Mar

26

I have come to like these posts which ask us to examine in depth the nature of trading. Today I think and write of very successful traders (speculators, if you like) who do not seem to ever be excited about their profession. This brief comment (from a few years back) by Sir Vic started me in this direction:

"Jim Lorie was one of the most successful speculators I ever knew. He passed away with a vast estate and he did it mainly on a teacher's salary, which was very modest in those days. His method was always to ask his friends for a good stock, buy and hold it, letting go only when it was bought out."

Sounds boring; really boring.

For some reason Jim Lorie reminds me of one of the most successful commodity traders of his day, back-in-the-day. I won't speak his name since his privacy was important to him and he may still be with us. He had a small office on "the street" and visited a nearby deli, where he would have lunch and take the rest of the day off - the rest of every day off. This is where I made his acquaintance. I think he liked me because I did not know everything and did not act like I did.

He shared his trades with me. Very rarely did he have a loser; his winners were usually big winners. He traded in size for himself and he had a small, but very wealthy, client base. He was never excited about a trade. Mainly, he thought about his garden and fly fishing. He had one simple approach:

"Let the technicals confirm the fundamentals."

A book about folks like this would be a snoozer. The general impression about the successful speculator is that he is on the edge of stress every day in an exciting world of near misses.

Nope.


Comments

Name

Email

Website

Speak your mind

1 Comment so far

  1. Jim Davis on March 26, 2015 9:44 pm

    I suspect few top class investors ever get ‘excited’ about what they are doing.

    Gets in the way of clear thinking. Wasted energy.

    The biggest ,regular winners at the racetrack , can rarely be seen rooting their horse home.

Archives

Resources & Links

Search