For good or ill your conversation is your advertisement. Every time you open your mouth you let men look into your mind. Do they see it well clothed, neat, business wise ?

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Just remember that when trying to pull people into your way of thinking, you need to be selling them solutions to their problems and not yours.

Just remember that when trying to pull people into your way of thinking, you need to be selling them solutions to their problems and not yours. Or else Yours truly would advise you politely to:-

Go tell it to the marines,

or Go take a long walk off a short pier,

and/or let me put it to you bluntly - Go get stuffed

Law Of Reciprocity

Law Of Reciprocity

If you do something nice for others they will do something nice for you. They feel obligated to reciprocate. But if you do something that hurts others, they will feel the need to hurt you back as well. (Think about it and do think long and very hard about it that somehow or rather with my eccentric tabiat and tingkah laku have I hurt others before !?)

Even my canine and the two Care Bears are fully aware of it and so be very careful with that.

As simple as that :- (And do think rationally, long and very hard about it.) What I sow is what I reap.

At Our Own Peril

Force majeure - Hazards, perils and *risk do not know you and never will. Forget trying to be liked. Need a friend ?? Do get a canine or two Care Bears as your companion. Don't toy around with them. They are not that friendly.

*risk - including selling kachang puteh, knowing Jack Ma very well (J Neo and Jho as well), trading, high roller and/or gambling especially Horse Racing.

At Our Own Peril

It does not much matter whether you are a treasure hunter, gambling, trading, investing or running a business (big or selling kachang puteh). All of them entail a fair degree of risk and a lot of hard work sprinkled with a generous helping of luck.

Hazards, perils and *risk do not know you and never will. Forget trying to be liked. Need a friend ?? Do get a canine or two Care Bears as your companion. Don't toy around with them. They are not that friendly

*risk - including selling kachang puteh, knowing Jack Ma very well (J Neo Chee Keong and Jho as well), trading, high roller and/or gambling especially Horse Racing.

Do get a canine as your companion.

Do get a canine as your companion.
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Forget trying to be liked. Need a friend ?? Do get a canine as your companion. Force majeure - Hazards, perils and risk do not know you and never will.
ROFLMAO
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Just like in horse racing -

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Just like in horse racing -

Spending quality time with the horse. Grooming, brushing, scratching, petting, walking, talking, to the horse. Let him hear your voice as well as your habits and it will build the trust, love, respect, understanding, relationship and the strong,close, deep, solid, unbreakable and inseparable bond with the horse.
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Mates do count your blessing on the result of winning the “ovarian lottery"

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Big hue and cry ??
Big hoo haa ??
Hullabaloo ??
KPKB for no apparent reasons ??
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Mates do count your blessing on the result of winning the “ovarian lottery".
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http://blog.bradleygauthier.com/congratulations-youve-won-the-ovarian-lottery/
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Click here to view

Grumpy Old Man !?

Grumpy Old Man !?
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People should maintain good emotions as these are extremely important to their health. Common chronic diseases which affect the Grumpy Old Man are closely related to the negative emotions of the Grumpy Old Man :
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Many patients with coronary heart disease have angina and myocardial infarction due to stimulation of adverse emotions, resulting in sudden death;
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"Bad" temper leads to high blood pressure. In prolonged and severe cases, this can cause stroke, heart failure, sudden death, etc.;
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Negative Emotions such as anger, anxiety, and grief can cause blood sugar levels to rise, causing metabolic disorders in the body.
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This shows how important it is to have a good mood!
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Fact or fiction ??

Fact or fiction ??

A thoroughbred with good lineage and handsome price tag does not always guarantee victory. Pedigrees champion to champion does not always matter but genes can find full expression on horse racing only when horse racing is of top quality. Horses like athletes must have constant training to win races.

Not in a million years.

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Think about it and do think rationally, long and very hard about it that would it be possible to make a living at the track trying to bet each and every race because you thought you could accurately handicap them all or by using a racing publication that purported to do so.
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ROFLMAO
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Luck Factor

It does not much matter whether you are a treasure hunter, gambling, trading or running a business (big or selling kachang puteh). All of them entail a fair degree of risk and a lot of hard work sprinkled with a generous helping of luck.

Stock markets are casinos - but unwary gamblers may still win out

Stock markets are casinos - but unwary gamblers may still win out
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Can stock market investors learn anything from the way that market speculators such as George Soros behave? On the face of it, the answer has to be no. Investment and speculation, so conventional wisdom has it, are two distinct arts.
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One is about the patient accumulation of wealth through careful selection of shares for the medium and longer term. Speculation, by contrast, is all about trading short- term possibilities, where what matters more than the intrinsic value of a share is its trading momentum and the state of market sentiment.
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The game, as Keynes said, is about trying to guess what the rest of the players have - not what you have yourself.
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But don't be fooled into thinking that the distinction is quite as clear- cut as all that. Victor Niederhoffer, one of New York's best-known market traders, who has worked with Mr Soros for many years, wants us to know that investment, speculation and even gambling are all in fact "first cousins".
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He quotes Ernest Cassel, the turn-of-the-century City financier who befriended Edward VIII and became a pillar of the financial Establishment: "When I was young," recalled Cassel, "people called me a gambler. As the scale of my operations increased, I became known as a speculator. Now I am called a banker. But I have been doing the same thing all my life."
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Mr Niederhoffer, like many New York traders, is a poor boy from the Bronx who has made good, and now wants to tell us how it was done. His thesis, born of 40-odd years of experience, is that investors can profitably learn from any walk of life where people make their livings out of staking money on risk and reward.
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That means studying what happens at the race track and in the casino as much as poring over the financial pages of the newspapers. His book, Education of A Speculator, has already sold 100,000 copies in the United States, which suggests he may be on to something.
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It is a strange and diverting mixture, half autobiography, half esoteric trading lore, thrown together in a way which suggests that Mr Niederhoffer's mind, like the universe, and the stock market itself, is in a permanent state of Brownian motion.
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But although it may sound fanciful at first sight, what he has to say about horse-racing and the casinos is perfectly pertinent to the stock market.
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As many professional investors will tell you, the mental discipline required to back horses and to trade in financial markets is very similar. It is all about managing money and making the right trade-offs between risk and reward.
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Mr Niederhoffer is at pains to emphasise the great importance of understanding the house "take" in any field of money-making. As even the most innumerate adult tends to know, the relentless "edge" that a casino has at roulette from paying out at 36 to 1 on what is a 37-1 bet will eventually grind even the wealthiest punter down.
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In horse-racing, something like 20 per cent of the money that the punter wagers is eaten up in the various "takes" - tax, the bookies' margin, and so on. Over time, it means that the racegoer has to make 20 per cent on his money just to cover the various hidden costs.
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What does this all mean for the stock market investor? Well, as Mr Niederhoffer points out, there is a "take" in the stock market too. It comes in several forms. Some are visible, like the commission you have to pay a broker to buy and sell shares, or the upfront fee charged by a unit trust group.
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Others, like the bid/offer spread, the difference between the price at which you can buy and sell a share or unit trust, are less immediately apparent, but just as important over the long term.
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Then there is the Government, which wants its pound of flesh in the form of income and capital gains tax.
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Add it altogether and it can have a significant bearing on your investment returns. The great beauty of the stock market, however, is that it is one of the few forms of money-making where the long-run return you stand to make - say 7-8 per cent after inflation - is sufficiently large to exceed the "take" you have to pay to take part.
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That is one reason why equity investment is a suitable place for pension funds and widows and orphans to put their money. Although Keynes likened it to a casino, the stock market is one casino where gambler's ruin does not necessarily await the unwary.
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But note the word necessarily. If you buy and sell shares too actively, and do so unintelligently, it is perfectly possible for the "take" to erode most of the returns you make, just as it does at the race track. This is where Mr Niederhoffer's tales from the racetrack and the card table are worth noting.
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The most successful punters are those who only bet where they have a clear "edge"; they make most of their money by betting against the most popular runners.
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They are also shrewd enough to know that any simple betting strategy will only work for so long. Patterns always run in cycles, and there is no single Rosetta Stone which holds the key to long-run success.
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And so, although you may not need to read The Secrets of Professional Turf Betting by Robert L Bacon to find out (as Mr Niederhoffer suggests), it is with the stock market.
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The morals for ordinary investors are clear. Don't trade too actively; it only enriches the brokers and the market-makers.
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Don't follow the crowd too slavishly into popular stocks: they will never be long-run winners.
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Don't fall for simple rule-of- thumb investment adages: a strategy based on picking the highest yielding shares will work well for a while, but not for ever.
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Look to put your money into areas where you believe you have some "edge", and allow time and compound interest to do the rest for you.
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Re: Studies have shown that people are almost incapable of making the simplest decisions without emotions.

Re: Studies have shown that people are almost incapable of making the simplest decisions without emotions.
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Think of a situation where you had bulletproof facts, reason, and logic on your side, and believed there was absolutely no way the other person could say no to your perfectly constructed argument and proposal. To do so would be impossible, you figured, because there was no other logical solution or answer.
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And then the other person dug in his heels and refused to budge. He wasn’t swayed by your logic. Were you flabbergasted?
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This is similar to what many negotiators do when they sit down at the table to hammer out a deal. They come armed with facts, and they attempt to use logic to sway the other party. They figure that by piling on the data and using reason to explain their side of the situation, they can construct a solution that is simply irrefutable—and get the other party to say yes.
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They’re doomed to fail, however, because decision-making isn’t logical, it’s emotional, according to the latest findings in neuroscience.
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A few years ago, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio made a groundbreaking discovery. He studied people with damage in the part of the brain where emotions are generated. He found that they seemed normal, except that they were not able to feel emotions. But they all had something peculiar in common: they couldn’t make decisions. They could describe what they should be doing in logical terms, yet they found it very difficult to make even simple decisions, such as what to eat. Many decisions have pros and cons on both sides—shall I have the chicken or the turkey? With no rational way to decide, these test subjects were unable to arrive at a decision.
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So at the point of decision, emotions are very important for choosing. In fact even with what we believe are logical decisions, the very point of choice is arguably always based on emotion.
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This finding has enormous implications for negotiation professionals. People who believe they can build a case for their side using reason are doomed to be poor negotiators, because they don’t understand the real factors that are driving the other party to come to a decision. Those who base their negotiation strategy on logic end up relying on assumptions, guesses, and opinions. If my side of the argument is logical, they figure, then the other side can’t argue with it and is bound to come around to my way of thinking. The problem is, you can’t assume that the other party will see things your way.
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What the negotiator can and must do, however, is create a vision for the other side to bring about discovery and decision on their part. In the end, your opponent will make the decision because he wants to. Getting him to want to, using the step-by-step methodology that is part of the Camp System, is the job of the negotiator—not trying to convince him with reason.
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You don’t tell your opponent what to think or what’s best. You help them discover for themselves what feels right and best and most advantageous to them. Their ultimate decision is based on self-interest. That’s emotional. I want this. This is good for me and my side.

There’s a detailed and systematic way to go about building vision the right way. But in general, if you can get the other party to reveal their problems, pain, and unmet objectives, then you can build a vision for them of their problem, with you and your proposal as the solution. They won’t make their decision because it is logical. They’ll make their decision because you have helped them feel that it’s to their advantage to do so.
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Charlie Munger

And Charlie Munger's take:
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The model I like—to sort of simplify the notion of what goes on in a market for common stocks—is the pari-mutuel system at the racetrack. If you stop to think about it, a pari-mutuel system is a market. Everybody goes there and bets and the odds change based on what's bet. That's what happens in the stock market.
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Any damn fool can see that a horse carrying a light weight with a wonderful win rate and a good post position etc., etc. is way more likely to win than a horse with a terrible record and extra weight and so on and so on. But if you look at the odds, the bad horse pays 100 to 1, whereas the good horse pays 3 to 2. Then it's not clear which is statistically the best bet using the mathematics of Fermat and Pascal. The prices have changed in such a way that it's very hard to beat the system.
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And then the track is taking 17% off the top. So not only do you have to outwit all the other betters, but you've got to outwit them by such a big margin that on average, you can afford to take 17% of your gross bets off the top and give it to the house before the rest of your money can be put to work.
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Given those mathematics, is it possible to beat the horses only using one's intelligence? Intelligence should give some edge, because lots of people who don't know anything go out and bet lucky numbers and so forth. Therefore, somebody who really thinks about nothing but horse performance and is shrewd and mathematical could have a very considerable edge, in the absence of the frictional cost caused by the house take.
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Unfortunately, what a shrewd horseplayer's edge does in most cases is to reduce his average loss over a season of betting from the 17% that he would lose if he got the average result to maybe 10%. However, there are actually a few people who can beat the game after paying the full 17%.
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I used to play poker when I was young with a guy who made a substantial living doing nothing but bet harness races…. Now, harness racing is a relatively inefficient market. You don't have the depth of intelligence betting on harness races that you do on regular races. What my poker pal would do was to think about harness races as his main profession. And he would bet only occasionally when he saw some mispriced bet available. And by doing that, after paying the full handle to the house—which I presume was around 17%—he made a substantial living.
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You have to say that's rare. However, the market was not perfectly efficient. And if it weren't for that big 17% handle, lots of people would regularly be beating lots of other people at the horse races. It's efficient, yes. But it's not perfectly efficient. And with enough shrewdness and fanaticism, some people will get better results than others.
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The stock market is the same way—except that the house handle is so much lower. If you take transaction costs—the spread between the bid and the ask plus the commissions—and if you don't trade too actively, you're talking about fairly low transaction costs. So that with enough fanaticism and enough discipline, some of the shrewd people are going to get way better results than average in the nature of things.
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It is not a bit easy. And, of course, 50% will end up in the bottom half and 70% will end up in the bottom 70%. But some people will have an advantage. And in a fairly low transaction cost operation, they will get better than average results in stock picking.
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How do you get to be one of those who is a winner—in a relative sense—instead of a loser?
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Here again, look at the pari-mutuel system. I had dinner last night by absolute accident with the president of Santa Anita. He says that there are two or three betters who have a credit arrangement with them, now that they have off-track betting, who are actually beating the house. They're sending money out net after the full handle—a lot of it to Las Vegas, by the way—to people who are actually winning slightly, net, after paying the full handle. They're that shrewd about something with as much unpredictability as horse racing.
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And the one thing that all those winning betters in the whole history of people who've beaten the pari-mutuel system have is quite simple. They bet very seldom.
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It's not given to human beings to have such talent that they can just know everything about everything all the time. But it is given to human beings who work hard at it—who look and sift the world for a mispriced be—that they can occasionally find one.
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And the wise ones bet heavily when the world offers them that opportunity. They bet big when they have the odds. And the rest of the time, they don't. It's just that simple.
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That is a very simple concept. And to me it's obviously right—based on experience not only from the pari-mutuel system, but everywhere else.
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And yet, in investment management, practically nobody operates that way. We operate that way—I'm talking about Buffett and Munger. And we're not alone in the world. But a huge majority of people have some other crazy construct in their heads. And instead of waiting for a near cinch and loading up, they apparently ascribe to the theory that if they work a little harder or hire more business school students, they'll come to know everything about everything all the time.
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Silver concludes, “Finding patterns is easy in any kind of data-rich environment; that's what mediocre gamblers do. The key is in determining whether the patterns represent signal or noise.”
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