Daily Speculations The Web Site of Victor Niederhoffer & Laurel Kenner Dedicated to the scientific method, free markets, deflating ballyhoo, creating value, and laughter;  a forum for us to use our meager abilities to make the world of specinvestments a better place.

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Department of Connections

Back to the Beginnings in Tennis, Chess

05/31/2004
Victor Niederhoffer:

Guess what: I'm back to when I was a baby. I am now playing with my left hand as a backhand. In other words, I have two forehands: one-handed forehand with the right and one-handed forehand with the left on the backhand side. That's how I started out when I was five, because I was too good at hustling and nobody would play unless I played lefty. The same thing is now true in markets. I started out with the stock futures and moved to gold, but that didn't work so I moved to bonds, then foreign exchange, then options. Now, I'm back to futures. A human is born crying and gasping for air, and he dies the same way.  

05/31/2004
Grandmaster Nigel Davies:

It often seems that our childhood preferences are the most natural, and we go back to them later in life. I'm also going to go to the forehand side and start playing 1.e4 again as White. The problem is that they recently they started trying to take White's c-pawn by meeting all the openings involving queenside expansion (d2-d4 and c2-c4) with ...d7-d5, ...c7-c6 and then ...d5xc4.

This is too complex and theoretical for me to keep up with, especially in my new  incarnation. And it's also good to change now and then for its own sake as the unfamiliar positions stimulate creativity. Larsen, for example, used to trade in his openings every year or two so as to avoid Pavlovian thinking in his games and experience a kind of rebirth.