'Idiot-Savant' Traders?

'Idiot-Savant' Test: www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html How'd you score?

  • Under 12 (Diplomat)

    Votes: 20 7.1%
  • 13-25 (Pretty normal)

    Votes: 118 42.0%
  • 26-31 (Almost there, but not quite)

    Votes: 84 29.9%
  • 32-40 (Looks like I might be one...)

    Votes: 45 16.0%
  • 41-50 (Rain Man)

    Votes: 14 5.0%

  • Total voters
    281
Quote from MrsSavant:



No... your not a nut job...I have learned to live with it for 19 years...

Sometimes Electric is a perfectionist where other times he is sloppy...like a box of chocolates in which he is the nut...But I love the man and my life would have never been so interesting without him.

Wifey


Whatever dude...
 
Quote from Rearden Metal:

'Idiot-Savant' is no longer the politically correct term, of course. "Asperger's" is the modern name for the phenomenon, where a person can be so unusually talented at specific numbers-based tasks like code breaking, software engineering, and perhaps... trading?

After seeing one INTP after another in the Myers-Briggs threads, I wouldn't be surprised if many of these traders are actually full blown keepers of The Gift and The Curse

Think you might be one yourself? Take this test and find out!

You shouldn't make fun of mentally sick people. It isn't nice and it is very cruel. Making fun of people who are "retarded", "idiot-savant", or have "aspergers syndrome" is being very mean and the topic does not belong on a stock trading forum.
 
Quote from glenjohnson:

You shouldn't make fun of mentally sick people. It isn't nice and it is very cruel. Making fun of people who are "retarded", "idiot-savant", or have "aspergers syndrome" is being very mean and the topic does not belong on a stock trading forum.

You hang around with some Asperger syndrome crank for awhile and see how you like it. Eventually you have two choices, shoot them or make fun of them. We have one at work actually, we have had his going away party every Friday for years, if he ever quits [and they never do] we will let him come along.
 
Quote from maxpi:

You hang around with some Asperger syndrome crank for awhile and see how you like it. Eventually you have two choices, shoot them or make fun of them. We have one at work actually, we have had his going away party every Friday for years, if he ever quits [and they never do] we will let him come along.

lmao
 
Quote from MrsSavant:

No... your not a nut job...I have learned to live with it for 19 years...

Electric has come back from walks and I have had to work on spreadsheets with him..sometimes exceeding many hours..I will not tell you how many as you would not believe me. Electric does not need as much sleep as I.

At 4:00 am this morning, we were cleaning the top of the refrigerator and vacuuming the air conditioner intake...

When Electric drives, he goes into deep deep thought...sometimes it takes hours for him to find his way. One time I sent him out to the grocery store and I did not see him for hours...He came back all excited about something in one of the spreadsheets from months ago...he photographs them in his mind somehow. AND GET THIS...he forgot to go to the store.

In one of his dreams he saw an abondened house in the mountains...do you know how many hours we have driven to search for it...?????

One time he told me to get the phone and it didn't even ring...then it rang with the wrong number...now this is just weird crap...I phoned Art Bell, but could not get through.

Sometimes Electric is a perfectionist where other times he is sloppy...like a box of chocolates in which he is the nut...But
I love the man and my life would have never been so interesting without him.

Wifey

Strangely i find myself remembering the days of my mom yelling at my dad for the same things. Cleaning when "normal" people should be sleeping or just forgetting stuff that they have talked about. Or my favorite, calling the house for no reason just to say what are you doing "nothing dad" ok talk to you later.
I always thought he was weird and i didn't think i was like him until i realized that my girlfriend was saying the same things to me as my mom did to him.

I do all the same things as electric does; deep thoughts about trading when alone, constant spreadsheeting, charting, and sometimes since i trade forex sitting just watching charts for hours on end.
The worst part is trying to get my girlfriend to get used to it, 4 years now and she still gets furious.

As far as self diagnosis goes, i wouldn't say theres anything strange or weird about us, we function just fine. Have been diagnosed with add and so has my dad but i think the medication craze for that is garbage. He was able to obtain an mba and a masters in electrical engineering without it. I'm more focused on trading than academics.
 
Quote from glenjohnson:

You shouldn't make fun of mentally sick people. It isn't nice and it is very cruel. Making fun of people who are "retarded", "idiot-savant", or have "aspergers syndrome" is being very mean and the topic does not belong on a stock trading forum.

I didn't make fun of mentally sick people.

"Idiot-Savant" is (or at least, was) a real term.
Look for yourself:

http://www.yourdictionary.com/ahd/i/i0023100.html
 
The thought never occured to me until I started trading the markets earlier this year. (Talk about instant fixation ...)

I now have a database of roughly 60 million records. I run batch jobs nightly which update data across 1500 stocks, three differnt data feeds, looking to add a fourth. Inet, Yahoo, Ashkon, ...

Weekly, Daily, 60 Minute, 30 Minute, 15 Minute, 5 Minute intervals across 5,12,16,24, 52 period increments...

All the popular indicators calculated and queriable using sql across umpteen diffrernt tables. Java/Oracle/Xml..

I think I've finally arrived at a system with a positive expectancy after months of non-stop work. I've arrived at a method to find highly-volatile stocks stuck in a wide (3-5 day) trading range, with a high-level of predicatability. (ie; stock is moving with regularity between peaks/troughs for the past 10-15-30 days.)

I've basically shunned the outside world for months until I can make this work ... God, I hope I can make this work ...

I don't think this makes me an "idiot-savant", but I sure as hell feel like one ! ... the idiot part anyways.
 
Quote from Rearden Metal:

I didn't make fun of mentally sick people.

"Idiot-Savant" is (or at least, was) a real term.
Look for yourself:

http://www.yourdictionary.com/ahd/i/i0023100.html

You are making fun of people who are mentally sick and who do not function in society like other people do. "idiot savant" is another form of "retarded". How would you like it if you had a child or a brother or sister that was not like other children or other grown up people, and was mentally disabled? Would you make fun of "retarded", "idiot savant", "aspergers", "ADHD" then? I don't think you should be making fun of people that are less fortunate than yourself. One day your own children or grandchildren might be born retarded and then your own jokes about them won't be so funny. Don't make fun of people who are born different or mentally sick(retarded, aspergers, adhd, idiot-savant).
 
Right on!! I say if you are idiot enough to do that much work then you should go on and be a savant while you are at it :) Just kidding, please don't be offended, well mild offense is probably warranted, sorry.

I went through a period like that years ago. Eventually I leaned to obsess far, far less and just relax and put in a little time as often as possible reading and studying charts. The knowledge gains come faster without the obsessing it seems. As far as the Asperger's type of brain structure goes I find that people have some control over it actually. If I work at having my two brain hemispheres talking to each other I find that I can have a complete overhaul of consciousness and get a good sense of realities around me. Some of it may be a learned behavior actually. I grew up with one, maybe two of them in the household and I may have learned it as much as inherited it.

Now if I could get the serotonin levels up where they belong.... I'm grabbing some 5-HTP and cutting back on the caffeine as the next step in trying to cure depression naturally and get my brain in the kind of shape it needs to be in.
 
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