Luck be a Lady

Sounds like the 5 minute version of Taleb's book "Fooled by Randomness". I hadn't really given much thought to the subject until reading that book, but now it colors a lot of my thinking about money management.
 
I believe that most traders are lucky. Anyone by can by luck make incredible gains in a period of two years. There are som many trying this game.

Istarted trading back in 1992. I made about 500% in my first two years (I did about 40 trades). Unfortunately, i thought i was a genius. All my friends wanted to hand me their money.

I lost more or less everything the next year. I realized I was just lucky.

Several of my friends traded fulltime in 1999- 2002 and made close to a million a year. They are not trading anymore. When the market changed, they couldn'tmake money. They were lucky as well.

There's a jewish saying: You don't need intelligence to have luck, but you do need luck to have intelligence."

BTW, I think Talebs book is very good, an eyeopener for most people.
 
I need to read that Taleb book. At least, I like the title.

When I say that the stock market is a casino, and that trading is the same as gambling, people react negatively. What they don't understand about gambling, is that if you apply your mind to it, gambling is all about increasing your odds of winning by planning out all the possible outcomes, and creating a strategy to cover them as much as possible. Strategy overpowers luck. (So, in this context, perhaps you do need intelligence to have "luck")

Winning strategy in the stock market needs to apply the same casino principles to the stock market.
 
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