Quote from stonedinvestor:
For change you take an action that includes two efforts:
Taking profits, and rentering the market on the right side.
How intellectually demanding is all of this?
The "DO'ing" is not intellectually demanding. everyone agrees on this.
There is no real demand being made, intellectually, to have operational skills at all times.
No one who posted so far has made the intellectual trip.
>> How intellectually demanding? To re(e)nter the market you need some idea of what to buy.
The is no "some idea of" in DO'ing buying. The lists are automated and the amount of capital flowing from profit taking and re entering is optimized. Last week, we all saw ININ a day or two before the price movement that was so rewarding. There is one long time between when a stock hits the list and when you take the trade before price moves.
It is like a clock telling anyone what time it is. there is no intellectual demand.
That's where stockpicking comes in and when the mythical big thinkers with their binders filled with theories go one way and stoney goes the other- to the bank.
This "either or" think you do is interesting. Sort of like "good guys bad guys" stuff, apparently.
It's almost like Steenbarger coaching Greenspoon to do better at trading 6,000,000 contracts to make 2,500,000 dollars a year. The running of 24,000 contracts in 60 trades a day of 400 cars each. Obviously, there is no intellectual demand there at all. It is operating like a fighter pilot they agree.
I wouldn't know because I trade using sports memory on automatic. It is just an extraction process for me.
On the other hand, what is it like to use intellegence and critical thinking to make money?
Leon wasn't interested in that, he just wanted to know who can make money in the markets and he found out well equipped people can do that and others can too.
Just about everyone can make money in the markets.
The ancillary questions about doing it well are just as interesting too.
To do it well, you just extract what is available all the time. There is no intellectual demand made of a person to do that. Being operational is not a big deal.
The big gap in that the market offers it and people do not take it is not primarily related to operations per se. People do quite well what they think they should be doing. They operate with what they HAVE to operate. These people express satisfaction in how they operate.
In fact, they express how others operate in terms of their operations as setting the standard for the comparison.
I prefer using the market's offerings as the standard instead.
You differ and say: "when the mythical big thinkers with their binders filled with theories go one way and stoney goes the other- to the bank."
Everyone goes to the bank in my opinion. We have to because our methods have upper limits of operation and we have to sweep accounts to pick up idle money and take it elsewhere. That is the nature of trading.
There are a spectrum of standards and I feel what the market offers is to the right of all others as scales usually go.
The artifical limitations people impose on reality comes from things like what you suggest is your reality. It is not intellectualy demanding to get to where you got and stay. There is no test of intellectual demands as a criteria for getting into a given niche. Why should there be?
I feel people come equipped to use their intellects productively no matter what the intellectual prowess may be.
If they so chose to do some work intellectually, then they can reap those rewards.
Intellectual work is accomplished by reasoning primarily. It is not work to recite. Reciting is just enumeration of of knowledge content.
To think critically and do intellectual work on what the huge pools of capital represent and how they are tapped and extracted continually is where it is at.
Reasoning out just how to see what is going on goes way way past "some idea of". It is a deep search and research of continally being able to take away from anyone else all they are giving to the markets. It has nothing to do with arbitrage and in the imbalances found in the markets. It only deals with the flow of money from one place to another in the present.
At some point a trader gets to recognize that the market goes to where its path has not been blocked. Only the people in the market count. The minority rules and they are, concurrently, mistaken.
When others are shown this during real trading with real money in real time, they get to see for the first time, what is going on in the markets.
To be able to be in a trading room and see every nickel offered continually taken out of the market as time passes is not an easy task. I heard this week that there are some stories floating around the CME.
Two kinds of people came to the trading room mentioned above. One group went through a change of intellectual state as a consequence of critical thinking. The other group there had taken the trip previously and on many occasions of confirmations.
There are two consideraations, intellectually.
Why did you decide to not take the trip intellectually and instead become a picker? And why did I take the trip, intellectually to get the the pragmatic place of extracting the available capital the market offers all of the time?
This is not a right or wrong thing.
Around the same time, you threw toy building blocks out the window and I taught grad student architects to design Montesorri schools by commuting to their uni periodically.
Any trader can decide how he is going to go about making money. There is a spectrum of opportunities.
You chose convention and it's orthodoxy.
I chose to look at what is there and take what is offered because it is there to take.
We do occasional demos and they really shake up the troops.