Pillage From All Sources
"I'll never be ashamed to quote a bad writer with a good saying."
— Seneca, On Tranquility of Mind
If something is useful for you in every day life or in trading too of course, then don't be put off where it was sourced from. It actually doesn't matter one jot where it came from, as long as it is of use to you!
When I started out on my trading journey, I was pretty much looking for football teams to score goals and horses to start races well so that i could lay them off at a lower price. The problem was that if goals didn't come, I lost and if horses started races poorly, the odds would shoot out far too quickly to be able to control the loss well enough, to avoid hitting my bank hard!
This though, eventually became my lightbulb moment so to speak. How about going against the crowd who are looking for goals in football games and fast starters in horse racing for example?
This got me thinking and researching and looking at the exact opposite to what I had been doing; successfully at times, but not nearly often enough to be more than break even at the very best, over a period of time!
Don't get me wrong I would have decent days, but this would be coupled with unmanageable losses now and again, putting me back to square one!
So I started looking at the reaction of odds in football games that started slowly and it looked promising when finding the right games. Because the odds at kick off were based over 90+ minutes, they would soon react if a game started slowly as the likelihood of goals was decreasing. A few minutes after kick off, I was out for a profit and could then relax and watch the rest of the game knowing my profit was secured. The same with horse racing. Instead of looking at horses that usually hit the front early on, I started looking for horses that would be held up/slowly away initially, to take advantage of the drift in the odds.
Only one horse can win a race, so it would need to be late on in a race before it would be tough to get out without managing a loss and I developed my cut off points from this, to determine exit points if a trade was going against me.Going against the crowd at the time, was an absolute game changer for me and I found that gradually, many more people started trading in this way. Nowadays it is very popular of course and here at TTM we have similar strategies.
I always remember a quote from an American investor called John Neff, which really hit home to me at the time and made me think of this when I read today's meditation, encouraging us to "pillage from all sources" and here is the quote; "It's not always easy to do what's not popular, but that's where you make your money." Maybe that quote was subconsciously in my mind and was part of my lightbulb moment.
It is certainly food for thought!