Rich On Money

Polish Crash Flight Recorders

In the end, unless you take positions in the stock market you can never make money or for that matter lose money. You must have money in the game in order to win. These are decision windows in fact. We call them windows because there is a time element involved. As an example yesterday, we came within ten cents of recommending a stock at the intraday low. The stock was off five points during the day and finished up from where we liked it. Ultimately over time we will know whether our decision window was accurate or not. 

You will recall back in April, an entourage from the Polish government including the President of that country were attempting to land on the Presidential plane journeying from Poland to Smolensk, Russia. The airport was enshrouded in fog. The jet had a terrain proximity warning system on board. Now remember the pilots couldn’t see a thing. The system went off telling the pilots you are too close to the ground. The pilots ignored the system, which in fact made two more warnings before the plane did hit the ground. 

So let me see if I got this right. You are flying blind, you cannot see out of the cockpit windows, and you choose to ignore three warnings from an advanced guidance system telling you that you are too dam close to the ground. There was a decision window involved here just as in the stock market. To be successful, you must go with the trend, because the trend is your friend. 

Is there another pilot in the sky who would choose to ignore a fully automated and reliable system telling him he is about to crash? What happened is that the pilot was informed by officials on the plane before it landed, that the plane must be landed in Smolensk regardless of ground conditions. In other words the pilot allowed people who do not know how to fly, to call the shots on the captain’s life. 

In the stock market you should not allow anyone else to interfere with the logic of the investments you are making. In the end, it is your money, just as for the pilot, it was his life. Everyone on board that plane died as a consequence of the officials on the plane, attempting successfully to interfere with the pilot’s common sense. Hopefully, the rest of us have more sense.

Richard Stoyeck