Weekend Buffet

Reading

Time for some selected weekend musings. Here's a link I just can't emphasize enough. It's to Dr. Brett Steenbarger's Trader Feed blog. Until its end earlier this year, I was an avid daily reader of this. I credit Dr. Brett in large measure for my trading turning profitable, and he was the inspiration for my starting this blog. To his credit, the blog is still up and searchable, though no longer updated since he went private.

If you've never read Trader Feed, you owe it to yourself. It is an impressive collection of psychological insight into the art and science of trading. You will be a better trader (and a better person) for reading it: traderfeed.blogspot.com/

Dr. Steenbarger has also written several books. I've read The Psychology of Trading: Tools and Techniques for Minding the Markets and it was great. Here's an Amazon link to all of them. This is definitely worth taking a look at too: www.amazon.com

Chart of the Week

There's been a lot of interest in gold lately, what with it setting new record highs. While wandering the web, I found this chart over on Wikipedia. I find it both fascinating and depressing. It plots the value of the US dollar against gold from 1954 to 2003. This chart is worth discussing in more detail later on, but for now, here it is:I'm not quite old enough to remember the very left edge of this chart, but I do remember the days when gas was 26 cents a gallon and a postage stamp was 4 cents. Today both gas and stamps are about an order of magnitude more expensive. But does a gallon of gas get my car ten times further than it did back in the 50's? Does a letter get delivered 10 times faster? No and no.

Gas and mail (and cars and college educations and everything else) are the same today as they were back then. What has changed is that the value of our currency has shriveled to near worthlessness. We're not quite to the stage of Weimar Republic wheelbarrows of cash to buy a loaf of bread - just yet anyway. But looking at this chart makes me sad.