Don’t Be Fooled

All Time Highs Aren't What They Seem to Be The mainstream media is going to start blaring all kinds of statistics intended to influence the low-information voter. Here is what they will say. The Biden stock market is doing great. It’s at all-time highs! We don’t care about all-time highs. They are nice to cite for soundbites, but meaningless when looking at the underlying. We care about the rate of change, or what statisticians and economists will call the “delta” along with “velocity”. How much did it change, and how fast did it change? The margin is what is important and where you can draw insight. Comparing Biden and Trump is hard because the statistics they throw at you are so muddled. However, there are some hard statistics we can cite to objectively assess what was and is going on. The stock market is one proxy for where the overall economy is at. There are others and both Presidents, along with Obama, took credit for a rising stock market. They had very little to do with it, but their policies could open doors or close them. Sean Hannity likes to say “92% of Americans aren’t in the stock market and are unaffected.” I think it’s because commentators don’t understand the stock market. The S+P 500 ($SPY) is the best indicator of the broader market, these numbers would be similar if one used the Dow Jones Industrial Average or the Nasdaq 100 ($QQQ). In my analysis, I break out 2019 and 2020. Since 2020 was the Covid year it is incredibly skewed in all kinds of ways. But, to show respect for the numbers, I show both and calculate Joe Biden’s baseline off the 2020 year since in all respects the data I cite gives President Biden a leg up so any detractors of my analysis know I gave the sitting President the benefit of the doubt. He assumed office in 2021, so it’s not fair to measure him using 2019 numbers. Let’s look at the stock market. In December of 2016, the S+P 500 was at 2249. Trump took office in January of 2017. In December of 2019, two months before the Covid shutdown, the stock market was at 3221.29, a 43.23% increase. For perspective, on February 19, 2020, when the worldwide governments forced economic shutdowns the S+P 500 was at 3386.11 up 50.56%. Then the Covid crash happened. By December 31, 2020, the S+P 500 was up 66% at 3733.27 That’s a 50% increase under Trump before Covid. Post Covid, it’s a 66% increase during Trump’s term. The S+P 500 was 3733.27 on December 31, 2020, and Biden assumed office in January 2021. On January 29, 2024, the S+P 500 closed at 4892.95. That’s a 31.06% increase under Biden. Even if the stock market is up by December 31, 2024, it’s probably not going to increase by another 35%. The Biden administration has gone on the air saying that they have been pumping out records. “It’s at all-time highs”, they will say. Again, it’s a perverse usage of statistics. Biden will tell you he is “pro-energy”. Let’s look at the statistics on natural gas and crude oil, the two major energy sources we use in the United States to heat and electrify homes and move stuff around the country. Natural gas is a clean burning fossil fuel that doesn’t contribute to global warming. Fracking and other innovation has helped the US find and produce more of it. Remember, Biden signed executive orders banning new exploration for fossil fuels on Day 1 of his administration. That set the tone. Trump was the opposite. Natural gas production in 2015 was 74.1 cubic feet. Natural gas production in 2019 was 93.1 cubic feet. Up 25.64% Natural gas production in the Covid year of 2020 was 90.77 cubic feet. Up 22.49% Natural gas production under Trump increased by 22.49%. Biden took over. He signed the aforementioned executive orders and his stated regulatory mission was to put fossil fuels out of business. Natural gas production in 2020 was 90.77 cubic feet Natural gas production in 2023 was 102.2 cubic feet Up 12.59%. Production grew more slowly in 2023 than in 2022. Gee, I wonder why that could be. Here is a way to observe the differences graphically. Notice the drop off since Biden took over and the difference in the slope of the graph line. Trump’s production was better than Biden’s. It’s not close. Crude oil shows similar statistics. In 2016, the US produced 8.9 million barrels. This was below the 2015 level. Obama’s war on oil was working. In 2019, the US produced 12.23 million barrels of crude oil Up 37.41% In 2020, the US produced 11.3 million barrels of crude oil. Up 26.96% Biden took over. In 2020, the US produced 11.3 million barrels of crude oil In 2023, the US produced 12.9 million barrels of crude oil Up 14.16% Again, the rate of increase in production under Trump crushes anything Biden did. If you get technical and try and adjust for inflation, the numbers favor Trump quite a bit more. Here is another funny thing. The abortion debate the Democrats want to run on shows similar kinds of statistics. Democrats and the Mainstream Media will tell you that there is not as much access to abortion after the Supreme Court remanded the issue to the states. However, that’s just not the case. Pre-Roe v Wade repeal; 75,000 abortions per month nationwide Post-Roe v Wade repeal; 87,000 abortions per month nationwide. Up 16% monthly. Trump beats Biden in virtually every economic category that matters to the average American. It’s not even close. Even if you hate Trump, you shouldn’t stay home and enable mediocrity and failure. Voting for a third party is silly too since that never works out. Perot put Clinton over the top in 1992 and left us with Hillary. There is idealism, and then there is realism. follow me on X @pointsnfigures1 Points And Figures is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Points And Figures that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments. © 2024 Jeffrey Carter 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

From Lake Michigan to The Sea

From Lake Michigan to The Sea Chicago Endorses Terrorism JEFFREY CARTER FEB 1 Today, the Chicago City Council voted to support the terrorists in Gaza. Biden and his people are going for a two-state solution which we know won’t work because the Palestinians aren’t interested in a two-state solution. A Palestinian state will just lob rockets daily into Israel, financed by Iran. For what it’s worth, the race hustler Jesse Jackson sided with the terrorists and brought a Palestinian scarf and laid it out on the table. Karol Markowitz nailed it on Twitter: “No better way to say “terrorism works”. To be clear, the Palestinians went into Israel and tortured, raped, dismembered, and murdered men, women and children. Even babies were beheaded. They took hostages, tortured them, and killed them. This is what Chicago endorsed today. They are on the side of hate. Other big cities have done similar. San Francisco, Detroit, and Atlanta, for example. I wholeheartedly endorse the flattening of the Gaza Strip and the killing of anyone who wants to terrorize any citizen of Israel. When you are attacked, and attacked the way they were attacked, there can be no mercy. Mercy happens after the war is fought and won. There is no “both sides are wrong” false equivalence here. If you follow that logic, then the Allies pushing into Germany had a “both sides are wrong” quality to it. The Palestinians are wrong and historically have been wrong. Biden has abandoned his Jewish constituency. I hope they see it. Jews traditionally have been a strong voting and money block for the Democratic Party. FDR abused them too. I am not surprised the city council voted 23-23 and the mayor cast the deciding vote. It’s a show pony, and meaningless. But, it might mean something to my Jewish friends in Chicago. Almost all of them, probably 95%, voted Democrat for years. They contributed large sums of money to Democrats and in some cases were parts of organizations that froze out anyone with a different opinion. Especially if you were pro-life. I have empathy, but it is tempered by the fact that they thought it was the Republicans who were racist. They are finding out. I saw the statement from the ADL and JUF, and I thought that it wasn’t strong or angry enough. A ceasefire will do zero. They want to kill you no matter where you are. The Palestinians aren’t even going to flinch when it comes to the other demands the ADL/JUF put in their statement. The Show Pony will embolden the people who hate Jews to carry out crimes and discrimination against them. They will use it as an excuse. Conveniently, the Chicago Teachers Union is for Palestine. They run the city now and are the new Machine. I read something from Bari Weiss once. She wrote that societies that do not protect the vulnerable, and allow anti-semitism to thrive do not survive. History proves her correct. Societies that are tolerant and accepting thrive. It has been that way in the United States for over 200 years now. When it is a religious belief, only the tip of the spear, force, can change anything, and change likely requires the absolute elimination of a person from the earth. That’s what “from the river to the sea” means. As of today, it is Lake Michigan to the Sea. We are facing down the barrel of a gun today and if you bask in your Christianity/Buddhism/Hinduism or any other belief, don’t. You are next. My Jewish friends are all of a sudden, vulnerable. They are facing a wall of anti-semitism. The people that hate them are being enabled by the milquetoast and double speak of the Biden Administration, and the absolute hate of the Chicago Democratic Machine. I want my friends protected. I want tolerance. But, we know that is impossible, especially now. Especially after the Chicago city council voted to be on the side of intolerance and hate. Again and again, I see hundreds of problems with life in the city of Chicago, all of them administered and caused by Democrats. They were the chumbalones who voted for this. Votes like the one that happened today make me glad I left Chicago. Points And Figures is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Points And Figures that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments. © 2024 Jeffrey Carter 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

The Government Picks Winners And Losers

Two Separate Decisions Show How The Free Market Doesn't Work This week has been a great week for anyone who loves wrecking capitalistic businesses. There are a lot of those kinds of people all over America. The first was the Europeans. European bureaucrats never saw a business that they didn’t want to control. They killed the deal between Amazon ($AMZN) and iRobot, makers of the robotic vacuum cleaner Roomba. If you haven’t read “The Rotten Heart of Europe” by Bernard Connelly, you should. It will help you understand do-nothing agencies like the World Economic Forum. The result. The CEO of iRobot is stepping down and will be laying off 350 employees. They don’t have the cash flow to plunge into research and development and have an operating loss of $265 to $285 million. They are a dead duck. Earlier this year, Adobe ($ADBE) abandoned a $20 billion dollar buyout of Figma. Nvidia ($NVDA)abandoned a $40 billion deal to acquire Arm . In early 2022, Meta ($META) was unable to buy Giphy. All cited huge regulatory challenges. Yesterday, a Delaware judge ruled that a pay plan that was approved by the Tesla $TSLA board of directors and voted on by shareholders was illegal. A recalcitrant communist shareholder who owned 9 shares of stock filed suit on a plan approved in 2018. Judges should not be ruling how much companies can pay their employees. Period. If the governments of the world wanted to see the rich get richer, this past quarter was a good primer on how to make it happen. What’s the incentive to go public? The public markets are unrestricted. Any Tom, Dick, or Harry can buy stock and hope it appreciates in value. The private markets are heavily restricted. Only the wealthy can play and even if you are wealthy, you need access to deal flow and to network to make something happen. The wealthier you are, combined with being active, you get to take a look at a lot of pitches. The average schmuck is frozen out. I don’t care if you hate Elon Musk’s guts or not for turning X into a free speech platform. Tesla went public at $19 per share. If you invested $10,000 on the IPO day, it is worth over $2MM today. The company went public at a market capitalization of $1.7 billion. Today it’s worth $600.34 billion. Elon created value for shareholders and employees of 35214.12%. Name any CEO who has done that since 2010. Musk was going to be paid $55 billion in stock options. Not cash. Not salary. Stock options. He had incentives he had to hit. This was not a free lunch. But, the long hand of the government, a centralized judge’s decision, swiped away an arms-length negotiation between a board and a CEO. In this climate, it’s hard to say the decision is not political. This is not a lot different than the Stalinesque charges and verdicts out of NY State courts against Trump. Trump valued his property at arm’s length with bankers and actually paid off his loans. Based on the value of the properties, he paid more property tax than he should have to the state given that they think he overvalued properties. What gives the government any right to get in the middle of that transaction? Trump is a private company as well, so there are few shareholders. In the “rape” case, Trump never met the women and there was no tangible evidence that anything ever happened. It was a “show me the man and I will show you the crime” judgment. Hopefully, both will not win on appeal but my guess is it will have to go over to the federal courts for Trump to get a modicum of justice. You might think $55 billion is obscene. That’s not a positive economic judgment. That’s a normative economic judgment. What if Tesla becomes the #1 robot maker in the world with all the software to boot? Does the company double in value? Triple? Quadruple? No one knows. Musk will certainly appeal and will have the board of Tesla on his side I would assume. I do not know anything about chancery law in Delaware, so I can’t speculate on what might happen. I do know that we will see more lawsuits like this from recalcitrant shareholders against CEOs who negotiated pay with their boards. I also predict that companies will stay private longer, and more companies will try to leave the public marketplace and go private if they can. Points And Figures is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Points And Figures that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments. © 2024 Jeffrey Carter 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

Can't Even Agree Hence The Divide

If you think of the current political environment, and it is toxic and tribal, is bad now, wait. It’s going to escalate tremendously in 2024. Two reasons. The Democrats want chaos. “Never let a crisis go to waste” is a mantra and by creating crisis, they use government solutions to grab more power. The Republicans use it to instill fear to try and motivate. “This is the most important election in our lifetimes.” Neither is particularly good at achieving what we need, consensus and agreement. Each side doesn’t trust each other at all. It also doesn’t help when people on your team cave on core values to try and build consensus. See the recent immigration bill in the Senate or anything Mitt Romney says. I always found that with reasonable people, I could find a solution if we could agree on the problem at hand. The knee-jerk reaction for a Democrat or a RINO is to create an expansive government program and spend government money to fix it. That’s a bad solution not only because it expands the power of the government. The real danger is that it abdicates an individual's personal responsibility to think about and solve it. Look at charitable giving and see which party’s faithful give more. There is a reason why and not because one party’s faithful is less charitable than the others. Arthur Brooks looked at this and shattered a lot of myths. When the government is the solution to everything, your taxes are considered charitable giving even though everyone of every political stripe tries to minimize them. There are plenty of examples of disconnect and distrust. Immigration is a hot one now. We can’t even agree on whether to close the border or not, how are we going to solve for immigration? Education is another hot one. We can’t even agree if we want classically educated people in the US. Education has become overtly politicized. Health and wellness is one. One side sees it as a human right. Once you go down that path, it is guaranteed and there is only one thing that can guarantee it. The other side sees it as a claim on someone’s personal innovation and labor. That’s kind of equivalent to slavery. It also avoids the fact that in most cases, healthiness is a personal choice. Free trade is another. Trump had tariffs. They didn’t work. Biden has tariffs. They don’t work. Yesterday Trump said he would put 60% tariffs on goods from China, which won’t work. Both sides talk a good game on free trade but neither is willing to walk away from tariffs, subsidies, price supports, or price ceilings. Maybe Trump is just making political talking points and trying to appear tough on the Chinese, but given his track record he doesn’t have to do that. The tax system is yet another. Trump’s tax cuts expire in 2025. Both sides are angling for a fight and I see all kinds of proposals now that are on the edges. Instead of trusting the individual citizen to make their own decision on taxes, they want to implement a centralized government solution. To be clear about where I stand, given the low optimum choices that confront me on the tableau, Trump is the least worst of all of them. There is no candidate like the Argentinian Milei in this tableau, even on third parties. Free markets if applied correctly can restore trust, and create consensus. The one thing I know is that the free market is objective if you let it be objective. Some of the more remarkable parts of the classic R. A. Radford paper on the “Economics of a POW Camp” is that a huge economy was created out of nothing. There was no actual government-issued currency. The prisoners used cigarettes. Since they used cigarettes, you could make a personal choice to not smoke, or smoke far less and you were automatically “richer”. The same goes for many choices people make in their own lives today. There was no surgeon general’s warning, no government telling you that you couldn’t, and nothing was illegal. The camp had a coffee and tea stand, and it was so busy they needed to pay an accountant to keep track. The free market economy created ancillary jobs that weren’t envisioned when it started. By the way, there was no centralized push for the market to start. It just happened because people are hard-wired to get gains from trade. As soon as the officers started to regulate and implement control measures they thought were “fair”, the economy crashed. Centralization kills free markets. “Oh, but we need some rules, some guardrails”, say the crowd. They see themselves in the middle between the free marketers and the government control freaks. The only rules you need are very clear and transparent standards on trading, settlement, and how money gets transferred. All the other stuff gives rise to price ceilings and floors and gives a competitive advantage to some market participants over others. Points And Figures is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Points And Figures that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments. © 2024 Jeffrey Carter 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

Testing Yourself The Pit Found A Way

Many young traders on FinTwit wonder what it would have been like to trade in the pits. Human to human. Mano to mano. A lot of people also ask me about how to break into VC. They are similar, though not the same. This morning on Twitter, I saw an old trader friend PAX tell a younger trader about it. Here is PAX in the Nasdaq 100 futures pit. He is trying to sell some contracts. It looks like he is either turning the market or there is an order filler buying that he is trying to get the attention of. There are a few of us old dinosaurs around. Had the pits existed today, I’d still be in them but at my age, it is highly doubtful I would be trading the same way I did when I was 40, or 30, or in my mid-twenties. A younger trader remarked on Twitter, “I know I would have been very successful.” Maybe. Maybe not. The true first step in success on the trading floor was believing strongly in yourself. You had to be very comfortable in your own skin, comfortable with your own identity. It helped if you tried things in your life and failed. It also helped if you had been entrepreneurial in your life, or in some way self-sufficient. When I got my $150.00/wk gross, no insurance, and no taxes taken out, runner job on the floor, I was told by our desk manager at Stotler that I wouldn’t make it. I wasn’t smart enough or good enough. This was after my first week on the floor after quitting a promising corporate career that paid real money. A few months later, when I got my $200.00/wk gross, no insurance, and no taxes taken out, pit clerk job in the Eurodollar options pit, most people said I wouldn’t make it. But some people thought I could after they watched me and got to know me. They knew I was very competitive and wanted to win. When you clerked, sometimes you paper traded. Most of the time to keep your mind occupied you’d mentally trade. You’d watch and observe. “I wouldn’t have done that trade” or “I would have made that trade.” you’d say to yourself. It looked effortless and natural when you clerked on the outside of the pit. A lot of the time, your back was to the pit. Your back acted like a plate of armor insulating you from the bedlam behind you. But, when you got your membership, you took about a two to three-foot change in where you stood. It doesn’t sound like a lot physically, but it was a huge chasm mentally. It was time to face forward in the pit and face your internal demons. By the way, if you were a female or a physically smaller male, it was harder. I am 6’5” and my great friend PBL is a far better trader than I will ever be. The first day I walked into the pit with my trading badge on as a member, and “real trader” after having been on the floor for two years every single day of my life, I could barely talk. I had gone through the traditional rites of passage meaning the Membership Committee and taking the test. I had worked with the people I was standing with. They knew me. I opened my mouth, and my voice wasn’t there. I moved my hands in the air. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I was dry. I made my first trade with RKP. It was a five lot. I scratched it within two minutes of making it. Several months later in the heat of a “fast market”, I was sweating. Fast markets meant a lot of the rules on price reporting were off, and was a signal to the outside world all hell was breaking loose inside the pit on the floor. I was competing with everyone to buy a forty lot. COT was selling and a burrowed through the pit in front of him. He winked at me and sold me 40. I had made two grand. I felt like I was home then. A lot of traders grew up where their fathers were traders. Some of their father’s fathers were traders. Others had family money. They had a safety net. People knew them since birth so there was some nepotism. If you weren’t one of those people, you had to figure out how to compete toe to toe with them and win. Losing meant you were shown the door. That doesn’t sound like anything related to numbers. It isn’t. Trading is 100% psychological, especially when you are in a pit. People like to think it’s non-emotional and just about accounting numbers, economic numbers, and statistics. There is more of that in computerized trading, but not as much in pit trading. Sure, unemotional numbers and statistics matter. But, not in the heat of the moment. As Mike Tyson used to say, “Everyone has a great battle plan until they get punched in the mouth.” The pit used to find all kinds of ways to punch you in the mouth. The pit didn’t just punch you once either. Sometimes it was daily. Sometimes hourly. Sometimes it would leave you alone and sneak up on you when you didn’t expect it or you thought you had it licked. There were days you “made your bones” and got the respect of fellow traders. But, everyone knew that just because you did it once didn’t mean you were immune from having to do it again. The pit had a huge circumference. Inside of it, it held the statistics and figures of the market. But, the pit contained the emotions, egos, goals, and psychology of each person inside the physical ring, combined with the emotions, psychology, and goals of every market participant outside the ring. Think of it like a pressure cooker, not an arena. For most of us inside the ring, it was our own money. Our own personal hedge funds with one LP, us. Every single day was the Super Bowl. Lose $10k, it was yours. You weren’t paying your rent and your kids were going to have to eat less. Make $10k, it was yours. Your wife got to shop at Hermes and you were on your way to an American Express black card. It was life on a razor’s edge. If you haven’t ever lost real meaningful money in an instant where it hurts physically, then you haven’t felt the emotion that comes with trading. In addition, since you were doing the actual trade, the writing down, the competing for it, the checking of it, your ego got involved. You wanted to be right. How easy is it for you to admit you are wrong in your daily life? Now layer in money and the fact that you have to do it in front of the entire world. How easy would it be then? I remember taking my Chicago Booth MBA classmates on the floor. Some of them asked me where my computer was with Excel spreadsheets to help me make decisions. I laughed. Decisions were made instantly. Now or never. The spreadsheets and all the data had to be looked at ahead of time and stored in your memory. In the heat of the moment, you had to recall all that data and make a decision. Some people can do that and some can’t. Nine out of every ten that walked on the floor couldn’t. Would you have been one of the nine or the one? There were more millionaires per square inch on the trading floors of Chicago than anywhere else on Earth. When you started, you hoped to join that crowd and be able to drop $1000 at the bar like nobody cared. That brought a lot of people from everywhere. The trading floor was a hard rubber black surface. It was grippy like a basketball court in the morning. By mid-morning, it was slippery and sticky all at once. It would be full of paper, newspapers, gum, seeds, spittle, and dust. And PEOPLE. Crammed into small spaces. Swaying, fighting, jostling and gesticulating. Every walk of life. Every political belief. Every size, shape, and smell. The smell of the trading floor put people off. When you were inside a pit, it was a combination of nervous sweat, not the same smell you get from a gym, nervous gaseous farts, hot breath coming from mouths. Breathe mixed with mints, gum, and cigarettes. Clothes that contained crusty sweat and hadn’t been dry cleaned. Noise. A cacophony. It was as loud as a jet engine. Multiple sounds all at once and you had to decipher precisely the one you needed to make money. (I will write some stories about the floor, but you will have to pay to read them. This blog will always be free.) When you go to a boxing match, you watch. You don’t get to participate. Not so in the pit. If you were the person that didn’t participate, eventually, you were eliminated. Would you have been the nine, or the one? With computers, the game is changed. It doesn’t resemble pit trading at all. The market even acts differently. The other facet you have to realize is that when you were in the pit, it was easier to create an edge for yourself. On the screen, it is significantly harder to create an edge. Instead of being the hunter, you are the pigeon. If you want to business school and took a marketing course, a basic economics course, and a good business strategy course, you could apply that in the pit. I walked into the Eurodollar pit and decided right away I wasn’t going to compete with people who were already there and dominating. What did I have to add? I’d also have to physically fight my way to get a good pit position and the effort wasn’t worth the opportunity cost. I needed to find a market segment I could dominate and exploit. I found one and when that got crowded I found another. As a pit trader, often you had to constantly reinvent yourself. In entrepreneurship circles, they call that “pivoting”. I look at other “risky” occupations. Venture capital is a good one. I hear blather about how much risk venture capitalists take. I don’t see it. Very few of them are willing to make a market. Very few of them take truly early risks. I have seen it over and over again. “Come back to me when…..” They don’t put real money on the line when they should. That means they invest too little when the risk/reward is right. I learned that when I spoke to a lot of small VCs in Silicon Valley. They were writing $50k-$150k checks into a bunch of companies thinking they were diversifying their risk and hoping, hoping, that one of them would turn into a unicorn. It’s a great strategy to lose money. Since many haven’t taken real risks or made a market in their life, they don’t recognize when the risk/reward is really right. A legendary and highly successful trader/entrepreneur Tom Sosnoff of Tastytrade once said, “The greatest thing about trading is it forces you to make a market hundreds of times a day. You get practice at making decisions and taking risks.” Most VCs remind me of the guys in the pit who tried to glom onto trades. They let other people make the market and then they’d scream about how they were “first”. They’d beg the person who made the market to give them a few crumbs. They were market takers. As a pit trader, occasionally you would keep them around because you needed someone to take the crumbs or overflow. But, you knew when the market got hot or if the chips were down, they wouldn’t be there for you. Some VCs do have their own money at stake. Some put their own money into their funds. There are VC funds out there that could be funded 100% from the partners. Then, other funds don’t have a huge personal money component to them. They don’t have skin in the game and the losses don’t hurt as much. Those are the glommers, the market takers. They won’t make markets. They are generally useless and just commodity money. If I am a market-making VC, why do I need them in my deal? I have had plenty of people ask me how to get into the VC game. My first question is “Have you ever invested real meaningful money into something you have no control over, that has very little chance of making it, and then lost it all?” If they haven’t, they may or may not be cut out for VC but when that happens it’s their first punch in the mouth. The other thing is just like when I was running, then clerking to get into the pit, everyone told me that I wasn’t right for VC or early-stage investing. Hence, I have never worked for a VC firm. I invested my own money and then had to find a partner so we could start our own. But, I ain’t sitting in my house in Las Vegas because of trading. Trading allowed me to take another chance. Anyone who knows me well knows that the years 2009-2016 were brutal for me. But, I was a survivor. Pit trading was one of the hardest occupations on earth to be successful at. It was lonely. Isolating, even with the camaraderie. It started with a belief in yourself. But, you had to hew to the iron laws of economics and statistics. You had to know how to make instant decisions on risk/reward, and then react accordingly. If you were Frosty the Snowman, you melted. The strongest law was 90% didn’t make it. Would you have been the 10%? Points And Figures is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Points And Figures that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments. © 2024 Jeffrey Carter 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104