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Confessions Of an Unsuccessful Trader (by DoubleNaughtSpy)

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Very few people can say they are worse at investing and trading than me. How’s that for whetting your appetite for my advice? Well, how about I tell you of how I have been a rotten trader for so long, and how I have recently managed to turn it around?

Birth of an Investing Idiot

My investment education started when the company I worked for was sold and I was given the opportunity to roll out my 401K to an IRA. This was around 1995. Of course, this was during the real start of the dot com bubble. In the five years leading up to the dot com bust, I made a ton of money. I took my 35K and turned it into 99K by trading in and out of the usual suspects of the day. In a way, it was like WSB without the formal Reddit page. Instead, I was all over Yahoo Finance message boards scanning for the next big winner. I listened to the hype and participated in it along with all the other Yahooligans. I also started watching CNBC religiously every morning while getting ready for work, then tuning in after work while I watched the profits roll in.

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Scheduled to be Slayed

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We have not had an honest-to-God bear market in ninety years. But what about 2008? Or 2001? Or 1987? Yeah, yeah, the market went down, it’s true, but in every single down-market since the 1930s, the federal government has intervened to stop the bleeding. The natural, organic, and marvelously healthy process of a sweeping financial cleaning hasn’t been permitted since the days of FDR, since the nanny state government feels duty-bound to spare its citizens anything that might hurt even a little bit.

The last big cleaning – – which spanned 1929 to 1933 – – spawned laws and cultural changes that benefited the United States for nearly seventy years before they were dismantled. The most egregious “help” the government has offered came, of course, during the last little downturn, during a few weeks in late February and early March of 2020, which was met with trillions and trillions of dollars of stimulus, forgiveness, and all-around federal fellatio.

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Slope Christmas Tradition 3 of 3

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Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago. Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house in a country town. A great black stove is its main feature; but there is also a big round table and a fireplace with two rocking chairs placed in front of it. Just today the fireplace commenced its seasonal roar.

A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkable—not unlike Lincoln’s, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. “Oh my,” she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, “it’s fruitcake weather!”

The person to whom she is speaking is myself. I am seven; she is sixty-something, We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together—well, as long as I can remember. Other people inhabit the house, relatives; and though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are each other’s best friend. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880’s, when she was still a child. She is still a child.

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