I just left this comment on Krauser’s newest post. In it he talks about how happiness is the top priority in life, and that the best way to achieve this is through seeking medium term goals. He also talks about not getting chained down by the responsibilities that come with being an authority over others.
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Ya, being happy is the top priority. That’s always good to be aware of.
Medium term happiness might seem like a reasonable balance between taking care of your present self and your future self, but will your far future self feel short shrifted? Maybe yes, maybe no. Good memories of good times are valuable. Young people are famous for discounting the needs of their older self. The Who sang “hope I die before I get old”, and kids in my highschool at the time didn’t care if smoking killed them, because they couldn’t value their fuddy-duddy older selves.
Is a wicked hang over worth it the morning after? Depends who you ask. The night before it was worth it. The morning after it wasn’t.
Old people famously have outrageous and unforeseeable health care costs, and then their quality of life is tied in closely to their retirement income. Once you are old enough to have those costs, will it have been worth it to think about long term happiness? Again, worth it to who? No, it will not be worth it to your younger self – he cares about short and medium term happiness.
I forget who it was who first noticed that it’s impossible to opt out of the sexual marketplace. Maybe it was Roissy. Roissy noticed that although we may proclaim ourselves as grass eaters and proclaim ourselves as Free with a capital F of all the burdens of external female validation, and Free of having to chase after pussy, and therefore Free to have Free time to do other things, that there was and could never be escape from the sexual marketplace. No escape from the socio sexual hierarchy. No escape from our own internal built in human condition of desire, and no escape from how other people view our place on the totem pole.
I think it’s the same for the notion of being Sigma. I’ve been about as sigma as they come, I suppose, most of my life. I make my own rules, go my own way, at times to the extreme of neglecting to cut my hair or wear decent clothes. I was a late bloomer to even notice all the dominance plays for power that are constantly going on in most social dramas, such as Mad Men. Those social games never interested me and I thought they were for stupid people or people trapped within conventions or people trapped inside jobs that they didn’t have the wherewithal to get out of.
But now I see it the same way as the socio-sexual hierarchy. There is no escaping it. Sigma is an illusion.
We are judged by others, and pretending or willfully believing that it doesn’t matter does not lessen the advantages of being higher up on the pole.
It’s true that there are also disadvantages. If there were not then most people would not seem so eager to follow, and the world would look a lot more like Lucky Thomson’s dog eat dog world full of every man for himself gangsterish positioning. Most people take less risks, and are more docile, and many can get by barely even noticing the rat race.
I used to laud the virtue of being a slacker, and despised the notion of a suit. Free time was my most valuable possession. I was low on the financial totem pole at 40, and that hurt my prospects with women, but I still did well above average with no end in sight. By then I’d spent a few years managing a staff of 12, and a few years after that working mostly on my own, and was happy to no longer have the burden of responsibility of making payroll.
But since then I’ve regrouped and rearranged and repositioned myself. My staff are no longer a burden, any more than a hammer is a burden. They aren’t a burden because I’m not overextended. And instead of being trapped by the business monster that I created, I now enjoy work, and choose to do it. I’m no more trapped by my work than a painter is trapped by the canvas that he put in front of himself.
Last time I had a staff of 12, it had little benefit to me other than money. This time I’ve carefully chosen my businesses to work towards giving me social proof and social access to young hotties. The businesses are pipelines, as well as very enjoyable hobbies. They have brought me close friendships with many cool guys, who came out to live here as interns. The integration of personal interest, future interest, financial interest, and social interest is complete.
And in the process I’m more aware of the social hierarchy that I once thought was so utterly beside the point. It’s not beside the point once you get advantage from it. When people come to visit me at my shop-house in Java, they have to climb four flights of stairs to get to my room. It’s a 30 meter long building and the floors below are filled with cool machines and kowtowing underlings. And I built a garden on the roof and added two more floors out of bamboo just for fun, for a total of 7 floors. This has a psychological impact on people. The compound of bungalows under construction in Bali will be equally impressive, and the planned attractions will bring in a steady stream of impressionable wide young eyes . This not only has a psychological impact, but is a pipeline and a growing network.
Guys who are not well positioned might start to get squirmy about this, and start to put their fingers in their ears and scream La La La La YOU DON’T NEED MONEY TO GET HOT GIRLS. Which is exactly like a go-your-own-way grass eater saying that you don’t need women to be happy. There is no escaping the fact that social hierarchy has an influence on how people treat you. When you are are relatively high up compared to those around you, through whatever the local measurements of status are, then people will treat you differently and you’ll notice the difference.
Only lately have I started to get a taste for it. It never mattered to me before, because I never knew the value of it before, because I never had the value of it before.
The back of my head is nearly all bald now, and my temples are grey. It’s much worse than two years ago. My face gets wrinklier every year. As do my drooping balls. But my tastes in girls are the same, and I still want and still date teenagers and young twenty somethings. I know that this is a concept that will not get past the fingers in the ears, but it’s a simple fact of life that money and status and power are sexually attractive, in more than a comfort and security way, plus also a comfort and security way. And this is a very welcome advantage for old men.
So medium term happiness is great, for you now. But there will be a different man in the future who will benefit from ample money.
And being sigma is good for you now. But you also might become a different man who becomes accustomed to being perceived of as high status, and becomes accustomed to the benefits that come with it.
Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. Grass eaters are free from pussy. Hippies are free from corporate chains and petty concerns about material possessions. But nobody is free. We are socially enmeshed beings, and we can never be free from that without being dead. Whether we care about validation has nothing to do with the benefits and costs of our relative social positioning. It takes money to be free, otherwise you won’t be free from hunger and deprivation, nor have the freedom to pay for a chosen lifestyle.
I’ve lived hand to mouth and been happy and enjoyed it. There is no one magic answer for what is a good life. I’m just saying that money matters more, the older we get, and as we get older we start to lose energy and focus and eventually peter out and want to retire.
If the long term is not included in notions about happiness, then you are having a generation gap with yourself, and are close to hoping that you die before you get old.
walter2015london said:
I had a friend who used to tell me ”always think in the long term”. While I completely had a blast during my 20s (mostly travelling around the world and banging girls) and I wouldn’t change those years for anything in the world, I want to make my 30’s different. I want to get into a career and save lots of money so my 40’s and later life can be even better.
xsplat said:
Ya, life is long enough to take some slacking years. But most of us can’t afford to slack forever.
Dylan Madden said:
This is a very true article. I sought free time to pursue what I wanted over working more for some time and then started to pay with lack of money. Now that I am approaching my birthday I have been putting in work everyday over the past 2 months to not only make more money, but to position myself to make a major lifestyle change.
I now am doing work that I enjoy while getting a business setup that will make the tribe money and help us pursue more ventures. My life is work because it is work that I enjoy.
Great article X.
Your Friend,
Dylan
olivermaerk said:
http://freedompowerandwealth.com
True, getting older and having no or little money sucks. If your younger it’s not that worse. When it comes to what is most important in life I recommend a slightly different answer to yours. Happiniss is definitly important, but freedom and success are too. So I would put them all together and call it “fulfillment” – that is what is most important to me in life.
YouSoWould said:
Totally with you on this.
I was living my life for the short term, let alone medium term. I’d always earned more than my peers, but when I turned 30 it hit me that I’d achieved nothing of note with my life that mattered to me. I moved to London, and quickly realised I was a worm in the social hierarchy, compared to the obscene wealth I saw everywhere.
It ignited a burning ambition within me to rise to the top of the pile, culminating in quitting work entirely nearly 2 years ago to learn to make a living trading the forex markets.
I’ve sacrificed my entire life basically to pursue this goal. I’m broke, I have no social life, my relationship fell apart because my gf couldn’t handle the strain of being long distance. I am watching the clock tick by, as I get older and as yet still haven’t realised my ambition.
But here I will remain, for as long as it takes, because I have no other focus in my life than to take care of the long term, once and for all. When sufficient mastery is attained in trading, the rewards are practically infinite. It’s really not even that hard to generate daily returns far in excess of 20%. My main issue at the moment is consistency, but this will come soon enough.
I will amass enough money to take care of my family, spread enough around to mean I never even have to think about money for the rest of my life, and then I’m to experience all the major cities of the world in the most opulent luxury imaginable until I bore of it, and will most likely look to building something more lasting.
xsplat said:
I understand well the ambition.
I don’t understand forex trading at all. Every time I read about trading it’s from the view of statistics, specifically the stats on consistent trading from all levels of traders. I would expect we’ve seen similar stats, and they don’t look good.
The big consistent money in trading comes from using other peoples money and collecting fees, is what I’ve heard.
I had a trader as an intern here briefly. He had worked for a bank, and had done well. I got the impression that there were limited and occasional information imbalances that could be harvested; one person must know more than a large group. He had a system that worked for a while, but now it no longer does. That’s often the case in entrepreneurial adventures; a business needs to be re-invented as market conditions shift. But the implication is that there may be no stable system of knowledge about trading that can bring in consistent profits.
Banking and finance is big money. But it’s a racket that relies on being established in an inner circle, and paying kickbacks to politicians to remain in that circle. Mafia is often involved big money finance, for boiler room scams and pumping and dumping stocks, vaporware of all sorts including bio-tech vapor, paying off polititians for control over gambling licenses and other corporate business, and more. Some of the biggest money is where government collusion allows money to be created out of nothing and used as incentive to get other people to do your work to build your corporations and to invest more real money, and then loaned out again in volumes big enough to create financial collapse so that assets can be seized when payments are defaulted. Big money is when money isn’t even money anymore, but an idea that you make other people believe exists. Then they will believe that you have “lost” money, as you seize billions in assets.
But those strategies are not about investing carefully using information asymmetries, they are about using financial incentives along with mobster incentives (and sometimes military incentives) to hack the very foundation of what money REALLY is; the systems of human motivation and legal claim to asset ownership.
Sometimes people can do well in financial trading by gathering investors, and showing a good rate of return, thereby gathering more investors. This works fastest as a pyramid scheme. But even if it is not, it is. Because information asymmetries by nature can’t be sustained; there is no brokerage house that consistently and over the long term outperforms the market averages. So the short term wins are just a type of pyramid scheme to attract future investors into eventual long term under-performance or losses that any brokerage house will certainly experience.
The money in investing is in setting up and selling confidence, and skimming off a piece of the confidently invested money. It’s not in the actual information imbalances.
If it is in information imbalances, then you need a long term system of insider trading, and for that you will need to set yourself up as a mafiosa who has government connections. You will need access to systems of motivating powerful people, such as lawyers guns and money. You will need to get underneath what money seems to be, in order to manipulate it below it’s roots; money is created out of peoples belief systems; it is a system of motivation below all. From control over motivation and belief, you shift legal ownership of assets.
And assets themselves are systems of belief. There is no stable store of value, only relatively stable ones. Gold, art work, classic cars, old baseball cards. They hold value as tokens of scarcity that people have invested belief in. Gold costs x many human hours of labor and y many units of energy to produce and has a limited z new addition to the marketplace per year, therefore it is traded as at least x+y – the inflation of z valuable. Until it isn’t, and investment shifts over to bitcoins, until investment shifts over to the next thing that information asymmetry shows to be the new value store trend. Even productive assets such as farm land are prone to being over invested with value and have their value bubbles.
I had too much money a few years ago, and looked around for the best value store I could find. After careful consideration I chose gold. It has gone way down since then. I did not have access to what was on the mind of the people who truly have influence in the gold value market – big banks and governments using their magical chinese and jew brains to manipulate markets up and down, extracting gains out of value booms and crashes. No amount of research could have put me on the right side of that information asymmetry. By design.
To invest for profit you need to own insider information, or create your own insider information by stock price manipulation. By definition you can’t find insider information through publicly available sources. You need a genuine information asymmetry; something not available to other investors.
Or just invest other peoples money, as a pyramid scheme that leads to skimming a portion of their capitol in return for gaining their trust.
My two cents. I’d be interested to hear anyone else’s take.
YouSoWould said:
So basically the way any tradeable financial market works, is that it is constantly manipulated by the “big boys”. It’s something of a food chain, with the biggest players like Goldman Sachs at the top, down through other hedge funds and investment banks, down to retail traders at the bottom (folks like you and I).
At any given time, those players with enough money to move the markets, are doing so in a manner which is designed to get the greatest number of people on the wrong side of the move. If Goldman Sachs wants to buy a billion Euros against the Dollar, then there has to be a billion worth of sell orders available for them to buy against. As such, they will manipulate the markets in such a fashion as to make everyone else believe price is plummeting, right up until the point they harvest all the liquidity and smash price the other way, wiping everyone else out.
Fortunately for us, there are only a finite number of these tricks, and they are all learnable and predictable to one extent or another. Additionally, the algorithms which the banks use to execute their orders leave a certain signature on the chart, which can be read by eye with practise.
It is our role as retail traders to anticipate the moves of the big boys ahead of time, and then go in the same direction, piggybacking the whale as it were.
Some very clever chaps backwards engineered all this over a period of time, and put the basic building blocks of the method up online. It’s by no means a complete solution, but it gives you enough information so that if you are prepared to put in the 5000+ hours of chart time required to gain enough experience on applying these concepts, you can routinely and consistently pull off the most spectacularly accurate trades, predicting price turning points for huge moves to a single pip.
All that is required initially is an understanding of the concept of supply and demand, specifically how it relates to trading financial instruments and how to recognise supply and demand levels on a candlestick chart. Once you’ve grasped this, you can then begin to study and apply these building blocks to solving the puzzle, which are all just enhancements to basic supply and demand theory.
Im currently at the point where I can add over 20% to my account most days, but still lacking sufficient experience to keep it up for a prolonged period with consistency, suffering large losses. But I am not the finished product, and I can still learn lots more. That I become fantastically wealthy from this is a given at this stage, it’s just a matter of time.
The imbalances you describe are what algorithmic traders look for. Mean reverting price series, momentum following strategies etc, all of which can be statistically modelled. The problem with these is as you say they don’t persist, and usually a great many people jump on the wagon at once until the market inefficiency ceases to exist.
The advantage of the method I use is that is is purely based around anticipating the big boys moves ahead of time using a series of building blocks of price analysis, understanding their tricks, and then going among with them for the ride.
If you are interested I can point you to the website I learned all of this from, but it does require a significant investment of time in order to grasp, let alone master.
xsplat said:
I believe you that stock trading can make a lot of money, and that it is a skill that can be learned.
My skepticism about it being practical as a business strictly as an investor comes from hearing that even the most informed and dedicated brokerage fund managers do not outperform the market. The statistics tell me that even if it is possible to play and win, that over the long haul that doesn’t happen for anybody, no matter how educated.
YouSoWould said:
Believe it or not, despite being in the public domain, this information is relatively obscure. I personally know many investment bankers, none of them have even heard of this method, and none of them have even a fraction of the chart reading skill that I do. Their trading strategies are mostly based around statistical models.
And indeed yes, not “anybody” can learn to trade this way. You need a high degree of intelligence, and an a massive amount of willpower and determination to succeed, since a big part of this endeavour is sitting here staring failure in the face over and over, day in, day out, until you succeed.
Would you base a hedge fund on something like this? No, not likely, because the key asset is a single trader’s ability in the markets. There’s no mathematical model guaranteeing certain percentages of returns, everything is discretionary. One day you might add 50% to your account, the very next you lose 10%. This is much more a technique for how one single person can work for themselves, making great returns on their money, not so much a business strategy.
The fact remains however, the markets are predictable to a degree, and it is 100% possible to become extremely wealthy applying a methodology of reading candlestick charts using a model of price movement.
This is Forex by the way – stock trading is inherently more difficult because there are more random factors at play in terms of news events, broker upgrades/downgrades, a poorly performing stock in the same sector etc. However, the “rules” such as they are, are still generally followed. Forex in particular lends itself strongly to this type of technical analysis.
xsplat said:
If I’m remembering correctly, the intern who was out here was a forex trader at a bank once. I don’t know what qualifications the bank required, but I got the impression that the traders were given leaway to invest according to their own theories.
I’ve heard of forex traders at banks moving big bucks, as profit and as loss. The intern had made profit, but his sector had a big loss due to another forex trader making bad moves. So it seems their individual choices were not according to any particular bank rulebook, and they had a lot of leeway.
But I don’t know if statistics on the returns of professional forex traders who work for banks ever get published. That would be an interesting stat.
Those types of investments seem high risk to me, for the reasons I mentioned. Are there any long term stats for experts who follow the method you are learning?
YouSoWould said:
The level of risk is entirely at your own discretion. You use a stop loss on every trade in case you are wrong, and then it is up to you how much of your account you wish to risk on each trade. Conservative traders tend to stick with 0.5%/1%, more aggressive traders risk 5% per trade. You get paid according to how many multiples of the distance your stop loss is away from your entry point, that your trade makes in profit. If you risk 2% over 10 pips, and your trade makes 50 pips, then that’s 5RR (risk/reward ratio), and you’ve added 10% to your account. There are then more advanced money management strategies, such as compounding winnings, scaling in and out of trades, managing your average position across a sequence etc etc.
The method I use allows extremely accurate placement of entry points and stop losses. Not all will win, but those that do more than easily cover losses. For instance if you aim for just 2RR off each trade, you only need to win 33% of them just to break even. The best trade I’ve personally made was 77RR at 1% risk. A friend made 130RR on a trade some months ago.
There is a community based around the website on a forum. There are different levels of traders on there. The guy that founded it runs an academy for those wishing to pay to get a shortcut on the learning process.
People don’t generally discuss their figures in great detail. However I know there are some guys on there who are killing it. Not many, but more than just a few. Most members don’t have the required intelligence to grasp the concepts fully – but even then, you can still get good profit out of the market with a limited understanding of just some of the concepts.
The guy who founded it originally was part of another group of traders. One of these was a guy called Ken who ran a site called Ace Gazette. He does publish his results online, and he makes some truly staggering gains.
xsplat said:
So the guy who founded the site also earns income teaching others.
I’m sure you are aware of “highly successful” entrepreneurs who “later” go on to teach entrepeneurialism. One guy was out in Bali a while back, and has built up a big cult following. I can’t remember his name or his site, but he’s famous enough that you might know of him.
Apparently the true story is that his cat scratch house business was only modestly successful, for a time, and he discovered the real money was in selling the dream. So he leveraged his so called success into a forum where people share entrepreneurial advice on a monthly subscription basis. Plus he hosts seminars where the crowd get together. I’m very, very cynical about it. I consider him to be selling hope – a fleeting feel good emotion. The participants don’t see it that way at all.
The guy was upfront about it in an interview; you hardly had to read between the lines. He discovered that fuck being a real entrepreneur, there is way more money in selling the dream.
Have you ever talked to a born again Amway salesman? My brother was one. Boy, was he a convert. It was if his belief in his potential success was his one and only pillar of strength in his otherwise turbulent world. He didn’t mind the math and statistics about pyramid schemes. I’ve never seen anyone so addicted to hope as my brother. It was freaky. He would play Amway supplied fuzzy noise tapes to himself as he slept to deliberately self hypnotize himself with subliminal messages of Amway hope. Ya, they not only supplied tapes of their Amway rallies, but they altered the background noise of constant fervent cheering into hiss of ongoing subliminal white noise. Zeeig! Amway! Zeeig! Amway!
I bought one stock in my life, on the recommendation of my father, who was recommended it by his favorite pundit. I was 18 at the time, and I lost $500. I know a brokers advice vs learning how to read info from (or into?) charts is apples and oranges, but the reason I bring it up, is because there is a reason that the pundit was giving stock tips through a newsletter, and building a following. It was because the real money for him was not in picking stocks. It was in claiming that he was successful at picking stocks, and using that fame to gather clients.
My Dad always told me to beware of people giving business advice. If it were truly good, they would keep it secret and do it themselves, and gain more advantage that way.
You have said yourself that the market could adjust for inefficiencies, in other words if enough people with enough money learn to do what you are then it won’t work anymore.
So if it really did work, there would with absolute certainty be more money in keeping it secret than in sharing it.
Plus if he could consistently and correctly use his system, he could soon build up some fame and following from investors, and even invest for major banks, rather than settle with paid subscriptions from an internet community.
As would anyone successful in that community.
If anyone can make it work, long term, there is much more at stake than sharing knowledge.
There is a forum called Blackhatworld.com. On it people publish amazing profits. Then they charge for their SEO service, based on their published profits.
But guess what? I posted on that forum several times, asking for recommendations from purchasers of any SEO service, with recommedations. No one replied with a positive review. Again and again I asked. The only people who chimed up were the service providers!
I had bought all the software, did all the reading, hired my own staff of 8 to follow all the directions, and it was all crap.
Oh, but so many people on there were making hundreds of thousands of dollars! The truth is most people on there manage a sweatshop of Indians who earn two bucks an hour, or privately earn their money selling the dream.
Whenever anyone is selling advice for how to make money, they are selling the dream. It’s always some form of naivety tax.
That’s how I’ve come to see it.
Published results could be believable if they were published and retrieved from tax records, but even then there must be proof that he was using his own investment capital and not others, and it would need to be for a stretch of years.
On the other hand, there are professional gamblers, especially poker players. To be a professional gambler relies on a crowd of less informed people. I don’t know how it works in Forex – people are all expecting to know more than anyone else – countries, banks, big and small and individual investors. I would expect that most of the money is held by the big players who would have all the info that you have plus much more. You’d know more about that than I do who is expected to be losing the money. For gamblers they expect the non-pros to lose. They don’t go into the pro gambling business expecting to earn their daily bread from the other pros. That would be gambling, not business. You did explain that you look at the charts to see what the big movers are doing, but if it’s forex, then other big movers must also be looking at the same charts – so is it a room full of mostly pros, or are there enough rubes to go around? Is much of the money in forex held by casual private investors?
Apparently the consistent money in this game is in charging fees to play. Your mentors charge tiers of subscription fees. Others charge fees for them to make investment choices.
I heard of one wealthy investor who is a friend of a friend. He would make and lose fortunes. The reason he could continue to do so was that in earning fortunes, he also earned fame and networked widely. He’d fly people out from across the globe for salons in his mansion. The best and the brightest. This was apparently proof of his investing prowess. He did do well, often. Until he didn’t. But his fame was enough to gather him new investors, until he could hit his stride again.
If he didn’t have new investors, he’d not still have his mansion.
The game of investing seems to always rely on other peoples money, in the long run. From everything I’ve ever seen or heard.
If professionals at every level consistently lose and win at rates at or below chance and have access to the same info plus more than you do, I just can’t see how the track records of professionals who are the best and brightest from top schools and who studied for years and have decades of investing experience can be easily discounted.
YouSoWould said:
Yes there are all valid points, and one myself and friends have discussed amongst ourselves at great lengths.
Why give the information away at all?
We came to a similar conclusion – he gives just enough away to tease, without revealing the whole method, which is enough to pique curiosity. And there is easier, less stressful money to be made from selling places at his academy, than in sitting there and trading himself. Although I don’t doubt the man can do it – when someone tells you “this is how the market works” and you go away and do it yourself, and it’s correct, then you tend to believe them.
Also, I think he came to the same realisation I did a while back – you can show 10000 peopple this information, and only a small handful will be able to pick it up and run with it, it simply is beyond the intelligence level of most people to decipher. When you consider that there are trillions of dollars going through the forex markets daily (retail make up around 10% of this figure, so pretty insignificant), even 1000 retail traders with this sort of knowledge won’t even be a drop in the ocean.
I can personally vouch however that the information is valid, and works. I’ve put it into practise over and over again myself. But it took a lot of extra work to put all the pieces together, much more than what is available just on the site. I’m not some statstruck noob chasing the dream of magic free money, I know a scam when I see it, and this is the real deal.
It just comes down to how much time and effort you are prepared to put into learning and practising the concepts. For me, it’s a no brainer – if someone told me I could go back to university for 3 or 4 years, unpaid, but at the end I get a job with unlimited salary where I pick my own working hours, from anywhere in the world – I’d rip their arm off.
And so here I sit, nearly 2 years into the process (although I only find this information a little over 1 year ago, the first 10 months was a total waste of time pissing in the wind), and now very very close to realising success.
I suspect no-one will believe me until I show them the Ferrari, but that’s fine, I probably wouldn’t either!
xsplat said:
I met a broker online who was consistently able to find information asymmetries. He was a commodities broker, of sorts.
What he did was travel around and make connections with farmers and international buyers, and profited on the farmer not having his list of high paying buyers.
He was able to do huge volume. He didn’t limit himself to contacting farmers, he could also sell Mexican socks to Japan, and Chinese steel to Brazil.
Every trade he did was based on information asymmetry, and he had his profit locked in and guaranteed for each trade. He did not need to rely on other investors information moving his value store up or down. I thought his was a very clever use of the power of networking. A broker in the best sense.
The import export business can also be tricky though, because markets always shift, but that man seemed to have got around that problem through diversification. He didn’t specialize in knowing the details of Thai silver jewelry, and rake in millions over a 5 year trend, but instead broadly built connections in various markets.
I’ve done import export, and I’ve done sales, and my heart isn’t in it any more. I need my heart to be in my now and my future. So now I’m moving more into the manufacturing and custom art sectors.
irishdoesasia said:
Nice article. As a guy in my mid 30s for me social status & hierarchy make such a huge impact, and the older you get the more critical it becomes. As you are expected to be established and successful when you’re older. A younger lad gets away with it by merely on his potential to be great. Although status and money are necessarily the same thing, they will usually will go hand in hand. Particularly for the older guy. Having that social status and positioning just opens so many more doors for you and with it provides access to that top level pussy…
I’m in Bali fairly often (usually Seminyak), I should hit you up next time I’m over
Glengarry said:
I’ve been mildly interested in forex because it’s a huge market which is always about relative value, but before I got started I decided the life of financial trading is not for me.
It’s annoying to have to monitor and think about your investments too much. I think I’d now prefer one of two approaches: the best one is probably to use a private bank with a long history of capital preservation to do the work for you. The other one might be the “permanent portfolio”. 25% each in stocks (indexes), bonds (long broad funds), cash (USD/reserve currency) and gold; rebalance every year or so.
However, it’s probably quite annoying to keep a “permanent portfolio” in a long bull market, because everyone else is leveraging their houses and getting rich. Being the conservative sort, I prefer to first have paid off my debts, including mortgages, and to have a cash buffer for a couple of years frugal living expenses in the bank (or safe deposit box). After that, invest the rest and try never to lose any significant amounts. You may be able to be less conservative by relying of the local welfare state.
Finally, it’s very nice to have cash readily available so you can act on the opportunities that appear in bad markets.
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daysofgame.com said:
>>The integration of personal interest, future interest, financial interest, and social interest is complete.
Totally disagree with you about Sigma… But ^ this is a great comment.
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Somewhere else you said “all attraction switches are valid.” I loved that comment too.
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Krauser’s sigma is not about ignoring hierarchy. It’s about non-situational dominance. Personality based, more than environmental.
And he is right about that. A kind of truth.
The hierarchy I present as a daygamer is still within the sexual marketplace… She compares me to what she knows elsewhere.
And my swagger is grounded in reality based on what I know I have done in my life, and my value in the marketplace.
Sigma is being able to create attraction with no “props.” And that is badass, and more reliable than “environment” game.
I am not anti success or anti cash. But I am anti props (for now) in terms of seduction.