Thrifty_Chartist

Jesse Livermore made and lost fortunes multiple times. Stan Druckenmiller shorted $200M worth of internet stocks in 1999 and lost $600M within weeks. Every one of those companies eventually went bankrupt. He was right about the businesses but was wrong on timing. Kristjan Kullamägi grew his account to $105M, then gave back nearly $60M in about eight months. Dan Zanger turned a five-figure account into $42M, then reportedly suffered a 75% drawdown. Paul Tudor Jones lost 60 to 70% of the equity he was managing on a single cotton trade. He nearly quit trading. These are some of the greatest traders to ever do it. People who understood markets better than most ever will. None of that made them immune to devastating losses. I was doing my usual re-listen of “Best Loser Wins” by Tom Hougaard, and two stories really stayed with me. One was about Adam, a brilliant trader with extraordinary patience and discipline. He had built great wealth through his trading. Then one heavily leveraged trade went wrong and wiped out nearly half of it. But that loss alone wasn’t what destroyed him. It was his inability to accept it and move on. He abandoned the discipline that made him successful in the first place, started doubling down, and desperately tried to make it all back fast. He went on to lose everything. His money, his home, his family. He ended up homeless. Then Hougaard talks about another friend who had been trading full-time for 15 years. He never made “f**k you” money. He earned what someone in a well-paid corporate job would. He paid his bills, took his family on vacations, bought a nice car, and was home when his kids got back from school. We spend so much time admiring huge returns and huge accounts. And rightfully so. They’re worth admiring, even aspiring to. But we rarely talk about what it takes to keep what we’ve made, or what we’re willing to give up chasing more and more. Very very few end up as Market Wizards. Then there is the guy who is home when his kids get back from school.