Dec

21

I thought this was a good article:

"Ray Dalio says read Ayn Rand to understand Trump's economics. Here's what that means"

Jeff Watson writes: 

Ayn Rand's "Virtue of Selfishness," contains many nuggets of wisdom IMO. It has roughly influenced the blueprint and road map of my life. A big lesson it taught me, among many other things, was that it is good to put myself first. Here's a copy of it.

Ralph Vince writes: 

I find her books (and I have not read "Virtue of Selfishness") hollow. It speaks of the effects and actions, I find, without the driving force, the motivation (save, except for vague notions of "profit," or "doing something worthwhile," or good, or improving things). It could be that I've missed those things in what of hers I have read. I think, however, it may be because it is an interpretation done by a woman, Rand herself.

By this I mean the following. It is vital that a man find his over-arching purpose in life, and find it before he is thirty, the single, solitary purpose that is the reason he lives his life, his telos.

Yes, taking care of family and other "obligations," and "responsibilities," one must live up to in life must be addressed, but aside from that he must find what he is here to do. His number one priority as a man is to find his purpose in life, his destiny, and pursue it with all he has outside of his responsibilities and obligations. (And it is on this point that modern education fails males, and it is on this point that inner city youths are left, abandoned to life).

Until a man has found this out, he should not commit to something, a job, a marriage, a city, etc. A man's purpose must be something he is crazy passionate about. Yes, a man can know success and/or monetary gain without ever figuring this out, yet it is the discovery of his telos that is where he draws his energy, and his joie de vivre, absent which, he is merely existing, merely a slave. It provides something he can do for the rest of his life, and make a living at. It provides something he would do if he were "retired." This is the ultimate form of success – getting paid to do what he loves to do and never having it feel like work. (This is why people so envy pro athletes, because they have found this at a young age). A man needs this to be happy.

Finding what he is meant to do with his life makes him powerful.

It is my belief women follow an entirely different existential path than this. I do not claim to know what that is, I am merely an outside observer, but it is a fallacy perpetuated by an ideology devoid of terrestrial and important motivations to assume genders are the same or even mirror images of each other - there is an inexplicable mystery involved that an outsider can never know. Rand was such an outsider, and as deeply as her writings resonate on the topics she wrote of, I say they are hollow as they seem to perceive what I have pointed to here as an outsider, which, to the world of males she necessarily was (and, in fairness, her works could never have been written by a man, else they would have, and that provides a unique perspective and beauty to hers).

Oct

19

For the past four years I have tried to reduce the prevalence of all doomsday talk on this site, as I believe it misses the forest for the trees in that the return from stocks is some 5% per year more than bonds (6% + 5% growth rate, versus 4.5%), and I felt that the doomsday arguments were economically nonsensical in that they didn’t take account of the fundamentals of entrepreneurial ability to earn a return and investor willingness to part with money for that return equilibrating economically and empirically at 10% a year, regardless of the backdrop of negatives, usually already discounted, and overwhelmed by numerous positives. I have tried not to allow the this site to be littered, as are so many financial sites, with hateful anecdotes about the weakness or problems in this or that, as I felt that this will miss the main chance, the beautiful woman with the 10000-fold return per century, lighting up the future with a torch in her hand. There is a certain satisfaction today as the Dow trades above 12,000.

Before anyone upbraids me for patting myself on the back, note that I’ve posted 1000 memos, and written two books, discussing the long term drift in stocks and its inevitability over reasonably long periods. I have saved countless individuals from the doomsday scenario so prevalent on other sites, and which could have overwhelmed this site. Why should I not remind others of these long term factors at the dinner party I host, as it should be a cause for mutual celebration? Like most, I have not participated as much as I should have in this long term drift, but I have eschewed the terrible catastrophe of ever being short, and my constant drumming of this message has been a highlight of my productive years, and thank goodness I was able to at least bend a few at this dinner party in that direction or at least against a self destructive alternate.

I N D U   - -   D O W   J O N E S   I N D U S .   A V G

W  10/18    12025.50
T  10/17    11950.02
M  10/16    11980.60

F  10/13    11960.51
T  10/12    11947.70
W  10/11    11852.13
T  10/10    11867.17
M  10/ 9    11857.81

F  10/ 6    11850.21
T  10/ 5    11866.69
W  10/ 4    11850.61
T  10/ 3    11727.34
M  10/ 2    11670.35

Richard Gula adds:

There is no one lonelier in the world of fast money than the lonely bull. AbelandCain has had the public leaning the wrong way for years. Staying positive in this business strains every element of your soul. Keep smiling through the pain of optimism!

James Sogi responds:

The question is: how many have been long the whole bull run since July? The second more important question is how do you capitalize on such bull runs while avoiding May’s bear market?

Prof. Gordon Haave replies:

I am not a full time speculator, although, as I say almost every day “soon” I will be again. I would, however, proffer that the very nature of our good friend Mr. Sogi’s question is at the root of many problems that speculators have. The drive to miss every downturn causes one to miss the upturns. We see this time and again on studies of individual investors, and how they routinely earn 4-5% per year instead of the 10% year offered by the market. Catching the upturns is more important than missing the downturns, simply because there are more of them.

Most of us are trying to do much, much more than “catch the drift”. If one uses leverage to accomplish that, then suddenly avoiding the downturns, or at least the worst of them, is very important if you want to avoid ruin.

But let’s all be clear that to simply catch the market drift, one shouldn’t worry about the downturns at all.

P.S. Here is an example of someone with probably little detailed knowledge of the financial markets, yet caught the drift (money quote: “she liked blue chip stocks”).

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