Posted on 06/15/2014 7:10:42 AM PDT by expat_panama
Happy Father's Day!
Seems there's no shortage of ideas out there on fathers and investing, there's an entire series of books (Rich Dad’s Rich Kid Smart Kid, etc.) but (imho) the ideas can be boiled down into a short list (from here):
FWIW, my favorite on the list is the last one...
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This is the thread where folks swap ideas on savings and investment --here's a list of popular investing links that freepers have posted here and tomorrow morning we'll go on with our--
Open invitation continues always for idea-input for the thread, this being a joint effort works well. Keywords: financial, WallStreet, stockmarket. |
Happy fathers day to you too.
As a parent this resonates with me about the individuality of childrens teaching. I believe the public school system does a poor job of shoehorning each individual into the broad rote method of teaching thus leading to poor performance. I do not believe more money will solve this problem but rather more parental involvement. Albert Einstein fought against the teaching methods when he was young (15-16 I think) and thus did not become an electrical engineer. I had several unsavory instances with my own children in public school with one involving my son being left behind on an out of state field trip in which the teacher failed to take a head count when a rain outburst cut the trip short and she rounded up what kids were nearby.
Tx —likewise!
Great list! I am BLESSED beyond measure to have had a Grandpa that WORKED all during the Great Depression - doing ANYTHING that would bring in a buck to support himself, Grandma, my Dad and his Father-in-Law. That work ethic is with me, still, and I will ALWAYS have multiple streams of income. :)
Secondly, I am blessed to have a Dad who taught me early-on to SAVE, and showed me how the Commodities Market works. Well, it USED to, anyways, LOL!
Allowance money went to buying Cocoa Futures and Sow Bellies, versus make-up and teen heart-throb magazines. (Though, I did not lack for those things, either.)
I’m getting there! Lost a LOT of $ in my dee-vorce, but I am back on track and should have the farm paid off and have enough stashed to live comfortably without outside employment before I’m age 60. Suh-Weeeeet!
Plan the work, then work the plan!
Coincidently nationwide public schooling began in Germany at the time Einstein was a child because the Kaiser realized that national defense required a draft pool that knew how to communicate in writing and understood numbers. Raising kids for life has always been and remains the parent's job. So we agree that "Formal schooling under serves non academic learning styles and financial education principles".
...do not believe more money will solve this problem...
Absolutely; the problem is one of direction. As a nation we need to consider that national defense in the 21st century requires a population not only educated for the labor markets but for the financial markets too.
There's so much to learn from that generation and now there are so few of them left. What strikes me is that as horrific as that era was, most of the anecdotes I'm recalling were of things that happened that were humorous --I mean like totally hilarious! My bet is you remember a few tales too; one of these days we got to swap stories.
...Lost a LOT of $ in my dee-vorce, but I am back on track...
Dang! Should know better that to forget I'm not the only one who's been down that road...
I found this interesting
Retail investors are more influential than most people think
Jun 14th 2014 | From the print edition
“FOLKS are dumb where I come from,” wrote Irving Berlin in the musical “Annie Get Your Gun”. The song’s condescension towards yokels is reminiscent of professional investors’ disdain for their retail counterparts. The “smart money” in New York and London thinks it can make a living exploiting the “dumb money” of people who live in the sticks. Yet a new paper from researchers at the Federal Reserve shows that retail investors—in America, at any rate—are a lot smarter than the professionals imagine. In fact, they have a bigger effect on the markets than the highly paid investment strategists of Wall Street.
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21604190-retail-investors-are-more-influential-most-people-think-wisdom
It's based on this paper from the Fed, which is so arcane that I think I'll stick to the Economist's take fro a bit. Well done!
Geopolitical SHTF alert. This will be an interesting week with the markets.
Yea, looks like Baghdad is about to go down.
US evacuates Baghdad embassy as brutal ISIS forces advance ... [Breaking!]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3168087/posts
Baghdad is about to go down
Yeah, was just looking at this too: Iraq May Be a Real Monkey Wrench In This Market - Jim Cramer, MSN
Good Morning! Beginning the new week with futures traders up beat in all commodities except stock indexes --right now at -0.32%. Major econ reports this morning include Net Long-Term TIC Flows, Industrial Production, Capacity Utilization, and NAHB Housing Market Index, the view from the press:
Good grief Obama is just clueless...
Good way to start the day... :-)
A Bazillionaire’s Guide to Stress Relief
3 Jun 15, 2014 6:03 PM EDT
By Michael Lewis
I’d like to start by making a confession: It’s never been easy being me.
Managing billions of dollars of other people’s money, and countless millions of my own, has been highly stressful. There was a time when I thought my anxiety, not to mention the investigations of my affairs by various U.S. government authorities, might break me — and so, on the advice of my attorneys, I took some time off. But that period of my life, thankfully, is now over. Just last week, for the first time in months, I fired up my Bloomberg terminal!
There I discovered that I’m not the only extremely distinguished Wall Street trader whose life is more difficult than ordinary people understand. Looking over the stories that people who can afford Bloomberg terminals have been e-mailing to one another over the past few months, I see the anxiety of financiers hitting new highs: Old bankers have been killing themselves; young bankers, burned out by their 90-hour-a-week jobs, have been quitting in droves to work for startups; hedge-fund managers are now telling the public that the stock market feels so dangerous that they are selling their holdings and going into cash.
The most widely circulated horror story was about people giving up golf. Apparently, Wall Street guys have been fleeing their game because their anxiety has them feeling they need to text all the time, and they can’t free up their hands long enough to swing the club. It’s like we’ve all become teenage girls.
So maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised that the story that got all of Wall Street’s attention was about a hot new stress reduction strategy: transcendental meditation. Several of my esteemed hedge-fund colleagues apparently actually do this. David Ford told Bloomberg Pursuits that his mantra helped him make a killing in the emerging markets crash — and he isn’t alone.
“Ford is part of a growing number of Wall Street traders, including A-list hedge-fund managers Ray Dalio, Paul Tudor Jones and Michael Novogratz, who are fine-tuning their brains — and upping their games — with meditation,” said the story, which went on to say that the TM classes at Goldman have a waiting list of hundreds.
Personally, I would find it stressful, if I worked at Goldman Sachs (which, thank God, I don’t!) to be on a wait list for anything. Why can’t they just buy as many gurus as they need? But I digress. The point of this crazy meditation article was how much money a guy can make these days just from staying calm. “Meditation used to have this reputation as a hippie thing for people who speak in a particularly soft tone of voice,” a meditation expert explains, to correct the popular misperception. “Samurai practiced meditation to become more effective killers. … It’s value neutral.”
I’m a big believer in value neutrality. I also get that the new way to get an edge in the markets is to trick your brain into no longer worrying about whether you have an edge — and just letting the intuition fly. The problem is that there’s no way meditating can give you a competitive advantage if everyone in the financial markets is already meditating. How can there be any edge left in doing whatever hundreds of grunts inside Goldman Sachs are already lining up to do?
Any hedge-fund manager who wants to pursue the calming strategy obviously needs new, superior stress relieving techniques, unknown to the weaker individuals whose anxiety he seeks to exploit. Here are a few secret strategies, unknown to the larger investing public, used by only the most successful hedge-fund managers, myself included. To begin:
— Find a fat kid and sit on him.
Fat kids aren’t as thick on the ground in Manhattan since the soda ban was proposed so you might need to get driven to a Jersey suburb to locate one. Once in New Jersey, identify some serious waddler, follow him until he is on his own, then leap from your limo, toss him on the ground and sit on him.
“A lot of people think that sitting on fat kids is just a mean thing done only by high school bullies,” says one hedge-fund trader — who, like many extremely successful hedge-fund managers, struggled with his appetites when he was himself a child. “That totally misses the point of sitting on a fat kid. The act itself — of hurling a little fat kid to the ground and using him as a human stool — is terribly relaxing. And it’s value neutral, especially after the kid stops screaming. Once you realize that you can literally sit on your own past, and subdue it, you cease to worry about whatever it is you have just done with other people’s money.”
This strategy comes with the small risk that some police officer witnesses the scene and fails to understand your actions. Relax! For those who don’t have the nerve to publicly sit on a fat kid for a few minutes, there are other state-of-the-art calming strategies. Such as …
— Identify people who have no hope in life, and use their distress to soothe your own.
One serious hedge-fund guy who just shorted a huge number of French government bonds told me that, when the pressure of his trade gets too overwhelming, he just goes to his local hospital and checks himself into a cancer ward. Obviously, he doesn’t have cancer; he just uses the people who do, to put his position into deep perspective. (And, of course, offers to donate the money for a new wing to the hospital, in exchange for the bed.) “I don’t know why,” he says, “But it just makes me feel at peace with myself, and all my trades, to be surrounded by people who are seriously worse off than I am. It makes me feel good about my situation, even when my investors just asked me to cut my management fee from 3 and 20 to 2 and 15. There really is no problem so big that a trip to the hospital doesn’t solve it.”
But be warned: This strategy isn’t for everyone. As one of my colleagues put it: “Eventually you just get used to the fact that pretty much everyone in the world has it worse than you do, and so the juice goes out of it. In the presence of other human beings, you just feel numb — because you have nothing in common with them. I tried hanging around with sick animals and even some fish, but they never worked as well.”
A few extremely successful Wall Street guys even claim this particular calming strategy has led to negative psychological returns. “Surrounded by people who don’t know how long they have to live just emphasizes how serious the pressures are on me,” as one trader out it. “Because my problems are much more relentless. When you have terminal cancer you probably aren’t in these markets, and so you don’t have to face the harsh reality that your net worth is on the line every day.”
Which brings me to the third strategy:
— Find someone who can help you to see the humor in your problems.
I can already hear a lot of guys thinking, “But there is no humor in my problems.” The answer is to cast your mind back in human history and ask: Who in the past most resembles you, in the seriousness of their emotional and psychological trials? To ask the question is to answer it: monarchs. The rulers of nations also shared our biggest source of stress: that no one dared make light of them. They, like us, were surrounded by courtiers and toadies and liars; they, like us, faced both the love and the hostility of an entire society. But they found a way to cope with their stress: a lowly but witty person who could serve as their Fool. Every extremely successful financier, like every king, can benefit from employing a court jester.
This person’s job is to find the humor in you and your problems. Of course, he will usually fail to do so, because there is nothing the slightest bit ridiculous about you or your problems. But his failure in itself you will find calming. And you can pay him next to nothing.
In the end, we who sit on top of the financial world all need to remember that anxiety is a relative thing. The best among us realize that it doesn’t matter how much of it we feel, so long as everyone else in the financial markets feels more of it. And so if you don’t have the stomach for these cutting-edge stress-relieving strategies, you can always just give up trying to reduce your own stress, and instead create more stress for other people. Stage a raid on some totally unsuspecting company, for example, or just go on TV and say you’re getting the hell out of the markets and putting everything into cash.
It’s a less original solution, but it totally works.
To contact the writer of this article: Michael Lewis at mlewis1@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this article: Marty Schenker at mschenker@bloomberg.net.
Hold on a second, there’s a kid waddling down the street now. I’ll be back.
When I first saw that I thot the title was “A Brazilianairs’s Guide...”
Russell 2000 now in plus land...
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