Jun

15

no matter how high they go, most gentlemen don't like stocks. nor do they realize that bonds have to go up to save the banks from marking down their holdings.

10 Qualities of a Modern Gentleman

seems like a good day to review all the reasons that the former president didn't win in 2020. lets start with the big pharma that withheld the announcement that they had an effective vaccine until the day after the election.

Steve Ellison replies:

Marginal voters proverbially vote their pocketbooks, and Mr. Trump had the misfortune to be the incumbent as GDP abruptly contracted by 9%, and unemployment rose to 15% in April 2020.

Vic writes:

yes that's a winner although no evil hand in that. let us not forget the military in their advocacy and demeaning and threats. all the three-letter agencies and the doj. scores of 4-star generals comparing Pres to Mussolini and guaranteeing that they would escort him out of office if he resisted. the professional sports leagues all acting to undermine. Director Wray negating all of Trumps critiques about their bias. another reason for the former golfer to lose was the lineup of all of the Fangs to do whatever they could to do him in.

Gary Boddicker adds:

Constitutionally questionable executive and judicial changes to voting rules in key states, bypassing legislatures and favoring Democrats. “It’s unsafe to vote in person!”

Vic continues:

excellent book for those who like Patrick O'Brian but aren't see salts. none of O'Brian's erudition but author made valiant attempt to research incident.

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

Also: Shantaram: A Novel

a critique of my methods, lifestyle and answer is elicited on twitter. i don't know when exchange took place - i would guess 15 years ago. I would add to my defense that I was much younger then and also I did not take account of ability of market to squeeze you and margin you out. they and the market inexorably get together by an evil hand to manipulate prices and margins so that you will contribute to the big players so that one day they will do you in and then prices will get back to their norm. one solution is to have good credit. Imagine the palindrome having enuf confidence to withstand the Bank of England and all the banks they control to speculate against the Pound successfully.

Vic's twitter feed

Mar

24

Pirate Latitudes, by Michael Crichton. Aubriesque tale of privateers and Spanish Galleons.

As the SPEC list is about books, as well as markets, counting, and barbeque.

William Huggins adds:

single best book on the history of finance that i've come across is William Goetzmann's Money Changes Everything. He's a Yale finance prof with a background in art history and archeology and its shows throughout the book as he looks at the roots of our toolkit (sumerian word for "baby cow" is the same word they used for "interest", etc). a very good description of the 1720 bubble with the hypothesis that the bubble was a reasonable reaction to the shifting expectations around insurance companies and the lines of risk they could cover. he also suggests that Venetian gov debt (1172) snowballed into the creation of western capital markets, which in turn propelled the west ahead of "the rest" (to steal a ferguson quote). three solid chapters on the tools imperial China used to increase its "span of control" over its rugged territory. 10/10.

(I used to use it as the required reading in my history course until I realized too many were balking at its size)

Jeffrey Hirsch responds:

Appreciate the reco Mr. Sogi. Almost done with Pam V’s reco on Keith Richard’s autobiography, Life, which is far out. Here’s one from me, The Immortal Irishman, by Timothy Egan. Irish revolutionary becomes a Civil War general. Adventurous tale across many continents.

Laurel Kenner writes:

I offer Harpo Speaks, the autobiography of Harpo Marx, the silent brother. Plenty of poker, speculation, and spectacular success, including an account of his Soviet tour, to entertain this List well.

Pamela Van Giessen responds:

Harpo Speaks is fantastic. For a meditative introspective read on things out of our control and how the body copes A Match to the Heart, by Gretel Ehrlich.

Big Al suggests:

I will recommend The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win, by Maria Konnikova.

First of all, it's just an entertaining, well-written story. But in her study of poker and portrait of one of the best professional players, Eric Seidel, there are many lessons for traders.

Penny Brown writes:

I recently re-read the cult classic, The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy. It has nothing to do with trading but the main character is a stockbroker. Read it for the wonderful prose and the delineation of Southern characters with great dialogue.

Also, re-read A Fan's Notes, Fredrick Exley's memoir of growing up under shadow of his father's football fame in Watertown. It's amazing that this book even got written since Exley makes three trips to mental institutions where he undergoes electro-shock and insulin therapy and was an inveterate alcoholic for his entire life. You can see the influence of Nabokov and Edmund Wilson (among his favorite writers) in his prose style.

And then I read Embrace the Suck - a book I literally found at my feet on the sidewalk - hey, the price was right - and I assumed it had a special message for me. It certainly did. It describes the training undergone to become a Navy SEAL including the infamously horrid "Hell Week" that resulted in the death of one participant. It has lots of lessons for traders as it extols the virtues of discipline, focus, planning and most of all, a willingness to embrace suffering, as a means of moving beyond mediocrity.

One guy's way of shaping up for the ordeal of SEAL training was to run the Badlands Ultramarathon - a little 100 mile race through the desert at temperatures over 110.

Okay, I'm not going to try that - never could have even in my prime. But it got me out of my chair committed to doing a full set of Bikram's yoga postures including the ones I hate because I can't do it - Salabhsana - or hate because it hurts - Supta-Vajrasana. As the author says, "you've got to embrace the suck everyday."

Gary Boddicker adds:

I recently read Mule Trader: Ray Lum’s Tales of Horses, Mules, and Men. I originally picked it up for the regional interest. Ray was based about 60 miles down Hwy 61 from me in Vicksburg, and traded mules and livestock throughout the Mississippi Delta…but, it turns out a few of the Chair’s favorite writers, Dr.Ben Green and Elmer Kelton, were running buddies of Ray and are mentioned and vouch for his character in the book. Many tales of trades, moving the herds as the tractors slowly replaced them from California to the Delta. In one case, he bought 80,000 horses in South Dakota, and arb’d them to where they could be used. The book rambles a bit, as it is essentially an oral history, but many lessons within.

It brought to mind a discussion I had years ago over dinner with an buddy of mine who farms about 20,000 acres in NE Louisiana. “Gary, there is isn’t a real farmer in Louisiana who picks up that government agricultural census and doesn’t mark down that he owns at least one mule. We are damn slow to admit we gave ‘em up.” I haven’t fact checked him, but a betting man says the mule census is Louisiana is overstated.

Gyve Bones responds:

I have two copies of that book… one autographed by the re-publishing editor. It’s a great book.

Jul

17

Always progressing. Meals for a lifetime can be found in this story of a mathematician. Not settling. Changing in midstream. Not accepting norms. Intense focus. Then passing it on to the next generation.

Alston Mabry adds:

A trader should enjoy numbers:

A Solver of the Hardest Easy Problems About Prime Numbers
On his way to winning a Fields Medal, James Maynard has cut a path through simple-sounding questions about prime numbers that have stumped mathematicians for centuries.

James Maynard on Numberphile.

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