#i mean i need to buy a pc first and then the decision will prob come to me easier BUT im jumping the gun! 🖤😵‍💫

[palmettocapital]

The Emotionally Intelligent Investor (2012)

Develop skills like a chess master — they use gut intuition to pick a move and then check it against their rational risk framework to identify problems

We are hardwired to avoid shame and its cousin regret. Learn strategies to minimize or embrace these—like small lotto ticket positions, trimming when you are tempted to sell too early

Learn to really be happy proving yourself wrong, recognizing an error or disproving a theory, for instance be proud when you find a mistake before you lose money on it

Be careful with spreadsheets and projections - they become too real. Don’t get overly detailed

Keep a trading journal. Practice identifying your emotions as they come, which is a rare skill in itself. Track your emotions and thoughts to help you understand your risk appetite and make more balanced decisions. Track missed opportunities as well as disasters avoided. Interrogate what risk means to you over time.

You are most emotionally vulnerable on a name when you are near break even, because the emotional diff between +/- is so large.

Play is important for self-discovery — elites do it in all fields. Scrimmages, sketching, play acting

Treat “value” (contrarian, trend-reversing) and “growth” (fundamental/price trend-following) differently and use different frameworks. 

Uses stop losses on stocks where a growth investing framework should be used. Only willing to take large % losses on stocks where he’s making highly contrarian bets. Asks himself regularly (weekly) whether he’s using the right playbook for each stock in book.

For value investments, set a buy-it-now price and be willing to dollar-cost average there. Also be willing to take losses, but set a timeframe over which you expect momentum to reverse. Do not dollar cost average in growth/momentum investments (ie once the name gets working for a while and has been exceeding estimates) — sell or trim down to core at the first sign of trouble

If performing well/beating expectations/expectations are for beats / >150d MA / 150d MA rising —> growth playbook. If opposite —> value.

If you can’t figure out which playbook to use (stuck in the middle?) often best to spend your time elsewhere

Speculating on a growth stock regaining momentum is dangerous!

Visualize what can go wrong - see all the ways the boulder can roll down the hill. Practice believing outlandish future scenarios (EZ breakup, USD:JPY at 100, etc)

Optimize for 70% of information - like Colin Powell says, any more than that prob means you spent too long. Uncertainty drives opportunities, embrace it!

Druckenmiller would occasionally sell his entire book to flat to reset things for him & his analysts — clean sheet of paper is very freeing

Personality assessment test —marketpsych.com/personality_test.php

Use your own fear to know when the right time to buy is. Mark Cook reasoned when he was scared other market participants were likely at least as scared as he was and therefore it was probably a good time to buy

7 questions before putting on a trade

What does current shareholder base look like? Value/anti-momentum/LT or growth/momo/ST? High SI? Does mgmt own a lot? Value won’t care as much about bad news, growth less likely to buy a miss and may even sell

What are longer term shareholders thinking and feeling?

What are the recent shareholders thinking and feeling?

Who is the potential buyer of the stock (value or growth) and what are they thinking/feeling?

What is the potential short seller thinking and feeling?

(If stock has a high SI) what are those already short thinking and feeling? Likely to cover or press?

What is management thinking and feeling?

Can be analyzed through TA, surveys, questions on calls, talking to mgmt, studying investor base changes, investor convos

Consider creative issues like the fact that quarter end is coming up and investors may not want to show a loser on the books and have to defend it to investors

Investors often act to avoid shame rather than rationally to gain — this is classic prospect theory!!

Prior resistance become support because of the association bias (buying there worked before, people will tend to buy the dip). Basically you buy breakouts because the R/R range has just flipped

Key tenets of technical analysis:

resistance, breakouts above resistance, support, and breakdowns below support. They work because they tell you at a glance average/aggregate positioning and PNL of shareholders — incredibly valuable info

Higher highs & higher lows = investors sell to realize gains but positive enough to buy back higher than before

Worsening breadth = topping market; improving breadth = bottoming. Because win:loss ratio is key to investor emotions and happiness/sadness drive risk appetite/aversion

Bull markets end when the leading stocks underperform. Eg Internet in 2000. Most exposed investors begin underperforming and reduce risk appetite

Ends of bull/bear market periods often have one last extreme leg up/down, driven by hysteria. FOMO and career risk are the dominant emotions, respectively.

Prices decline faster than they rise. “Stocks take the stairs up, elevator down”. Associates it with prospect theory where people feel a loss of Y 2x as much as a gain of Y

Use short-term overbought/oversold indicators like RSI to help with timing

Equivocal: volume often very telling around inflection points

150 day MA = rough approximation of the market’s cost basis for the stock (PC speculation: because 150 trading days = ~6 months or average current hold period)

When interviewing management, be attuned to details. Even trying not to take notes can be useful to help you focus on non-verbal communication from execs. Watch facial reactions, stress responses, face touching, eye contact — all can indicate untruths or stress. Ask questions that challenge them to admit true motivations and weaknesses. Best execs have a short term focus when things are going poorly and long term when things going well (Jobs did this). Notice if they take blame for things not in their control, avoid blame for bad decisions, dismiss legitimate risks or speak too positively about the future when NT is bad. Saying “probably/virtually/basically/fundamentally” or being overly reliant on jargon/technical mumbo-jumbo is a classic tell as well. Buying time with “great question” or “I’m glad you asked that” also notable.

When considering an investment, talk to people long/short/uninvolved and try to empathize with what each is feeling and why they are saying what they’re saying

Analyst’s job in a meeting is to learn, not to impress. Be present!

Intuition comes from pattern recognition. Experience leads to certain mental maps and patterns being formed.

Research (on sports) shows novices do better when they think through things mechanically, and experts do better when they really on feeling and intuition rather than overthinking. This is a problem for professional investors who need to be taken seriously by bosses/clients/regulators. Can be an opportunity — investors like Peter Lynch started with gut (Eg liked donuts at DNKN) but fewer operate that way now, more reliant on screening or pure quant

Pay attention when you hear a pitch and it resonates with you immediately — often a sign of something meaningful.

Focus on ST track record when evaluating short-term traders and opposite for long term investors.

Ability of chess grandmasters can’t actually see much farther into the future than weaker players—at least, it’s not what drives elite play (Kasparov). Use their gut. Great moves may come to them intuitively, but most of their playing time is spent evaluating the risk of the move.

Steps for using intuition (safely!). This is basically a soup-nuts process in itself

Only valuable when you have ample experience (retail investor investing in biotech)

Be aware of biases. Tough thing about intuition is separating the good/bad feeling from a potential positive/negative emotional bias. Biases are different from intuition and not good. Practice intuition, especially making it more explicit so it can be analyzed rationally. “I hate that stock” is diff from “I hate that setup”

Try to determine if an investment reminds you of a specific previous situation. That determines IF you can rely on gut feelings. Use pattern recognition, note similarities and differences as best as you can.

Analyze the fundamentals and risk/reward characteristics of the security.

Expose your ideas to the criticism of others. “More doubt is the last thing you want when you are in trouble”. This is also where a partner comes in handy — they know your history/experience too and can help you avoid pitfalls.

Maintain openness to changing your mind, and set tripwires. Trip wire = event that should not occur if your thesis/intuition is right.

Use the process. Chessmaster’s process is to use gut and risk evaluation in a loop, following the process iteratively until he comes up with a move he feels good about and is logically acceptable. They make the game come to them in a way that their competencies are best utilized.

Kasparov in “How Life Imitates Chess” — secret to success in most endeavors is relentless review of prior decisions and focused practice on areas that require improvement.

Example of things he looks for at cyclical bottoms (this example specifically from semis): Retail indication that demand is stabilizing or even turning positive —> Significant inventory out of the supply chain —> merger activity where large companies buying smaller ones for cash —> insider buying —> cuts to capex (lead indicator on low supply growth) —> high pessimism from market participants —> stocks not reacting badly to bad news anymore (like a quarterly miss)

Problems with the intuitive approach: randomness plays a role in investing (so focus on reviewing process, not just outcomes), intuitions go obsolete (certain patterns get arbed away over time if they really work)

Suggest pre-mortems involving visualization. Eg he owns EQIX, imagines it falling 40%, thinks about how he would feel about it and what could have caused such a decline. In this case, he thinks it’s increasing competition/pricing pressure or risky management decisions like a big acquisition. Feels better prepared to sense danger and exit decisively when the time comes, or to buy a dip more confidently. Can also help you realize you’re taking too much risk — if you can imagine a number of ways you lose 50% and that loss would make you uncomfortable taking appropriate risks in the future, you are probably sizing the position too aggressively relative to R/R. Since he recognizes as a person he most values financial freedom, he also does this with his minimum net worth — constantly imagines scenarios that would cause him to fall below the MNW he’s decided on, and adjusted the risks he’s taking accordingly. Often limits potential upside, but that’s a trade-off he’s willing to make given his personal motivations. PTJ does this (allegedly for an hour a night), picturing huge moves in oil or USD, how it would impact his portfolio and what it would mean — wants to be more prepared when unexpected news hits.

Basically his thesis is trading success requires recognizing and taking advantage of the mistakes of others. This requires empathy. Emotional intelligence is the rare skill in that it can be grown with practice as an adult.

Firms should screen for personality traits more than they do when recruiting, focusing on whether the candidate has the right temperament for that fund’s style of investing (trend-following or contrarian?).

Structural problem in funds is reliance on junior team members for idea generation and initial work when they have the least-developed gut instincts.

Investing by committee doesn’t work. Hard to get a large group to agree on something contrarian, and it’s just not able to move fast enough. Key decisions ought to be made by 1-2 people. Meetings are more useful as sounding boards than as consensus-building exercises. Group discussions often cause people to line up behind the most out-spoke — one way to combat this is having people write down their opinions/thoughts before anyone speaks.

Be on the lookout for intuition obsolescence — stop doing what doesn’t work. Losses on situations that appear very similar to past successes are a red flag for possible obsolescence.

Most firms operate as if people have an unlimited capacity to process information (respond to emails/IMs/phones, watch tickers and the news all day). Quiet thinking time allows for for reviewing prior decisions and mental simulations. It is the key to turning experience into intuition, and that requires the right environment, including cultural focus on stress reduction.

Takeaways

This book was much better than I expected from a self-published investor book with a relatively lofty name. It’s basically a really great overview of process, complete with ideas for self-reflection that can help you build your own. It’s the sort of thing you’d want to give a junior analyst on their first day in a public markets seat. I have read a little on technical analysis in the past and used it for years but this was the best explanation I’ve ever read of why it works. 

It made me want to re-start keeping a journal—I kept one for years but stopped when it became too much of a time suck, and because it had gotten too much into tracking all of the day’s news rather than reasoning/feelings.

(From the intuition checklist) — May even be worth putting a step in your work/pitch process that asks — what previous situation does this most remind me of, if any? What playbook am I using here: value/growth, but also which situation am I mimicking here and is that a good thing (this is highly likely to play out similarly) or a bad thing (I’m anchoring too much)?