The interview in the back of the book is priceless.
Must read.
Holy crap there are about 40 gems in this interview. A few of my favorite quotes from PTJ:
There are two rules from this book by which I now live during these later stages of my constitution. First is the tenet “The trend is your friend,” which is repeated often – but not often enough. You sill simply never make any money unless you begin and end every trading thought with that in mind. Second is the old adage actually popularized in the 1880s, as I learned in your annotations: “Sell down to the sleeping point”.
Probably the best lessons to be learned from this book come from his (Lefevre’s) repeated failures and how he dealt with them. In the book I think he lost his entire fortune four or five times. I did the same thing but was fortunate enough to do it all in my early twenties on very small stakes of capital….I think it’s no great coincidence that our greatest champions, our greatest artists, our greatest leaders, our greatest everything all seem to have experienced some kind of gut wrenching loss.
Do we still have to buy the book or the interview available online?
“Sell to the sleeping point.”
I had to look that one up.
—If you are troubled by an investment but still desire to hang onto it, sell just enough so that you can feel that you’ve ‘dealt’ with the anxiety and can calmly sleep at night, but you’ve kept enough to feel comfortable with what you have left.
That goes right along with not taking on too big a stake on any one position and making sure your have stratified your assets with low correlation.
I'm reading “The 12 Investment Myths” by J.J. Calhoun.
Funny thing about life. It doesn't come with instructions. LOL.
Reminiscences is such a well done book. It would be interesting to compile a list of investors and speculators who have made great fortunes *without* blowing up. Straight from ~zero to great wealth, that would perhaps have fewer plot turns though
I don't think Alfred Jones, or Buffet every “blew up”, Ben Graham did take large losses. Richard Dennis blew up, and the guys in LTCM and other notorious funds did as well… A good dose of risk management to reign in the worst case scenario is a great idea.
Looks like the timing model flashed another “whipsaw” bond fund buy (several recently) this month and a commodity fund sell.
Looks like the timing model flashed another “whipsaw” bond fund buy (several recently) this month and a commodity fund sell.