Many years ago, when I rented a condo with a couple of other roommates who had just graduated college with me, I had a friend named Timo who lived with me. (Yes, Timo. Like my name with an “o” at the end). We would greet each other enthusiastically – “Timo!!!” “Timmy!” and shared a mutual fondness for Pee Wee’s Playhouse and Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Good times. Good times.
One day, Timo saw his cubicle-mate working on some code that didn’t look familiar. “What cha workin’ on, Pierre?”, he asked. Turns out this fellow Pierre was putting together code for a web site (and at the time the commercial web was brand spanking new) called Auction Web to match buyers and sellers. That Pierre was, of course, Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay.
One of Pierre’s core beliefs was that people, on the whole, were honest and respectable, and that creating a community of totally anonymous buyers and sellers could succeed based on the general premise that the community would be relatively moral and self-policing. His thesis was correct, and eBay’s tremendous success has made Pierre a billionaire many times over.
I was reminded of this by the recent events here on Slope. I have my own philosophy on life, of course, and one of my core beliefs is that a person trusts others in accordance with how trustworthy they themselves are. In other words, if you meet someone who is essentially suspicious of others…………don’t trust them. Because they are projecting their dark own nature on the rest of the world. Conversely, a person who assumes good intent and basic moral goodness from others is himself probably worthy of your faith.
I have run this blog for a long time, and I have written countless posts (over 10,000, but who knows how many). Indeed, this very month on the 29th we will celebrate our 11th year, and Slope has a well-deserved reputation as a place of well-intended camaraderie.
But even I have been deeply moved by the outpouring of kindly emails that have been sent to me in recent days during my “time of ashes”. It’s almost become embarrassing, because one would assume based on the quantity and thoughtfulness of these missives that I had been begging for some kind of relief for my troubled psyche, even though I never directly did so.
The simple truth is that not “pivoting” from bearish to bullish on February 11th has been one of the most painful fumbles of my trading career. It’s not that I’ve blown up or anything – – far from it – – but the calculations of “what might have been” and questions about “where did I go wrong” have been haunting me nearly to the point of despair.
Truly, though, I have been astonished at the lengthy, tender-hearted, and thoughtful emails people have been sending me. And, honestly, even with all my neuroses, I haven’t been trying to drum up a pity party. I express myself on Slope quite openly, for better or worse, and I guess some of the more empathic souls feel compelled to reach out.
Suffice it to say I appreciate it, and I pray for a lot fewer reasons for such kindness in the near future. More than this, though, I hope never to repeat a similar circumstance, because the combination of watching profits evaporate and seeing missed opportunities disappear is a feeling I really don’t want to experience again.
