Way of the turtle

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Way of the Turtle

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is not working, that is not the time to hope for a change, wish that
things were different, or pretend that reality is different; it is the
time to exit the trade.
Reality has a way of persisting despite our best attempts to wish
it away. Turtles embrace reality rather than trying to avoid it. This
makes it easier to change directions when we find that things are
not as we hoped or expected. We don’t complain, we don’t worry,
we don’t hope; we do something concrete to adjust to our new per-
ception of reality.
On Money
I think it is easier to make a lot of money if you don’t really want it
badly. This is especially true for traders. I remember that one of the
Turtles was strongly affected by the large fluctuations in equity that
would come from market moves when we had large positions. Mak-
ing a lot of money was very important to him. At one point I returned
from vacation and found out that he had destroyed his telephone
because he was so angry that the market had moved against us.
I don’t think it was a coincidence that he had trouble following
the system. I think that his desire to make a lot of money made it
harder for him to execute the systems we were trading consistently.
I was successful at least partly because I did not care about the
money. I cared about trading well. I cared what Rich thought of
my trading, but I didn’t care about the money that was flowing in
and out of my account each day.
Money is a tool; it is necessary for certain things. It is very use-
ful, but it is a very poor objective in and of itself. Being wealthy
does not make you happy. I know. I have tried it several times.
When All Is Said and Done
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I have also tried the opposite. At one point, when I was 33, the
stock in a company I founded and took public but no longer
worked at dropped suddenly. That meant that my liquid assets dried
up almost overnight. I had divorced recently and did not have many
other assets besides stock in that company; I had given my house
to my wife in the divorce. 
I was no longer part of the company I had founded and did not
have any faith in the management. Therefore, I no longer viewed
myself as an investor but instead as a trader. In my role as a trader,
the price had been going down, and so I had been selling. Unfor-
tunately, the market was very thin and the market makers were not
the best. Further, I had sufficient shares to drive the price down to
close to zero on just my own selling if I was not careful. Therefore,
I had been selling 10,000 to 20,000 shares every few weeks for sev-
eral months before the rapid decline in price.
I was working on a start-up airline at the time and had been
using the money from the sales of the stock for costs associated with
the start-up and my living expenses. That was no longer an option.
I went from having several years’ expenses covered to less than two
months almost overnight, meaning that I needed to find a way to
make money; I needed to get a job. I had not worked for anyone
else since the Turtle days. In fact, with the exception of Richard
Dennis and my first programming job in high school and college,
I never had worked for someone else. I spent several months look-
ing for a job that was interesting and landed a consulting job work-
ing on a marketing project for a small Internet start-up. I was
literally out of cash at that point and barely managed to find
enough money to pay for the hotel I stayed in until I cashed my
first paycheck.