The Official Kicking Myself Thread

[nickola.pazderic]

grems8544 wrote:

"playing catch up" always leaves me feeling exposed, and when it's my capital at risk, it's hard to cross this particular chasm.


I think there is a profound reflection here, and I recall research I did for a book project on photography in East Asia.


While looking through photographs of various eras, it was obvious that poses were crucial. Everything in a frame needed to be in place. In all early photographs that I've ever seen, including those of Europeans and Chinese, photography evoked or provoked a cold, hard stare into the device. Perhaps we might say this is only because exposure took some time in those days. But looking at contemporary pictures, critical poses can still be detected. Talking with elderly people who had lived through the camera's first extensive deployment through the Chinese countryside, I learned that people were fearful the device would suck one of one's life energy. At its beginning until today, exposure literally evokes anxiety. Nowadays, people carry cameras in their phones everywhere, and everything is always potentially exposed. I think it reasonable to say the device provokes constant attention to one's pose. To be exposed is to have one's pose or lack thereof photo-graphed into the permanent record.

When I started this post after an exchange with Billy, I felt anxiety of exposing myself, of putting my 15 letter name into the record as regretful and incompetent and, literally, powerless in the presence of the device, called IWM Robot.

Perhaps my willingness to expose myself as a dunce can itself be anxiety producing to readers. To me, it shows our comic incompetence. It is comic and not pathetic or tragic, I think, because we're still in a position to profit. To laugh is, thus, easy. It is to crack up, as we say in English-- that is, lose our composure or pose.

It is interesting for me to read bromides to self improvement and trading excellence in this thread. Bromides are literally tranquilizers; they reduce our anxiety.

But here is the problem: like the camera's influence on our lives, algos now structure trading. Any failing I experience as a trader is fundamentally my failure to conform to the demands of the devices. To not conform is folly. And while I might expose myself as a self-flagellating fool, my money is much more serious; it knows I must conform to the new patterns established by the devices.

[dsmcdougal]

On the Mechanical Investing Forum, Fool.com, today, KBGlenn said: "Can't remember where I read it but some guy actually tried to quantify how much investors lose to simple human error in executing what they are doing. It was pretty high, something like around ~3-5% per year difference. That's a chunk of change if you add it up over time. Somewhere I'm sure my face is on the poster for this type of error."

Mine too.

Dave