From the New Yorker article I pointed to in the last post, I found this wonderful quote:
At Empirica (a hedge fund), then, there are no Wall Street Journals to be found. There is very little active trading, because the options that the fund owns are selected by computer. Most of those options will be useful only if the market does something dramatic, and, of course, on most days the market doesn't. So the job of Taleb and his team is to wait and to think. They analyze the company's trading policies, back-test various strategies, and construct ever-more sophisticated computer models of options pricing. Danny, in the corner, occasionally types things into the computer. Pallop looks dreamily off into the distance. Spitznagel takes calls from traders, and toggles back and forth between screens on his computer. Taleb answers e-mails and calls one of the firm's brokers in Chicago, affecting, as he does, the kind of Brooklyn accent that people from Brooklyn would have if they were actually from northern Lebanon: "Howyoudoin?" It is closer to a classroom than to a trading floor.
Remember, you don't make more money by being more frantic about your trading. You make more money as you relax and think about what you are doing, how you are doing it, and then watch some TV, read some poetry, play some video games, have fun with your family or friends, eat good food, sleep a deep sleep, and then get up and do it all over again.
Are you thinking deeply enough? Resting your mind well enough?
