Jul

6

Without in any way attempting to aggrandize myself, “the older we get the better we were” and all that, I had an instructive experience today playing one wall racquetball at the courts on 101 st. I lost 21-4 to a player 10 years older than me. This might not have been expected as when I was 11 I beat the best paddle ball player in the world in a big money game, and I won 4 national paddle ball tournaments, 2 in singles and 2 in doubles, and was ranked in the top 10 in racquetball some 45 years ago. I stayed back, quite afraid of mixing it up in the front court, and I was not very mobile. I hit the ball very hard and tried to blast it through my opponents who were up front and just tweaked the ball back to the front wall and since I was standing back and am not mobile I couldn’t reach the ball. To add humiliation, Aubrey was watching.

It occurs to me that macro traders find the same problem when they go into micro or day trading, and micro traders find the same problem when they go into macro trading. Their techniques are all wrong for the new game they are playing– they are fish out of water. They take long term positions and they are margined out or stopped out by the swings designed to take chips from the poor, or flexionic moves. The micro trader going into macro trading might have lost to me because when I don’t have to be mobile, I can stay back and my strokes, the macro traders fundamentals, and if he works for a bank the unlimited potential that he has to withstand loss makes him an impossible adversary for the micro trader.

One guesses the moral is that the cobbler should stick to his last. And one should always be humble about any past success and realize that things are very different in the modern era.


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