Did Sklansky say he Could have won a Nobel?

[mackthefork]

[ QUOTE ]
That is laughable. You dont have any idea what you are talking about. Have you beaten the stock market by 3-4% over the long term(>10 years)? I think you maybe read that somewhere, or one of your friends told it to you. If you are able to beat the stock market by 3-4% per year you would be a billionaire in no time(10 years I think). It is INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT. Why would it be easy? Millions of very smart people are trying to do it 24 hrs a day. It can be done, but it is one of the most difficult things in the world to do over any meaningful period of time. I will repeat it. You do not have a clue what you are talking about.

[/ QUOTE ]

I know what i'm talking about, I am not old enough to have beat the market long term I'm only 30, I didn't make a bean through the dot-com boom because I never touched any computer or telecom stocks until 2001, I bought airline stocks and holiday companies in the middle of September 2001, its not hard you just do the opposite of what everyone else is doing.

Billionaire?, I meant 3-4% after the effects of compounding not before, you are right about that, you would need lots of luck. I think it would be tougher with $5 million as well, most of my stocks are smaller companies so I would need more holdings than I currently have, lessening my chances of outperforming. I don't need $5 million though if i could get £250,000 ($500,000) I would never need to work a stroke again for the rest of my life.

10 years isn't long term either. Oh and I almost forgot I haven't been nominated for the Nobel prize yet [img]/images/graemlins/tongue.gif[/img].

Mack

[mackthefork]

[ QUOTE ]
So what you're trying to say is in the stock market there is...

0.000001% winners
99.999999% losers

This makes perfect sense.

[/ QUOTE ]

There was a survey a while back, about investment trusts performance from 1975-1995, they worked out that 10 of 375 had outperformed from 1975-85, and of those 10 only 1 still was outperforming in 1995. It was admitted by the researchers that the main reason for this was because of the way performance is evaluated in the Financial Services industry is very short term, and in trying to stay comparable to competitors funds had much higher turnover and thus higher costs than would be desirable and most funds were very similar in their core holdings.

Mack

[Moon Double Comb]

I agree that it is indeed sad that someone who is as old as he is, still rambles about his SAT scores and what he could do as a 13 yo.

How unfulfilling a life must be, if you're constantly questioning yourself what you could have been.

[David Sklansky]

Last post on subject.

First don't misconstrue my thirteen year old comment. I did get a little better later on, even though I hated school. At 13 I was easily in the top 50 in the nation. Which was probably good enough to beat all but 10,000 high school seniors. And at 18 less than 500 seniors were better than me, most of whom wouldn't have been had I pursued my studies. I was still winning statewide contests in math and science while getting suspended from school for rowdiness. At Penn I am sure I could have decimated any undergraduate there in any math test that involved subjects that I was familiar with. So it is ridiculous to assert that I'm not in the top 100,000 in the country in math aptitude.

Math is different from athletics. One is not likely to blossom late in life. There are five million Americans that know more math than me. But the vast majority could not set up an algebraic equation for difficult word problems nearly as quickly as I once could. Or see creative shortcuts that solve probability problems. And if they can't, they have little chance of coming up with something original regarding the advanced math or science that they laboriously studied.

But just being very good in math or science is not enough to come up with something new. You have to have a different outlook on things. You usually need to approach stuff from odd angles. Otherwise it would have already been done. Now I have a lot of reasons to believe that this type of approach to problems is right up my alley. But I'm not going to bother going into that here. Or post on the subject again. Because I really have nothing to gain, and perhaps have something to lose, if I explained all my reasons for believing that I had the prerequisites to do work that had a chance to win the Nobel Prize, especially in economics. But I do believe it.

Now as to those who feel that I am tortured by the fact that I did not pursue such lofty goals. You needn't worry. It is not like I am a champion volleyball player who claims he could have made it into the NBA but didn't try. Someone who says that is indeed delusional because the rewards of the NBA are clearly so much greater and nobody in his right mind would give up his chance to play there, to play volleyball instead. But with few exceptions winning a Nobel Prize doesn't mean all that much. I might be willing to change places with Murray Gell Mann, Crick and Watson or Paul Dirac, but not Julian Schwimmer or even John Nash.

[Freudian]

I think you could have won a nobel prize. I also think you could win against Batman in a wrestling match and sail over the Atlantic in a anchovies can.

[Moon Double Comb]

Frankly, I don't care if you have/had the ability to be a Nobel-prize winner. I can't possibly know, and neither can you. You can have the faith that you could have done it, and maybe you can convince yourself that you were even statistically favoured to win one. But it's not one's ability that shows what he is; it's one's choices.

[betgo]

[ QUOTE ]
DS's chosen profession does not benefit society in any way.

[/ QUOTE ]

Perhaps he should have been a lawyer or a physicist working on weapons systems.

[Leonardo]

What on earth are you talking about? After the effects of compounding, not before?? You really have no clue what you are talking about. If the market return is a compounded rate of 10% per annum for 20 years and you get 13% for 20 years, you have beaten the market by 3% per year on a compounded basis. If the average return is 10% and you get 13% you have beaten the market average by 3% on an average basis.Either one is very difficult and essentially the same thing because the change in the index from year to year isn't so large that the compounded rate will be wildly different from the average rate over 20 years. As for just doing the opposite of what the market is doing - you are guaranteed to fail if this is your strategy. What about when the market is correct? The market is more often right than wrong. The millions of people sitting around analyzing companies arent fools. You are the fool for thinking that they are.
As for whoever said am i saying that 99.9 % of stock market investors are loser, no that is not what I am saying. The stock market is not a zero sum game.It is a positive sum game. It could be considered approaching a zero sum game around the average market return, but brokerage costs make that game less than zero sum. The fact is that beating the market by any meaningful amount over any meaningful amount of time is EXTREMELY RARE. Most investors tend to get right around the mean return, the results are not largely dispersed for investors that have a meaningful amount of money in the market and are actively trying to beat it. Of course some mom and pop investors who stick all their money into one stock for whatever reason and just leave it there are going to beat the index by pure luck. It can be compared with poker. From what I read I think that Phil Ivey beats the game for a meaningful amount of money and has done for a meaningful amount of time. If I was to sit in the big game at the Bellagio for a couple of hours and win, does that make me a winning poker player. Of course not. Only players who have spent a meaningful number of hours and beaten the game for a meaningful amount of money can be considered winners. The players in the stock market who are actively investing over a twenty year period are the people to look at when considering investing and ones ability (rather than luck) to beat the market. Of the people investing long term with a meaningful amount of money, those that beat the market are few and far between, an generally get paid a large sum of money for that ability. Just see how many you can name.

[betgo]

[ QUOTE ]
At age 13 I believe I was better in math, science, puzzles, coming up with clever shortcuts, and logic, than perhaps half of those who went on to get physics prizes (and most of those who got the economics prize) when they were 13 years old.

[/ QUOTE ]

A lot of people think that way when they are 13.

[betgo]

If there were a Nobel Prize for poker writings (Who is going to present that idea to the committee in Oslo?), Sklansky should get the first one and Brunson the second.

If you read the writings of either, it is clear they are both egotistical, but that is part of what makes for good poker books. A good player doesn't have to write books to suppliment his income.

Brunson goes on about how he would play certain hands. You can tell he wants you to know how great he is. It is probably true, as he claims, that he gave some information that helped his opponents.