The Money Game

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This book was written in the 1960s so brokers are mostly a dying breed but the overall concept hasn’t changed. By the time an individual investor knows of that hot tip it has been sold by those professionals and we’re left holding the proverbial bag.

Money Games - Family Learning Money Games - Family Learning

The mood is what makes a system, a theory, a strategy, or a rational view on markets imperfect, imprecise, sometimes wrong, and irrational. Mood makes markets biological, complex, and in a constant state of change.

Chapter 10: Charting assumes that what was true yesterday will also be true tomorrow. But you and I know that past patterns/performance are not predictive of future patterns/performance. The crowd always loses because the crowd is always wrong. It is wrong because it behaves normally.”— Fred Kelly, Why You Win or Lose: The Psychology of Speculation, 1930 Any sense of attachment or emotion to an investment can lead to a humbling experience for the most brilliant investors. Towards the middle of the book, the author-narrator grows a bit more restless and perhaps a bit bored with the trade. Call it a midlife crisis, but instead of buying a motorcycle or a Porche, he makes an attempt to first seek a more lively thrill of trading cocoa futures and then tries to seek the truth, first through a conversation with a semi-mythological entity, called the Gnome of Zurich, and later through pursuit of redeeming the pure silver out of the national treasury of the United States of America, and then starts to muse only halfway lightheartedly about what is wealth all for and how base it all really is. Yet, I am sure, this musing does not prevent him from enjoying a fine dinner and a home in the Hamptons. Long before the term behavioural finance there was someone writing about the significance of identity. Long before the witty Buffett-isms, someone wrote those same words as part of his Irregular Rules. And long before Michael Lewis carved out his own position as the Wall Street storyteller du jour, someone else did so with similar eloquent finesse. Today, nearly three months have passed since George J.W. Goodman died on January 3, 2014 - or, as the financial after world knew him by, Adam Smith. A name created for him by the publisher of New York Magazine so as to keep his weekly Wall Street columns anonymous.

The Money Game - Adam Smith - Google Books

Identities are supposed to come from occupations. If the occupation is money-making then anxiety must always be present, because there is always a threat the money which represents the achievement can be taken away.

Accounting standards and financial statements imply precision too, yet earnings can be manipulated up or down any number of ways. Example: there is no uniformity between companies on depreciation charges, amortization, inventory valuation, or goodwill. The implication: using complex math and “manipulated” financial statements to unearth things like precise earnings or growth trends is impossible. Investing is more art than science, so treat it as such. Chapter 15: Professional investors are “performance” managers who are focused on driving results in the short term. Very few “performance” managers think in the long term. It’s all about driving big capital gains!

Money games for kids - Topmarks

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. A later impression. A clean unmarked copy in publisher's cloth. The cards and markers appear all there, and have been used, probably just on a couple of occasions. The game can be defined several ways: 1) something done as sport or fun; a diversion of sorts to keep things interesting, or 2) something more along the lines game theory, through math and weighing probabilities to decide on the most likely outcome. Keynes was one of the first to describe the markets as a game, one that is “intolerably boring and over-exacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct; while he who has it must pay to this propensity the appropriate toll.” Nothing works all the time and in all kinds of markets… If you really love playing the Game, any action is better than inaction, and sometimes inaction is the proper course, if it has been taken after measuring all the measurable options. If a decision is made not to make a decision, that is just as much a decision as a decision which initiates action.” Detachment means you can change your mind or reverse course, without being tied down by prior decisions.Irregular Rule #2: “The identity of the investor and that of the investing action must be coldly separate.” It has taken me years to unlearn everything I was taught, and I probably haven’t succeeded yet. I cite this only because most of what has been written about the market tells you the way it ought to be, and the successful investors I know do not hold to the way it ought to be, they simply go with what is.” Irregular Rule #3: “Find smart people.” Phil Fisher, the creator of the scuttlebutt approach, looked at his past successes to find that only one-sixth of them were found through scuttlebutt. The five-sixth, the rest, were from a network of smart people he knew and trusted. The downside: groupthink. If the profit numbers on income statements are treated with such reverence, it was obviously only a question of time before some smart fellows would start building companies not around the logical progression of a business but around what would beef up the numbers. Such a corporation is called a “conglomerate” or a “free-form” company, very popular when the market gets to tulip-time.”