Market Mind Games: A Radical Psychology of Investing, Tradinmarket Mind Games: A Radical Psychology of Investing, Trading and Risk G and Risk by Denise Shull

PART 1
 PERCEPTION OR REALITY: WHAT MAKES
 MARKETS TICK?

Chapter 1
 From Wall Street to the Ivory Tower and Back
 Monday, April 18, 2011, 12:45 AM
 Michael rolled his over stuffed duffle bag into the taxi queue at O’Hare.
 He’d stayed an extra day because the champagne powder just kept on
 coming but that meant he had just barely made it down the mountain in
 time to slip through the closing doors on the evening’s last flight out of
 Denver. The 80 people now ahead of him combined with the 15 degree
 wind-chill compelled an audible, “You’ve got to be kidding!” Getting to ski
 with his younger brother Tom, while always a blast, drove a hard logistical
 bargain—particularly when he thought of the econ undergraduates he would
 be facing on maybe five hours of sleep.
 “Oh well,” he thought, “next year when I’m back to being the runt on the
 trading desk, I won’t be skipping town for four days just because a blizzard
 rolls into Aspen.”
 A decade ago, Michael had been recruited to be a proprietary trader at
 Schoenberg Trading. He’d accepted against his father’s will because in the
 late 1990s, the market seemed to print money—at least for anyone who
 understood the momentum game of stocks and because the day-to-day work
 actually felt to him a lot like chess, something he had excelled at even as a
 kid. For a few years, it was great. He could wear jeans, the firm bought
 lunch, and he was only supposed to trade from 8:30 to 11 and 1:30 to 3. The
 firm provided what were then cutting-edge analytics on the relative strength
 of each industry group and taught everyone to trade by buying the strong
 and selling the weak. It worked until it didn’t.
 Most of the guys learned how to be long stocks but when the Internet
 bubble burst, they couldn’t, for some inexplicable reason, apply the same
 idea on the downside. The firm closed their Chicago office and in the fall of
 the 2002 bear market, Michael returned to Chicago University for his MBA.
 He thought taking on a purely quantitative view of markets would be the
 best alternative.

Market Mind Games: A Radical Psychology of Investing, Tradinmarket Mind Games: A Radical Psychology of Investing, Trading and Risk G and Risk by Denise Shull