached the dark warehouse room that led to a corridor winding around and down to a lift. The workers averted their eyes when they used the lift, as if they thought it wasn’t their business to notice a few royal kids stalking around in the building. Talis and Mara hopped on the lift. She grabbed his hand as the lift jolted, starting their descent several hundred feet down into the darkness. Talis always felt a thrill from the descent as if uncertain whether they would ever arrive at the bottom. It was pitch black without a source of light. Mara cuddled close to Talis, her arms snaking around his waist, the soft exhalations of her breath landing on his neck. He felt uncomfortable and his heart raced. Her small fingers felt along his chest and she wormed her way even closer and started to whisper something in his ear. The lift suddenly jolted as they reached the bottom. What was she going to say? She jumped out of the lift and dashed down the passageway until they reached Shade’s Gate next to the upper part of Fiskar’s Market. Talis frowned and wondered if he ever would understand the minds of girls. Today was Hanare, the sacred day of the Goddess Nacrea, eighth day of the week—a day free from study and work. At least for the royals. In Fiskar’s Market, most commoners still toiled, preparing for Magare, the first day of the week and market day. But still, children chased chickens lazily through the market stalls and old men played Chano, staring at the chipped granite pieces as if waiting for a mystery to unfold.

Lemon Pepper Cod 2 cod fillets (I prefer the thick end of the fillet) 1 teaspoon extra virgin olive oil Zest and juice of 1 lemon Lemon pepper seasoning (Trader Joe’s makes a good one) Dry the cod fillets and rub them with olive oil. Top the fillets with the lemon zest and sprinkle with lemon pepper seasoning as desired. Let the fillets rest in the refrigerator for 15 minutes and then grill for 3 minutes. Top with fresh lemon juice. Note: This is one of the world’s easiest dinners! Two great side options: grilled asparagus and kale salad.

For a week she had waited for him to get in touch. Waited for a note, a knock at the door. Waited for him to do something. Anything. And the simple truth was that he hadn’t. He hadn’t lifted a single finger to see her. As far as he was concerned she might have died of vomiting. Or fallen off her window ledge and broken her neck. Or been carried off by a white slave trader to Arabia.

I discovered something else, and that is that suckers differ among themselves according to the degree of experience. The tyro knows nothing, and everybody, including himself, knows it. But the next, or second, grade thinks he knows a great deal and makes others feel that way too. He is the experienced sucker, who has studied not the market itself but a few remarks about the market made by a still higher grade of suckers. The second-grade sucker knows how to keep from losing his money in some of the ways that get the raw beginner. It is this semisucker rather than the 100 per cent article who is the real all-the-year-round support of the commission houses. He lasts about three and a half years on an average, as compared with a single season of from three to thirty weeks, which is the usual Wall Street life of a first offender. It is naturally the semisucker who is always quoting the famous trading aphorisms and the various rules of the game. He knows all the don'ts that ever fell from the oracular lips of the old stagers excepting the principal one, which is: Don't be a sucker! This semisucker is the type that thinks he has cut his wisdom teeth because he loves to buy on declines. He waits for them. He measures his bargains by the number of points it has sold off from the top. In big bull markets the plain unadulterated sucker, utterly ignorant of rules and precedents, buys blindly because he hopes blindly. He makes most of the money until one of the healthy reactions takes it away from him at one fell swoop. But the Careful Mike sucker does what I did when I thought I was playing the game intelligently according to the intelligence of others. I knew I needed to change my bucket-shop methods and I thought I was solving my problem with any change, particularly one that assayed high gold values according to the experienced traders among the customers.