Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Jack Schwager's Market Wizard's deception

Let's first understand something about mister Jack Schwager. Till this day he has almost without a doubt in my mind not been able to sufficiently acquire an income from his trading on a stand alone basis and has made his fortune off of selling his Market Wizards books. To further prove my point, if you want to see where Jack works today you only have to look to a site called fortunegrp.com. It's an investment banking company  no different than the crooks at Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan.

What he did in the time of writing and publishing his Market Wizards series was no different of a concept than the idea to sell shovels to all the gold diggers and dreamers during the gold rush. The only people who got rich were the suppliers. He like everyone else who has failed at trading decided to profit from it by selling information. But his approach was different this time. He sold the information told to him from the successful traders themselves, not his own system. Genius right? Well kinda if you only look at the surface. To further propound on his idea you'll notice that the people that Jack interviewed have been trading for at-least 8 years or more. Genius again, right? Now Jack can propose that trading is not a random act of luck and that, yes there are credible traders that have done well over a prolonged period of time. This makes any quick to conclude skeptics opinions, short lived.

Jack did quite well with the concept of his book. And with its allure of fast money making traders came many curious readers. The book is filled with interviews by chart traders which Jack himself was for over 20 years prior to his writings (also note that Jack hasn't had any consistent success chart trading himself, hence the reason for the book). Readers instantly believed that because he was able to find enough people that used charts to make money over a prolonged enough time period, that made technical analysis trading a viable method and would put to rest any skeptics opinions that they've never met a rich technician. But first let me note what he fails to mention about the markets in the years prior to his interviews with these so called super stock chart traders (I also would like to mention that not all of the people he interviewed were chart traders, some are actually valid investors with real life strategies that any intelligent person with half of a brain would recognize as something logical and real i.e. Jim Roger's interview). You see, most people would think, "Oh yea this profession is possible and look at all these technical analysis traders who made all this money after all these years. Wow they must have figured out a system or a discipline that was used by charting and pricing the right indicators or chart patterns, right!?" Wrong! Jack Schwager failed to mention the most important thing that would have made all his research nothing more than a failed attempt to prove that its not the amount of people you find that are successful that's relevant, but instead the time period in which you find them.

It's kind of like when the real estate or internet boom happened, most people that were lucky and dumb enough to chase these stocks to valuations never before seen and thought prices could never come down (these companies didn't even have revenue let me mind you, yet some of these companies traded at levels that made them worth more than the entire US economy at one point) got rich on paper faster than the logical intelligent minds of the business world had. Just as long as these same idiots were fearful enough to realize that this all felt to easy and made more money than they ever dreamed and (yet they didn't know a damn thing about the stocks or the markets they were trading in) got out, they managed to cash out enough money to continue to gamble away in the stock market and live very rich comfortable lives. Let me show you a chart of what the market averages had done since the idea of the book to the time of its publication. If it doesn't all make sense after this then your continuing to lie to yourselves, because your desire to get rich off of charts is greater than your thirst for truth. By the way, any one who is lazy enough to believe that by looking at a chart of a company is sufficient enough to make an investment decision, is completely delusional. Making money is not a game of drawing lines on a chart and whoever tells you this is trying to steal you for your money either by teaching you it, or having you subscribe to their services.

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