Visually Compelling TA

Garry Kasparov says "success and satisfaction can lead to bad habits that will impede greater success and satisfaction" as he discusses Question Success in chapter eleven of How Life Imitates Chess. Success leads to an illusion that everything is fine which leads to complacency which can lead to failure. Fighting complacency requires continuous questioning of the status quo. How do we as investors inspire ourselves to keep pushing for better results? Drawing from Kasparov three thoughts are:

1. Competition. Sports endeavors have an obvious competitive component but when it comes to personal real money investing you rarely have competitors per se. But you can develop a set of benchmarks for self-competition. Percent gain over time, percent of winning trades, percent gain over various indices, can all become metrics by which you can compete with yourself. SLO and other available on-line stock picking contests are certainly enjoyable (and instructive) competitions but translating the activity to real life investing can be elusive.

2. Continually raising your own goals and standards. The aforementioned metric can be used as a framework for pushing for better results. Did you beat the S&P 500 index by 2% last month? Strive for 3% this quarter! Is your winning trade ratio 55/45? Strive for 60/40!

3. See value in other methods. In a recent Bob Dylan documentary I was struck by his propensity to adapt or try-on the style of whatever musician he himself was enjoying at the time. But even so most would agree he has a distinct musical style that is his alone. The MSN Strategy Lab, SLO blogs, InvestorPlace, and Marketocracy are all venues for observing the methods of others. It is interesting to see many divergent methods practiced by successful investors. It is hard to really dismiss any - even those that are not my style. After all, as Ken Kam says, "no system, style or strategy works in every market."

Comments: View Comments |  Saturday July 12, 2008