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Friday
Jun172011

Trading Education: Techniques or Insight?

I read this passage from Howard Marks’s book titled The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor:

In my view, that’s the definition of successful investing: doing better than the market and other investors. To accomplish that, you need either good luck or superior insight. Counting on luck isn’t much of a plan, so you’d better concentrate on insight. In basketball they say, “You can’t coach height,” meaning all the coaching in the world won’t make a player taller. It’s almost as hard to teach insight. As with any other art form, some people just understand investing better than others. They have—or manage to acquire—that necessary “trace of wisdom” that Ben Graham so eloquently calls for.

This comment got me thinking about trading education:

  • Is trading education useless to a trader who lacks insight?
  • How do you teach the art of being insightful?
  • For an insightful trader, education is a way to add techniques to the trading toolkit. How much should he pay to acquire something that is widely available?
  • If augmenting one's insightfulness is so important, where are all the schools of insight?
  • Isn't it disappointing to rarely see the word “insight” in most education marketing material?
  • Are we thinking about education in a Newtonian kind of way (Industrial Age-Euclidian-Time space) and missing what education could be in an insight-Internet-time-augmented human’s space?
  • Is the cost of learning techniques fast approaching zero and the value of insight increasing to infinity?
  • What is trading education’s adjacent possible?

Help me clarify my thoughts on the subject.

Written by Michael Bigger. Follow me on Twitter and StockTwits.


P.S. I want to thank Todd Sullivan for introducing me to Howard marks' book

Howard Marks, The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), Kindle edition, 2.

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