Online Stock Trading

“All there is to thinking,” he said, “is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.”

Norman F. Maclean, A River Runs Through It (from the epigraph of Seth Benardete’s Socrates’ Second Sailing).

This epigraph, besides being the fundamental set of instructions needed to illuminate Benardete’s illumination of Plato’s Republic, for me, serves a similar purpose in my daily life and in my daily thinking. Until recently, I had dabbled in the stock market for years, and throughout much of that dabbling, sometimes I would think I had seen something noticeable. After seeing those things, I would think I had seen other things I hadn’t seen before, but the things I then had seen as a result of what I first had seen quickly showed that there were obstacles to them in addition to the kind of obstacles I had seen in the beginning. Fortunately, these obstacles were among some of the obstacles I had seen before I ever had seen anything noticeable in the first place, but because they were now fewer, they (the reduced subset of obstacles) became my competitive advantage (or they would be were I to find ways of overcoming them).

Ultimately, that’s the real goal. What’s the competitive advantage of any model? Why do we need one? The answer is simple but, it seems to me, often overlooked: if we did things the same way everyone else is doing things we should expect, on balance, the same results. Are those results good enough? They never were for me.