Being Humble is Required for Trading
QUESTION: I have a personal question. You have said that what you know has been taught to you by your clients. People who attend your WEC say you are humble and not arrogant. Could you explain that?
MN
ANSWER: Look. You cannot go to university to get a degree in trading or being a hedge fund manager. You have to be self-taught in this field. If you want to be a successful trader, you MUST be humble!!!!!! The market is the ONLY thing that is 100% infallible. So you better be humble and survive. If you want to be arrogant and try to dictate what the market should do, you will not survive very long. So I do not understand why that should be a surprise. This is about reading the markets and listening to what they are trying to tell us. This is NOT about being personally right or wrong. Your bank account will determine that. You can tell someone who will never survive because as soon as they start blaming other people for their own failures like Hillary Clinton, they should quit and save a lot of money for they will NEVER be a good trader.
Trading teaches you to be humble or you will not survive. The market is much bigger than you or even government. One primary trading tip I have perhaps been famous for saying is: Intelligence is not measured in the definitive knowledge that is never wrong. It is measured by the ability to see when you are wrong and quickly adapt to the new reality.
There are some people who could never do anything with respect to trading if they (1) cannot admit a mistake, and (2) be a dynamic thinker where you see everything around you.
I have been TRAINED by my clients. I was giving a seminar in Zurich in the early ’80s. People were flying in from many different countries. This became the origin of the WEC events, which began in 1985. Why are they so different from standard seminars? Because you have a very diverse audience.
At that Zurich seminar, a client from Canada had asked about gold. I responded that it would be a short-term buy. The guy from Zurich quickly said that since I had said the Swiss franc would rise more than gold, he would lose money on that trade. Right then and there I began to realize that giving advice depended COMPLETELY upon your currency base. I said you are right. The Canadian should buy and the Swiss should sell.
Once I understood that I had to tailor advice and forecasts to the currency base of every client, that was the first step in understanding currency flows. From there, the world began to come into focus.
So if you define “humble” as being flexible to adapt to the changing trends, then you will survive.
