Lyrics by Roger Waters. Music by Pink Floyd.
We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.
We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.
“Wrong, Do it again!”
“If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you
have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?”
“You! Yes, you behind the bikesheds, stand still laddy!”
Virtually all of us, myself included, focus our initial “education” regarding markets in a similar direction.
We spend our time with economics, finance, geopolitics, technical analysis, fundamental analysis, etc.
We are manipulated by Wall Street, universities, and the financial media into believing this will be our path to financial independence.
The problem with all this is almost zero time is spent attempting to truly grasp the only things that truly matter about markets – risk and probabilities.
One of my mentors gave me a warning when I was a young, clueless floor trader in Chicago.
He passed on to me about his own journey as a trader/investor, where he was fabulously successful by the time that I met him.
He told me he always wanted to be involved in markets (which unlike myself, certainly wasn’t where my passions were focused growing up).
So after he received his MBA from Yale, he moved to Chicago to begin his trading career.
He recounted to me how he completely wasted his first three years as a trader.
His first two years were spent unsuccessfully attempting to use what he “learned” about markets while at Yale.
And the next year he spent attempting to forget everything he learned at Yale.
The best traders/investors I’ve ever been around were not the Stanford MBAs, nor the Harvard Finance PHDs. But they often were former blackjack players, which is attributable to their total focus on risk and probabilities.
Now I suggest spending some time pondering that, because just understanding the previous statement alone will be very helpful.
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