No Trading

By Ramesh Akkineni
Bob Kirby said this in a speech - I still have a dream of a miracle I hope to see one day, the likelihood of which is fast diminishing. It is depicted in a cartoon I have on my wall that shows an evening financial commentator of the kind seen on Nightly Business Report. He is saying, "There was no trading on the NYSE today. Everyone owned exactly what he wanted."
After almost five decades, you would think I would have learned some "rules to live by" that would have helped me increase my ratio of successes over failures. Sadly, most of the rules I have found worked like all other rules in this business. They work just fine until you discover them, then they never work again. However, there is one law I believe in, which I call elasticity. That is simply an intuitive non-scientific term for the law of regression to the mean. What goes up does not have to come down, but what goes up a lot more than everything else, frequently has to lie fallow for a long time while much else catches up.

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