Originally Posted by GMAN

I have no need to be frightened about ideas. As I stated earlier, this is not new. I read about it several decades ago. Feel free to challege any of my ideas or assumptions.

Where did you read about "it"? Please describe what you claim to have read.

It has been many years since I read about this. I don't recall much about it other than the concept.


Making money in the stock market isn't rocket science. Those who make money trading do so by watching trends and taking advantage of those trends or cycles. Stocks have cycles. All of them have cycles. All it takes is a little money, a plan and patience. For everyone who makes money in the market someone will lose money. Those who lose money in the market usually do so by getting greedy. They don't follow those things which worked for them in the past. It is not random.

This whole paragraph demonstrates your ignorance. Tell the guys writing the automatic trading algorithms that it's not rocket science. How many Nobel laureates did Long Term Capital have on their Board of Directors? Read "The (Mis)Behavior of Markets" by Benoit Mandelbrot and then make the above statement. Outliers exist and they will frock up every distribution they can. Markets, and indeed the universe as we know it, may well be fractal in nature.

I have made and lost a lot of money in the market. Like I said, it isn't all that complicated. You watch trends and invest accordingly. Some people make money by trying to make it complicated. Granted, there are events, such as a depression, which can mix things up a bit, but money can and will continue to be made in the market regardless of world events. There are those who will make money with this down economy just as they did during the Great Depression of 1929. When I lost money in the market it is because I got greedy and threw what was working out the window. Most people lose money in the market when they get greedy. I have always lost money when I listened to a broker, the so called professional. It seems to me as though you put too much faith in what others write.


What some people call luck is preparation. You can get "lucky" if you are prepared. You prepare for success. When opportunities come along you are prepared and get "lucky." People who fail, usually do so by not preparing. Again, it isn't random. It has nothing to do with genetics. You either prepare for success of failure. It is a choice. I am not sure what good it would do for me to read a book about random success. If I am to be successful or fail then there is nothing that I can to to effect the outcome since everything is random.

CAN YOU PLEASE READ THE BOOK BEFORE YOU START TO COMMENT ON IT?
In one of his books Taleb talks about someone who did a study of successful entrepreneurs and decided that the largest quality they had in common was a willingness to take risks and thus decided that to be successful a person needed that ability. Taleb pointed out that if they had done a study of FAILED entrepreneurs they probably would have found an equal, if not greater, willingness. Sometimes the very qualities that get you to a certain point in life keep you from going any further.

I have only been commenting on what you have written. I don't need to read a book to comment on your words. I do agree that to be successful you need to take risks. You will never be successful unless you are willing to take a risk. I believe the difference is in the type of risk one is willing to take. Those who succeed are single minded and stay focused on their goal. They don't give up. When they have a setback they move on or take a different direction. Those who fail give up and don't even try again.


We all have setbacks in our life. Einstein, Edison and others had many setbacks over their lifetime. Some would have called them failures. A failure would have given up. They learned by their failures and persevered. That was not random

[I]What does that statement have to do with anything we are discussing here? What I read into it is that you will only get lucky if you keep gambling. I agree that randomness can't strike you if you quit. That's why I keep going, someday I will get another opportunity. I will also say that people like Einstein and Edison appear to pretty randomly distributed..[/QUOTE

Originally Posted by LightsChromeHorsepower

That's why Long Term Capital Management was bailed out. It was the excuse given for bailing out AIG.

I say any business "Too big to fail" is actually too big to be allowed to exist to begin with. Of course if you want to stop companies from reaching such cancerous proportions you will need regulations and heaven knows we can't have that.

I think Taleb gave the mathematical odds of the 1987 Wall Street meltdown as somewhere in the quadrillions. But it still happened. How random is random? I was predicting a housing market correction in 2003. But I never imagined it would melt down like it has. I thought there would still be credit and that the demand for rentals would mushroom. Wrong on both counts. I'm not sure you could calculate the odds of the housing market behaving like it is, but it feels highly random to me.

Originally Posted by GMAN

No business is or should be too big to fail. I have a couple of friends with whom we have discussed this depression for the last few years. I think we all agree that it happened with greater severity that we had hoped. The trends were there for anyone who cared to see and compare to history. The events that led to this collapse were pretty much identical to what happened in 1929. Safeguards that were put into place after the crash were supposed to have stopped this from happening again. The problem is that these safeguards were removed over the last couple of decades. History repeats itself. All you need do is read and learn. What happened during this collapse was a result of a number of events, some of which I believe were contrived. Prior to the crash of 1929 credit was too easy and people were trading in the stock market in record numbers. Most people thought they would always make money in the market. They over invested. When the inevitable collapse happened and their margins were called they lost everything they had. Margin accounts were only 10%. That changed to 50% after the crash, but it still happened. Both then and now there were similarities for those who would only open their eyes. I did think the collapse would happen before it did. Neither of these world events were random. They were a result of a chain of events.

Originally Posted by Dejanh

Problem with the current downturn is that the government is getting in the way of the system cleansing itself of all the bad investment. Thats what the recession should be all about.

We have had the recession and still HAVE IT, yet, no cleansing has occurred. What happened to all the bad investment, its still there buried underneath the carpet somewhere waiting to pop out..All the junk had been bought by our government and not only that, our government has created and borrowed trillions on top of trillions to plug up the hole this recession has created........


...and the bad investments are still there...

That is why i think this downturn is much more severe than it appears to be for one, as well as could be much worse than the depression of the 30's which really was not that long ago....

We are in a zombie state of mind right now as we have been given too much government medicine(stimulus). What happens when a stimulus(alcohol) wears off. Thats what scares me. After you get drunk you have a hangover, its just that this hangovert might be mother of them all. Lets hope not !

Originally Posted by GMAN

With the bailout the government is rewarding inefficiency and corrupt behavior. When you reward bad behavior then that reinforces that behavior where it will repeat itself. Contrary to what the media and Obama administration would like us to believe, this is not over by a long shot. All the government has done is prolong the agony. We have a government that is out of control and has lost touch with reality.

Originally Posted by Orangetxguy

That is a BIG 10-4!!!


If anybody lets anybody else treat them poorly, or lets anybody else "screw them over", without correcting the wrong done, this contributes to the problem.

Standing up for yourself, and doing so in a straight forward and intellectual manner, puts an individual yards ahead of those whom sit on their hands and cry "Poor me"!!

Originally Posted by LightsChromeHorsepower

I never said anything about gambling. If you believe that random events control your success or failure without any contribution from you then you would not continue to try. I was not talking about Einstein and Edison personally, only their achievements. They succeeded because they refused to give up. It had nothing to do with randomness. Again, you assume that I am commenting on the book itself. I am only commenting on your statements about the book.

Originally Posted by Dejanh

One thing that all of these guys have in common is their belief in free market capitalism which we do not have right now, and never actualy had even though it is getting blaimed for the current downturn.


If you are following financial news and things like that, Marc Fiber is the one who publishes that well known ,,gloom,boom,doom'' report that everyone references all the time when it comes to the market and its description and value. They all agree that these massive bailouts will hurt us in the long run and make things a'lot worse, and when i, as a regular Joe Jack start thinking about it and digging below the surface a bit, i come to the same conclusion no matter how optimistic i want to be.....simple fact that Americans debt to earning ratio is about 380%, sends chills down my spine, and when you have economy which is purely consumer driven, you get the point...how long can it go on..?