You’ll hear me say this once in a while: some days are for taking it easy. I don’t go into every trading session with guns blazing. For one reason or another, there are days I’ll either step away completely or just dial it back. Today is one of those days.
The first thing I do every morning is check for the day’s economic releases, or what I call “hot zones.” For anyone running a trading operation as a , knowing when big news is scheduled to drop is non-negotiable. But there’s a common misconception here. I’m not looking for news to trade; I’m looking for moments of potential chaos to be aware of.
When you first start analyzing companies, it's easy to get bogged down in the details and feel a need for absolute certainty. To break free from that mindset, it helps to look at how Warren Buffett handles uncertainty—he’s a master at it. He often repeats the idea that it’s better to be “approximately right than precisely wrong.” This is a core lesson for anyone interested in .
Benjamin Graham, the man who would become known as the father of modern security analysis, was an intellectual at heart. He spoke seven languages and could quote classic authors in their native French, German, or ancient Greek. He was also famously absent-minded, known for inventing a new slide rule while also showing up to work in mismatched shoes. After graduating from Columbia in just two and a half years, he turned down teaching positions in math, English, and philosophy to support his family, choosing the one field with the highest earning potential: finance.
There’s a persistent idea that with enough research, skill, or a hot tip, anyone can beat the market. Yet, the data tells a different story: the vast majority of professional money managers consistently fail to outperform simple market indexes like the S&P 500. For anyone interested in , especially , understanding why this happens is crucial. The explanation lies in a concept called the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), which boils down to a simple but powerful idea: by the time you hear a piece of information, it’s almost certainly already reflected in a stock’s price.