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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9/7/04
Department of Connections: Motorcycles and Markets by Craig Maccagno

For the last several days in West Palm Beach on the heels of Hurricane Frances having been without electricity or water, I turned to the bookshelf to reread some favorites and I came across an old motorcycle racing handbook written in the early 80's by Keith Code, well after recently purchasing a new bike it seemed an appropriate read and of course the parallels to the market were rampant, I felt that fellow specs may benefit from the following even if you've never been on a motorcycle, written to be understood hopefully everyone that reads this can come away with something as I did, again all credit to Mr. Code..........

Play the Game Well
Racing on a motorcycle is a tremendously exhilarating and challenging game. It is a game with rules and barriers. There's something to win, something to lose, and a purpose for each individual who plays the game. It demands your attention. The consequences of a major mistake can be severe- severe enough to make the game worth playing well. My overall approach to rider improvement is: To simplify the actions of riding by defining the basics and investigating the decisions you must make to ride well.

What'll it Cost?
Attention, and where you spend it while riding a motorcycle is a key element in how well you will function. Attention has its limits. Each person has a certain amount of it, which varies depending on the individual. You have a fixed amount of attention, just as you have a fixed amount of money. So let us say that you have ten dollars worth of attention. If you spend five dollars of it on one aspect of riding, you now only have five left for all other aspects. Spend nine and you only have one left and so on.

When you first began to ride you probably spent nine dollars of your attention on how to let out the clutch without stalling the bike. Now that you've ridden for years and thousands of miles you likely only spend a nickel or a dime on it. Riders often tell me that some of the common movements like shifting have become "automatic". It's not true. They are simply spending less attention on it. Riding is like that. The more operations you reduce to the cost of a nickel or a dime, the more of your ten dollars of attention is left for the important operations of racing.

You must make literally hundreds of decisions while riding just one lap on the racetrack- especially at top speed. Hundreds! If you understand enough about riding to have correctly decided how to handle 25 of those situations you are probably a fair rider. The things you do not understand are the things that will take up most of your attention. Whenever a situation arises that you do not understand, your attention will become fixed upon it. You often fear a situation when you cannot predict its outcome, and panic costs $9.99-you may even become overdrawn. The course of action you have already decided upon to handle a potential panic situation costs much less and leaves you plenty of attention to sort out your options.

On the positive side, sorting out the actions of riding beforehand buys you the time and freedom to become creative with the activity of riding, just as having lots of cash in your pocket allows you a certain freedom of movement. On the race track, that left over attention allows you to experiment and improve your riding ability.

High performance riding and racing demand not only that you be able to perform the necessary actions, but also that you be able to observe them. Making accurate observations of your performance is the key to being able to improve them. If you know what you have done- you know what can be changed. If you did not observe what you were doing the changes become haphazard and inaccurate. - Taken from "A Twist of the Wrist" by Keith Code