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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (30828)	6/4/1999 11:41:00 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

Hi ST, < Actually I was interested to know how I could generate a list similar to the ones you posted.> Perhaps Brad Dryer could answer this one, I'm curious though, why do you want to reinvent the wheel? < I think it provides a good indicator of what the general public is after.> Some gems from "The General Theory of Employment", J.M. Keynes, 1936 seem both timeless and appropriate: “…professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one's judgement, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.” The General Theory, 1936 < For example, in the list of bookmarked subjects, I noticed a lot of TA, day trading, options, Internet related stocks, and in general subjects that are associated with speculation (I don't mean it in a bad way).> Again, from the "General Theory": “Yet it is safer to be a speculator than an investor in the sense…that a speculator is one who runs risks of which he is aware and an investor runs risks of which he is unaware.” “The social object of skilled investment should to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelop our future. The actual private object of the most skilled investment today (note, written in 1936) is to ‘to beat the gun', as the Americans so well express it, to outwit the crowd, and to pass the bad or depreciating half-crown to the other fellow.” <I wonder if there are any books that describe his investment methods?> Yes, the General Theory, particularly Chapter 12 and possibly: "Maynard Keynes : An Economist's Biography" by Donald E. Moggridge, publ.: Routledge; ISBN: 0415127114 I also have a jewel of a story about Keynes' corner on the British wheat market in 1937, should you be interested. Best, Ry