Trend Trading for a Living

BRAINSTORM with me for a minute: what does the stock market represent to you? What images come to mind? What feelings do you associate with trading, with Wall Street, with the global markets? When I reflect on what the markets mean to me, this is what I come up with:

• A free-flowing stream of numbers, numbers, numbers

• Greens and reds, ups and downs, peaks and troughs, ebbs and flows

• A melting pot of products, services, technologies, commodities, and information

• Manhattan high culture, soot-stained buildings, suspenders and pinstripes

• A barometer of the economic and psychological state of the nation, and of the world

• Power, greed, discipline, corruption, intelligence, ecstasy, and agony

• The playground of very energetic people who love making money

• Icon of free-market capitalism, of democracy, of America

• An efficient, highly accessible vehicle for creating wealth, freedom, opportunity

Obviously, my impression of the stock market is an amalgam of a variety of things. The market represents to me the most challenging and most stimulating arena in all of human culture. I love art, literature, architecture, science, film, and fashion. I am a religiously committed person and am conversant with many of the world’s major philosophies. But of all products of human making, no other so totally engages my intellect, my will, my passion as does the stock market.