Quote from FBW:
Jack Hershey,
I hear what you are saying. I am a little surprised to see that there are no contra views at this point. I will begin putting my GPA under the spotlight, thanks guys!!. Keep them coming.
I agreed to receive the financial information and to keep it confidential. It does not influence any part of my method of choosing a trade. I donât think I would have gone this far with my trading listening to other peopleâs trade recommendation or research. I do my own homework.
âMaking money is not staying up at night gambling on anything.â I donât understand nor do I agree with this bold statement.
I do not believe in teaching but I did teach at GA for five years. My orientation is to support learning and it is not in books as a rule. I just required a full class of questions for me to answer daily as a demo on how a person "processes"... "Environmental Math", which I brought to GA from AIZ (in Switzerland) which came from Rosemary Hall in Greenwich, was a Sixth Form financial math class. My other sixth form course FAV was a combined calc II and Physics II. I supported learning a combo of FA and TA and each year a student did trade their way to tuition for next year in college; this is no big deal because they had lots of capital usually and it was part of class to run either paper or cash. Your prep school ed did not go that far in Philly nor is it part of your current courses in any way.
The point of the above is to let you know, I am familiar with with the scholastic level where you presently reside. My affiliation with Wharton was through UCSC (where I ran 2 of the 5 divisions as was considered an Adj Prof at Penn). Wharton has a good tutorial staff. I was used to being in Wharton classrooms and I know how to support learning in that setting. Getting a seat in such a classroom absolutely requires excellence. Get a tutor as your alternative since you have already passed on this option.
There are many people who prevent themselves from being excellent traders. They do it in a variety of ways. One of the themes that I have seen for the past 49 years regarding supporting the learning process of traders is seeing people take something that they have found or have been given and, promptly, they set about "improving" it or think that they are "inventing" something from it. They are doing neither and they are also letting what was in the space pass them by by abrogating the opportunity it presented. This is a triad of conditions in a situation that is lethal because it is being built permanently in the mind and specifically in the memory. As a lens it will remain always as a distorting mechanism.
Your environment is conventional. The orthodoxy associated with it is pervasive in the financial industry. That is not going to change. Being excellent in the orthodox convention is one thing and how your learning is supported in that context is well evident as you look at the system. Bringing the mouse you caught to the classroom will always get recognition and then you get to eat it alone all by yourself. In the classroom and out, it is your job to support the learning of your peers by your excellence and how they come to you for collegual sustanence. I am speaking to you from the simple vantage point of running classrooms or lecturing at a lot of places where it is very hard to get a seat. If you want the current cell phone of a guy from Wharton who was quoted on the 19th of October in the Washington Post on the best pickers, I can could give it to you. But more important, is that you get orientated to getting fully in the groove to make the grade where you are paying tuition.
Lastly: you quote what I said to you and follow up:
âMaking money is not staying up at night gambling on anything.â I donât understand nor do I agree with this bold statement.
for your better understanding I was referring to this:
"I have been live trading retail spot FX for a little over two years and have had marginal positive success. ........... Staying up past 4:00am est. to watch European activities does not mesh well with late AM classes."
I surmize that you are looking at several currencies. I feel that you use a conventional orthodox orientation (Pascal, Fermat, et, al...). It looks like you have an orientation to real time data from a broad market selection. And you have the results to show for it:.. "marginal positive success" combined with dropping one course a semester and going to summer school to compensate.
I see you betting both time and money. You do not. I see you caught in the triad above spending non-recoverable time to "process" realtime data into a self invented winning strategy that has over two years been a "marginal positive success".
I see a net loss of time and a net loss of money. You do not.
In business parlance using MBA lingo "You made a bad bet and lost". You reply that you made a good bet and you won.
Now, I am making a bet with my time and my money. I'm not going to say anything bold to you or anything like that. My bet is placed with the simple idea that at some point you will remember this exchange and I get a payoff out there somewhere but not now. I know that there are no easy bets.
My reading list for the GA course was a zinger; we always had to oversupply at the bookstore.. It included beat the dealer and how to lie with stastics among other things but it also had rock solid other stuff that would last a life time. One GA student* who played basketbal for Princeton then graduated from Wharton sent me a letter on flowery stationary that started with: ..... Now, that we are married and we are doing some planning, we both wanted to do your reading list........
* Coincidentally his class had a fullblown S&P brokerage daily support system supplied free by the S&P eastern regional manager. This was way before PC's etc.