#and my senior quote was from adventure time i cant remember what it was but i know it was from adventure time

[teshknowledgenotes]

RAY DALIO - PRINCIPLES NOTES - PAGE 1-40

INTRODUCTION

I'm passing along these principles because I am now at the stage in my life which I want to help others be successful rather than to be more successful myself. Because these principles have helped me and others so much, I want to share them with you. It's up to you to decide how valuable they really are and what, if anything you want to do with them.

Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals

Every day, each of us is faced with a blizzard of situations we must respond to. Without principles we would be forced to react to all the things life throws at us individually, as if we were experiencing each of them for the first time. If instead we classify these situations into types and have good principles for dealing with them, we will make better decisions more quickly and have better lives as a result. Having a good set of principles is like having a good collection of recipes for success. All successful people operate by principles that help them be successful, though what they choose to be successful at varies enormously, so their principles vary.

HAVING YOUR OWN PRINCIPLES

We come by our principles in different ways. Sometimes we gain the through our own experiences and reflections. Sometimes we accept them from others, like our parents, or we adopt holistic packages of principles, such as those of religions and legal frameworks.

Because we each have our own goals and our own natures, each of us must choose our own principles to match them. While it isn't neccessarily a bad thing to use others' principles, adopting principles without giving them much thought can expose you to the risk of acting in ways inconsistent with your goals and your nature. At the same time you, like me, probably don't know everything you need to know and would be wise to embrace that fact. If you cant think for yourself while being open-minded in a clearheaded way to find out what is best for you to do, and if you can summon up the courage to do it, you will make the most of your life. If you can't do that , you should reflect on the why that is, because that's most likely your greatest impediment to getting more of what you want out of life.

Thig brings me to my first principles:

Think for your self to decide 1) What you want, 2) What is true, and 3) What you should do to achieve #1 in light of #2 and do that with humility and open-mindedness so that you consider the best thinking avaiable to you. Being clear on your principles is important because they will affect all aspects of your life.

Five steps  1) Audacious Goals

     2) Failure

     3) Learning Principles

     4) Improving

     5) More Audacious Goals

MY PRINCIPLES AND HOW I LEARNED THEM

I believe the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. By failing well, I mean being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game.

This way of learning and improving has been best for me because of what I'm like and because of what I do. I've always had a bad memory and didn't like following other people's instructions, but I love figuring out how things work for myself. I hated school because of my bad memory but when I was twelve I fell in love with trading the markets. To make money in the markets, one needs to be an independent thinker who bets against the consensus and is right. That's because the consensus view is baked into the price. One is inevitably going to be painfully wrong a lot, so knowing how to do that well is critical to one's success. To be a successful entrepreneur, the same is true: One also has to be an independent thinker who correctly bets against the consensus, which means being painfully wrong a fair amount. Since I was both an investor and en entrepreneur, I developed a healthy fear of being wrong and figured out an approact to decision making that would maximize my odds of being right.

MAKE BELIEVABILITY-WEIGHTED DECISIONS

My painful mistakes shifted me from having a perspective of “I know I'm right” to having one of “How do I know I'm right?” They gave me the humility I needed to balance my audacity. Knowing that I could be painfully wrong and curiosity about why other smart people saw things differently prompted me to look at things through the eyes of others as well as my own. That allowed me to see many diminsions than if I saw things just through my own eyes. Learning how to weigh people's inputs to that I chose the best ones in other words, that I believability weighted my decision making – increase my chances of being right and was thrilling. At the same time I learned to:

OPERATE BY PRINCIPLES

That are so clearly laid out that their logic an easily be assessed and you and others can see if you walk to talk. Experience taught my how invaluable it is to reflect on and write down my decision-making criteria whenever I made a decision, so I got in the habit of doing that. With time, my collection of principles became like a collection of recipes for decision making. By sharing them with the people at my company, Bridgewater Associates, and inviting them to help me test my principes in action, I continually refined and evolved them. In fact, I was able to refine them to the point that I could see how important it is to systemize your decision making

Time is like a river that carries us foward into encounters with reality that require us to make decisions. We can't stop our movement down this river and we can't avoid those encounters. We can only approach them in the best possible way

When we are children, other people, typically our parents guide us through our encounters with reality. As we get older, we begind to make our own choices. We choose what we are going after (our goals), and that influences our paths. If you want to be a doctor, you go to medical school, if you want to have a family, you find a mate and so on. As we move toward these goals we encounter problems, make mistakes, and run up against our own personal weaknesses. We learn about ourselves and about reality and make new decisions. Over the course of our lives we make millions and millions of decisions that are essentially bets, somee large and some small. It pays to think about how we make them because they are what ultimately determine the quality of our lives.

We are all born with different thinking abilities but we aren't born with decision-making skills. We learn them from our encounters with reality. While the path I went down is unique being born to particular parents, pursuing a particular career, having particular colleagues I believe that the principles I learned along the way will work equally well for most people on most paths. As you read my story, try to look through it and me to the underlying cause and effect relationships at the choices I made and their consequences, what I learned from them and how I changed the ways I make decisions as a result. Ask yourself what you want, seek out examples of other people who got what they wanted, and try to discern the cause and effect patterns behind their achievements so you can apply them to help you achieve your own goals.

MY CALL TO ADVENTURE

I didn't like school, not just because it required a lot of memorization but because I wasn't interested in most of the things my teachers thought were important. I never understood what doing well in school would get me other than my mother's approval

When I didn't want to do something, I would fight it, but when I was excited about something, nothing could hold me back. For example while I resisted doing chores at home, I eagerly did them outside the house to earn money. Starting at age eight, I had a newspaper route, shoveled snow off people's driveways, caddied, bussed tables and washed dishes at a local restaurant, and stocked shelves at a nearby department store. I don't remember my parents encouraging me to do these jobs so I can't say how I came by them. But I do know that having these jobs and having some money to handle independently in those early years taught me many valuable lessons I wouldn't have learned in school or at play.

In my early years the psychology of the 1960s U.S. As aspirational and inspirational to achieve great and noble goals. It was like nothing I have seen since. One of my earliest memories was of John F. Kennedy an intelligent, charismatic, man who painted vivid pictures of chaning the world for the better – exploring outer space, achieving equal rights and eliminating poverty. He and his ideas had a major effect on my thinking

Everyone was talking about the stock market because it was doing great and people were making money. This included the people playing at a local golf course called Links where I started caddying when I was twelve. So I took my caddying money and started playing the stock market.

While I liked playing the markets, I also loved playing around with my friends, whether in the neighborhood when I was a kid, using fake Ids to get into bars when we were teeens, or nowadays going to music festivals and on scuba diving trips together. I've always been an independent thinker inclined to take risks in search of rewards not just in the markets, but in most everything. I also feared boredom and mediocrity much more than I feared failure. For me great is better than terrible and terrible is better than mediocre, because terrible at least gives life flavor. The high school yearbook quote my friends chosefor was from from Thoreau. “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step the hte music which he hears, however measure or far away.”

In 1966 my senior year of highschool, the stock market was still booming and I was making money and having a blast, cutting school with my best friend Phil to go surfing, and doing what fun-loving high school boys usually do. Of course I didn't know it then, but that year was to be the stock market's top. After that, almost everything I thought I knew about the markets was proven wrong.

I gradually learned that prices reflect people's expectations, so they go up when actual results are better than expected and they go down when they are worse than expected

By midsummer, the dollar problem began to reach a breaking point. There were reports that Europeans wouldn't accept dollars from American tourists. The global monetary system was in the process of breaking down, but that wasn't clear to me quite yet. Then on Sunday, August 15th, 1971, President Nixon went on television to announce that the U.S. Would renege on its promise to allow dollars to be turned in for gold, which led the dollar to plummet. Since government officials had promised not to devalue the dollar, I listened with amazement as he spoke. Instead of addressing the fundamental problems behind the pressure on the dollar, he continued to blame speculators, crafting his words to make it sound like hwas moving to support the dollar while his actions were doing just the opposite. “floating it” as Nixon was doing, and then letting it sink like a stone, looked a lot like a lie to me. Over the decades since, I've repeatedly seen policymakers deliever such assurances immediately before currency devaluations, so I learned not to believe government policymakers when they assure you that they won't let a currency devaluation happen.

As I listened to Nixon speak, I wondered what those developments meant. Money as we'd known it a claim check to get gold no longer existed. That couldn't be good.

Monday morning I walked onto the floor of the exchange expecting pandemonium. There was pandemonium all right, but not the sort I expected: Instead of falling, the stock market jumped about 4% a significant daily gain.

To try to understand what was happening, I spent the rest of that summer studying past currency devaluations. I learned that everything that was going on – the currency breaking its link to gold and devaluing, the stock market soaring in response – had happened before, and that logical cause-effect relationships made those developments inevitable. My failure to anticipate this, I realized was due to my being surprised by something that hadn't happened in my lifetime, though it had happened many times before. The message that reality was conveying to me was “You better make sense of what happened to other people in other times and other places because if you don't you won't know if these things can happen to you and if they do you won't know how to deal with them.”

I owned pork bellies stocks, I had lost a lot of money. It taught me the importance of risk controls, because I never wanted to experience that pain again. It enhanced my fear of being wrong and taught me to make sure that no single bet, or even multiple bets, could cause me to lose more than an acceptable amount. In trading you have to be defensive and aggressive at the same time. If you are not aggressive, you are not going to make money, and if you are not defensive, you are not going to keep money. I believe that anyone who has made money in trading has had to experience horrendous pain at some point. Trading is like working with electricity, you can get an electric shock. With that pork belly trade and other trades, I felt the electric shock and the fear that comes with it.

I got fired from my job at Shearson, but the brokers, their clients and even the ones who fire me liked me and wanted to keep getting my advice. Even better, they were willing to pay me for it, so in 1975 I started Bridgewater Associates.

I set up a little business with Bob Scott, a friend from HBS. Along with a few pals in other countries, we made halfhearted attempts to sell commodities from the U.S. To other countries. We called it Bridgewater because we were “bridging the waters” and it had a good ring to it. By 1975 there wasn't much left of this commodities company, but as it did already exist on paper, I used it.

I worked out of my two-bedroom apartment. When a pal from HBS who I shared the apartment with moved out, I made his bedroom an office. I worked with another friend I played rugby with, and we hired a great young woman who worked as our assistant. That was Bridgewater.

Pursuing a mission with friends to help clients beat the markets was much more fun than having a real job. As long as my basic living expenses were covered, I knew I'd be happy.

MODELING MARKETS AS MACHINES

I was really getting my head into the livestock, meat, grain, and oilseed markets. I loved them because they were concrete and less subject than stocks to distorted perceptions of value. While stocks could stay too high or too low because “greater fools” kept buying or selling them, livestock ended up on the meat counter where it would be priced based on what consumers were willing to pay. I could visualize the processes that led to those sales and see the relationships underlying them. Since livestock eat grain (mostly corn) and soymeal, and since corn and soybeans compete for acreage, those markets are closesly related. I learned just about everything imaginable about them-- what the planted acreage and typical yields were in each of the major growing areas; how to convert rainfall levels in different weeks of the growing season into yield estimates; how to project harvest sizes, carrying costs, and livestock inventories by weight group, location and rates of weight gain; and how to project dressing yields, retailer margins, consumer preferences by cut of mean, and the amounts to be slaughtered in each season.

This wasn't academic learning: People with practice in the business showed me how to agricultural processes worked, and I organized what they told me into models I used to map the interactions of those parts through time.

For example, by knowing how many cattle, chickens and hogs were being fed, how much grain they ate, and how fast they gained weight, I could project both when and how much meat would come to market and when and how much corn and soymeal would be consumed. Likewise, by seeing how much acreage was planted with corn and soybeans in all the growing areas, doing regressions that showed how rainfall affected the yields in each of these areas and applying weather forecasts and rainfall data, I could project the timing and quantity of corn and soybean production. To me it all looked like a beautiful machine with logical cause-effect relationships. By understanding these relationships, I could come up with decision rules (or principles) I could model.

These early models were a far cry from the ones we use now; they were back-of-the-envelope sketches, analyzed and converted into computer programs with the technology I could afford at the time. At the very beginning, I did regressions on my handheld Hewlett-Packard HP-67 calculator, plotted charts by hand with colored pencils, and recorded every trade in composition notebooks. When the personal computer came along, I could input the numbers and watch them be converted into pictures of what would happen on spreadsheets. Knowing how cattle, hogs, and chickens progressed through their stages of production, how they competed fro meat-eater dollars, what meateaters would spend and why, and how the profit margins of meatpackers and retailers would influence their behaviours (for example with cuts of meat they would push in advertisements), I would see how the machine produced cattle, hog and chicken prices that I could bet on.

As basic as those early models were, I loved building and refining them – and they were good enough to make me money. The approach to price determination I was using was different from the one I had learned in my economics classes where supply and demand were both measured in terms of quantities sold. I found it much more practical to measure demand as the amount spent (instead of as the quantity bought) and to look at who the buyers and sellers were and why they bought and sold.

This different apporach was on of the key reasons I caught economic and market moves others missed. From that point on whever I looke at any market – commodities, stocks, bonds, currencies, whatever – I could see and understand imbalances that others whodefined supply and demand in the traditional way (as units that equaled each other) missed.

Visualizing complex systems as machines, figuring out the cause-effect relationships within them, writing down the principles for dealing with them, and feeding them into a computer so the computer could “make decidsions” for me all became standard practices.

Don't get me wrong. My approach was far from perfect. I vividly remember one “can't lose” bet that personally cost me about $100,00. That was most of my net worth at the time. More painful still, it hurt clients too. The most painful lesson that was repeatedly hammered out there that can hurt you badly, even in the seemingly safest bets, so it's always best to assume you're missing something. This lesson changed my approach to decision making in ways that will reverberate throughout this book – and to which I attribute much of my success. But I would make many other mistakes before I fully changed my behaviour.

BUILDING THE BUSINESS

While making money was good, having meaningful work and meaningful relationships was far better. To me, meaningful work is being on a mission I become engrossed in, and meaningful relationships are those I have people I care deeply about and who care deeply about me.

Think about it: It's senseless to have making money as your goal as money has no intrinsic value – its value comes from what it can buy, and it can't buy everything. It's smarter to start with what you really want, which are your real goals, and then work back to what you need to attain them. Money will be one of the things you need, but it's not the only one and certainly not the most important one once you get past having the amount you need to get what you really want.

When thinking about the things you really want, it pays to think of their relative values so you weight them properly. In my case, I wanted meaningful work and meaningful relationships equally, and I valued money less – as long as I had enough to take care of my basic needs. In thinking about the relative importance of great relationships and money, it was clear that relationships were more important because there is no amount of money I would take in exchange for a meaningful relationship, because there is nothing I could buy with that money that would be more valuable. So, for me, meaningful work and meaningful relationships were and still are my primary goals and everything I did was for them. Making moeny was an incidental consequence of that.

In the late 1970s, I began sending my observations about the markets to clients via telex. The genesis of these Daily Observations (”Grains and Oilseeds”, ”Livestock and Meats”, ”Economy and Financial Markets”) was pretty simple: While our primary business was in managing risk exposures, our clients also called to pick my brain about the markets. Taking those calls became time-consuming, so I decided it would be more efficient to write down my thoughts every day so others could understand my logic and help improve it. It was a good discipline since it forced me to research and reflect every day. It also became a key channel of communication for our busienss. Today aalmost forty years and ten thousand publications later, our Daily Obsrevations are read, reflected on, and argued about my clients and policymakers around the world. I'm still writing them, along with others at Bridgewater, and expet to continue to write them until people don't care to read them or I die.

One of my consulting clients during this period was McDonald's, which was a huge beef buyer, and Lane Processing, then the largest chicken producer in the country. I made them both a lot of money – especially Lane Processing, which did even better from its speculations in the grain and soy markets than it did from raising and selling chickens.

Around this time, McDonald's had conceived of a new product, the Chicken McNugget, but they were reluctant to bring it to market because of their concern that chicken prices might rise and squeeze their profit margins. Chicken producers like Lane wouldn't agree to sell to them at a fixed price because they were worried that their costs would go up and they would be squeezed.

As I thought about the problem, it occurred to me that in economic terms a chicken can be seen as a simple machine consisting of a chick plus its feed. The most volatile cost that the chicken producer needed to worry about was feed prices. I showed Lane how to use a mix of corn and soymeal futures to lock in costs so they could quote a fixed price to McDonald's. Having freatly reduced its price risk, McDonald's introduced the McNugget in 1983. I felt great about helping make that happen.

I identified similar types of price relationships in the cattle and meat markets. For example, I showed cattle feeders how they could lock in strong profit margins by hedging good price relationships between their cost items (feeder cattle, corn and soymeal) and what they were going to sell (fed cattle) six months later. I developed a way of selling different cuts of fresh meat for future delivery at fixed prices far below crozen meat prices but that still produced big profit margins. Combining my clients' deep understanding of the way the “machines” of their own businesses operated with my knowledge of the way markets functioned worked to our mutual advantage, while making the markets more efficient overall. My ability to visualize these complex machines gave us a compeititve edge against those who were shooting from the hip, and eventually changed the way these industries operated. And, as always it was a kick to be working with people I liked.

I had made a lot of money on silver's rise to $10, I was kicking myself for missing the ride to $50. But at least by being out, I didn't lose money. There are anxious times in every investor's career when your expectations of what should be happening aren't aligned with what is happening and you don't know if you're looking at great opportunities or catastrophic mistakes. Because I ad a strong tendency to be right but early, I was inclined to think that was the case. It was, but to have missed the $40 move up was inexcusable to me. The plunge finally did happen in March 1980, silvercrashed back down before $11. It ruined Bunker Hunt (then the richest man in the world), and he nearly brought down the whole U.S. Economy as he fell. The Fed had to intervene to control the ripple effects. All of this pounded an indelible lesson into my head: Timing is everything. I was relieved that I was out of that market, but watching the richest man in the world – who was also someone I empathized with – go broke was jarring. Yet it was nothing compared to what was to come.

In 1979-1982 as I saw it, the Fed was stuck between a rock and a hard place. They either had to a) Print money to relieve debt problems and keep the economy going (which had already pushed inflation to 10 percent in 1981 and was causing people to dump bonds and buy inflation-hedged assets), or b) break the back of inflation by becoming bone-cushingly tight (which would break the back of debtors because debt was at the highest levels since the Great Depression). The worsening problem showed up in both progressively higher levels of inflation and progressively worse levels of economic activity. Both appeared to be coming to a head. Debts continued to rise much faster than the incomes borrowers needed to repay them, and American banks were lending huge amounts – much more than they had in capital – to emergineg countries. In March 1981, I wrote a Daily Observation entitled “The Next Depression in Perspective” and concluded it by saying, “The enormity of our debt implies that the depression will be as bad or worse than that witnessed in the thirties.”

I believed that the choice was between accelerating inflation and deflationary depresssion, I was holding both gold (which performs well in accelerating inflation) and bonds (which perform well in deflationary depressions). Up until that point, gold and bonds had moved in opposite directions, depending on wheter inflation expectations rose or fell. Holding those positions seemed much safe that holding alternatives like ccash, which would lose value in an inflation environment, or stocks, which would crash in a depression.

Mexico defaulted on it's debt and my prediction was starting to come true, a lot of people were intersted in what I had said and I was asked to be on popular stock market shows.

My prediction was dead wrong. After a delay, the economy responded to the Fed's efforts, rebounding in a noninflationary way. In other words, inflation fell while growth accelerated. The stock market began a big bull run, and over the next eighteen years the U.S. Economy enjoyed the greatest noninflationary growth period in its history.

How was that possible? Eventually, I figured it out. As money poured out of these borrower countries and into the U.S., it changed everything. It drove the dollar up, which produced deflationary pressures in the U.S., which allowed the Fed to ease interest rates without raising inflation. This fueled a boom. The banks were protected both because the Federal Reserve loaned them cash and the creditors' committees and international financial restructuring organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for Interanational Settlements arranged things so that the debtor nations could pay their debt service from new loans. That way everyone could pretend everything was fine and write down those loans over many years.

My experience over this period was like a series of blows to the head with a baseball bat. Being so wrong – and especially so publicly wrong – was incredibly humbling and cost me just about everything I had build at Bridgewater. I saw that I had been an arrogant jerk who was totally confident in a totally incorrect view.

So there I was after eight years in business, with nothing to show for it. Though I'd been right much more than I'd been wrong, I was all the way back to square one.

At one point I'd lost so much money I couldn't afford to pay the people who worked with me. One by one, I had to let them go. We went down to two employees – Colman and me. Then Colman had to go. With tears from all, his family packed up and returned to Oklahoma. Bridgewater was now down to just one employee: me.

Losing people I cared so much about and very nearly losing my dream of working for myself was devestating. To make ends meet, I even had to borrow $4000 from my dad until we could sell our second car. I had come to a ford in the road: Should I put on a tie and take a job on Wall Street? That was not the life I wanted. On the other hand, I had a wife and two young children to support. I realized I was facing one of life's big turning points and my choices would have big implications for me and for my family's future.

FINDING A WAY PAST MY INTRACTABLE INVESTMENT PROBLEM

Making money in the markets is tough. The brilliant trader and investor Bernard Baruch put it well when he said, “If you are ready to give up everything else and study the whole history and background of the market and all principal companies whose stocks are on the board as carefully as a medical student studies anatomy – if you can do all that in addition you have the cool nerves of a gambler, the sixth sense of a clairvoyant and the courage of a lion, you have a ghost of a chance.”

In retrospect, the mistakes that led to my crash seemed embarrassingly obvious. First, I had been wildly overconfident and had let my emotions get the better of me. I learned (again) that no matter how much I knew and how hard I worked, I could never be certain enough to proclaim things like what I'd said on Wall Street Week: “There'll be no soft landing. I can say that with absolute certainty, because I know how markets work.” I am still shocked and embarrassed by how arrogant I was.

Second, I again saw the value of studying history. What had happened, after all, was “another one of those.” I should have realized that debts denominated in one's own currency can be successfully restructured with the government's help, and that when central banks simultaneously provide stiumulus (as they did in March 1932, at the low point of the Great Depression, and as they did again in 1982), inflation and deflation can be balanced against each other. As in 1971, I had failed to recognized the lessons of history. Realizing that led me to try to make sense of all movements in all major economies and markets going back a hundred years and to come up with carefully tested decision-making principles that are timeless and universal.

Third, I was reminded of how difficult it is to time markets. My long-term estimates of equilibrium levels were not reliable enough to bet on; too many things could happen between the time I placed my bets and the time (if ever) that my estimates were reached.

Staring at these failings, I realized that if I was going to move forward without a high likelhood of getting whacked again, I would have to look at myself objectively and change – starting by learning a bettwe way of handling the natuaral agressiveness I've always shown in going what I wanted.

Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you apporach that choice? Take a moment to think about it because it is the sort of choice that, in one form or another, we all have to make.

I just want to be right I don't care if the right answer comes from me. So I learned to be radically open-minded to allow others to point out what I might be missing. I saw that the only way I could succeed would be to:

1) Seek out the smartest people who disagreed with me so I could try to understand their reasoning.

2) Know when not to have an opinion.

3) Develop, test, and systemize timeless and universal principles.

4) Balance risks in way that keep the big upside while reducing the downside.

Over the years that followed, I found that most of the extraordinarily successful people I've met had similar big painful failures that taught them the lessons that ultimately helped them succeed. I saw that to do exceptionally well you have to push your limits and that, if you push you limits, you will crash and it will hurt a lot. You will think that you have failed but that won't be true unless you give up. Believe it or not, your pain will fade and you will have many other opportunities ahead of you, though you might not see them at the time. The most important thing you can do is to gather the lessons these failures provide and gain humility and radical open-mindedness in order to increase your chances of success. Then you press on.

The computer was much better than my brain in “thinking” about many things at once, and it could do it more precisely, more rapidly, and less emotionally. And, because it had such a great memory, it could do a better job of compounding my knowledge and the knowledge of the people I worked with as Bridgewater grew. Rather than argue about our conclusions, my partners and I would argue about our different decision-making criteria. Then we resolved our disagreements by testing the criteria objectively.

While the computer was much better than our brains in many ways, it didn't have the imagination, understanding, and logic that we did. That's why our brains working with the computer made such a great partnership.

Truweth be known, forecasts aren't worth very much, and most people who make them don't make money in the markets. This is because nothing is certain and when one overlays the probabilities of all of the various things that affect the future in order to make a forecast, one gets a wide array of possibilities with varying probabilities, not one highly probable outcome. We believe that market movements reflect economic movements. Economic movements are reflected in economic statistics. By studying the relationships between economic statistics and market movements, we've developed precise rules for identifying important shifts in the economic/market environment and in turn our positions. In other words, rather than forecasting changes in the economic environment and shifting positions in anticipation of them, we pick up these changes as they're occuring and move our money around to keep in those markets which perform best in that environment.

[ryanbitchbard]

The mIllenial Man

I was walking to the abandoned school house to find a photograph from my ex girlfriend Mary.  I was given the photo as a teenager and been meaning to find it for a while.  I didn’t have much going for at the time.  I would spend my nights digging through nostalgia.

It had been a difficult six months.  Since my girlfriend left i have been sort of a bummer.  I burned through what little friends I had who would give me company.  Apparently, people don’t want to hang with negativity.  With no one to hang out with I had nothing to do but come home from work and browse the internet.  For the last four months my life had become an endless loop of videos and pointless nostalgia.  I just didn’t feel the need to really do anything.  Lately I’ve been digging into old photos.  Trying to relive old memories.  I recently found a picture of the old school house that we would hang in as kids.  I planned on going Friday after work.  I wanted to find this picture of my old girlfriend.  She wrote me a note in the back of it.  I really wanted to read what it said.  We were so happy back than.  I know its not healthy but I haven’t had much to do.  I was living for the past.  I’m not depressed but I do have huge issues.

I broke the hinges off the door.  I walked into lobby.  Everything was dark and dusty.  This place got run down.  It looked as if people hadn’t been there in at least ten years.  I remember when it first closed down because of the lead problem.  It became a hangout for misfit teenagers.  The smell brought me back to that time.  I remembered everything.  The nights drinking and smoking, the after school hang outs, and the casual hook-ups.  I needed to find the picture.  It was a Polaroid picture she gave me one night during our senior year.  She told me about the note that she wrote in the back.  I wasn’t supposed to read it until I got home.  It was my valentines present.  We left after she thought she heard people walking in and snuck out through the back.  When I got home the picture was gone.  I didn’t think it was a big deal at the time as I was still dating her.  I told myself I would go back to get it after school.  I never did.  Eventually, we graduated and broke up.  We both went to separate schools in different states.  The thought of her would enter my mind every now and than but I had moved on.   A year after college I moved to Philadelphia and the rest is history.

The room was dark and dusty.  I didn’t know if it was possible to find the photo.  This is the first time I had been there in fifteen years.  I continued to look.  Flashes of memories came flooding back every corner I searched.  Memories of drugs with people I barely remember.  Laughs with people who used to mean so much to me, yet mean nothing now.  A tear rolled down my cheek.  I was putting in so much effort to relive these times with people I don’t care about.   Everything I picked up sent dust flying in my face.  The school wasn’t that big and figured if the photo wasn’t in the few places it would have been stolen.  I decided to look in other rooms just as a memorial of a by gone era.  I entered one of the classrooms.  the room seemed different.  The room seemed a little more well Kept.  Still dusty but a lot less.  It appeared that people have been in here recently.  “I wonder how after people come in here?”

“More than you think.”

I jumped and ran behind the teachers desk.  I didn’t know where that voice had come from.  I was terrified.  I stayed hidden for a minute than he spoke again.

“Its okey.  I’m not going to bite.”

He had an odd accent.  He sounded Dutch with a hint of Arab.  I cant explain.  He had an old way of speaking.

“Are you just going to hide behind the desk?  I see your feet.  Ive been here long enough for my eyes to get used to the dark.”

I slowly got up.  No point in pretending I’m not here.  I shined my flashlight.  It was just an old guy.  He looked elderly and fit at the same time.  

“Who are you?”

“Just a guy.  I don’t have business here.  If that’s what you’re wondering.”

“What’s your name?”

“Everett.  That’s the last name I went by.”

I walked towards him.  I had questions.  Starting with the obvious.

“Why are you here?”

“To die.”

I jumped after hearing that.  

“Why?  What’s wrong?”

“People live and people die.  Nothing’s wrong.  Seems normal.”

“Are you sick?”

“Nope just dyin.”

“Where are your friends and family?”

“All dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m over it.”

“Why are you so indifferent?”

“I’m not.  People live and people die.  They died a long time ago.  There’d be something wrong with me if I were still upset.  Are ya gonna cry about Lincoln.”

“No.  But I never met him.”

Everett laughed.

“The guy was a hourses ass.  Did good but could be a huge jerk.”

“Are you saying you’re old enough to remember Lincoln?”

“I used to have drinks with him.”

“Shut up!”

I was beginning to think the man was senile.  Just a random drifter taking a rest.  Although, there was something, oddly, coherent about him.  I had a lot of trouble believing he was just a random nut job.  The man laughed again.

“Sorry.  I forgot to mention I have lived over a thousand years.”

 I laughed.  Now I was convinced he was insane.  No big deal, I thought.  I would just humor him and be on my way.  I needed some entertainment.

“Really?!  What’s that like?”

“I know you don’t believe me.  Thats fine.  Ive been around to long to care.  Ive known so many people, had so many groups of best friends, and have explained this many times.  You believe whatever you want.”

“Why have you chosen to die here?”

“Comfort.  Its cool in here.  I’m not a big fan of summer.”

I felt confused but found him interesting.  I had nothing better to do than listen any way.  So I just sat near him.  It could be a good way to pass the time.  I was going to keep engaging.  

“What’s your story?”

“Its long.”

“I have time.”

“I won’t tell you all of it as most of my story is shit.  Not all stories are worth mentioning.  I was born a thousand years ago to Danish farmers.  My family was killed when I was five.  I had to move on pretty quickly.  I was taken by another family who I would eventually call my own.  I grew up without parents.  I just had a bunch of older siblings.”

“What happened to that family?”

“Most lived to the healthy age of thirty-four.  That was the standard age back than.  I was surprised when I found myself still alive.  When I said goodbye to ma sister Jesé, I was filled with emotion.  She drifted off forever.  I thought I’d be dead within in a month.  At least in the next couple.  But I never died.  Twenty years later I found myself surrounded by friends and workers.  I met an older lady and we decided to migrate to the Middle East.  Ten years later my friends started to die off.  I thought it would be my time.  It wasn’t.  I still lived.  I I held my friend Tab in my arms for the last time.  We kissed and she slowely faded.  I still didn’t die.”

“Thats interesting.  It sounds like you had an interesting life.”

I felt very self conscious.  I think a part of me did believe him.

“Compared to my life you’ve done so much.”

“You seem like a bore.  I didn’t mean to offend but I don’t care if i did.  Most people I’ve met in the past hundred years have been incredibly boring.  It keeps getting worse.  Barely anybody gets stabbed anymore.  At least in America.”

“We’re at war!!”

“This is not a war.  My heart rate hasn’t risen in three decades.”

“Are you just going to sit here for another thousand years?”

“Nope.  I’m dyin soon.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve never felt like this before.”

He became silent.

“So?  Maybe you’re sick?”

“Nope.  I know what that feels like.  Being sick just makes ya feel broke.  Like there is a piece in ya that’s loose.  This doesn’t feel like anything’s loose.  It feels like the piece is oldd and rusty.  Another way to look at it......  Its like when you see your dog growing up.  You watch the first time he walks up the stairs.  You feel pride.  Years later you slowly watch him loose that ability.  Thats what this feels like.  Like growing backwards. 

“That sounds scary.”

“Ive felt worse.  This is just different.”

“What advice would you give a young person like me?”

“I don’t know.  You’re probably not going to live my life.  Most people die pretty early.  I guess I would tell you not to waste it.”

“Shut up!  That’s so cliche.  I want something useful.  I don’t need a dumb Disney quote.”

“Okey.  Don’t stab your friends in the back.  I know the stakes aren’t as high as they used to be but you would all be a lot happier if you had more honor.”

“Okey.  I get it!”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-nine.” “Jeeze!!  You’d be almost dead if it were a thousand years ago!  Get livin!!”

Talking with this ma had become a chore.  I knew he was right about my life but I Didnt like hearing from a stranger.  I was about to leave when he began again.

“Ya know.... ...your generation is lucky it gets the time it does, but your life would have more meaning you had less time.  You guys get eighty years on average but only ten of them are worth talking about.  You spend the the rest living in a box.  For god sakes!!!  Stab one person!!  When my first wife died I stabbed my best friend for insulting her.  Did I regret it?  Yes but I had the gumption to do it.”

“Sounds psychotic.”

“Kind of.  But I had fun.”  

“I’m fine.  I don’t need to live an exciting life.”

“Most people don’t live any kind of life.  Ya move to the city, drink at a bar once a week, and call that living.  Nothing exciting happens during your time.”

“I’m living through a war.”

“I cut a man with a Sabre!  I also got cut with that same Sabre.  I remember when the blades became obsolete.  China brought guns to the table.  I had to learn a new way of fighting.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“Now I’m gonna die.  And in all my years I’ve come to realize the futility of it all and that’s what makes it worth it.  You’re born to walk the earth in search of meaning, you find meaning, and the meaning is ripped away from you.  I used to think I had a curse.  Now i feel it to be a blessing.  I got to live several lives.  Once i got over my existential dread it became an adventure.  I made friends who have died but they still mean as much now as they did when alive.  Now people live twice as long.  I managed to keep my friendships longer within the last two-hundred years.”

“You don’t feel that they’re more meaningless?”

“Nah.  Like I said....I got over that dread hundreds of years ago.  Although I don’t talk to many people now a days.  I enjoy my solitude.  Every now and than i’ll talk with a curious person who wants to know my story.  Like you.  Although, I’m not sure how interested you really are but you’re still here.  I enjoy company but taking in the world alone is something I crave now.  Ive been, happily, alone for the last thirty years.  Just thinkin.  Reflecting on my life, other’s lives, and the future of man kind.  Sadly, I won’t get to see it.”

We spent the next hour talking about life.  Not just his and mine but all of life.  He talked of past atrocities and what that meant to him.  He brought up the inquisition and how many people were killed.  He talked of Genghis Khan and his destruction.  I asked him about the twentieth century atrocities and he acknowledged em but lived to long to give it much thought.  He seemed romantic and distant to his life at the same time.  He talked of people he killed the most.

“My favorite way to kill was through the stomach into the heart.  Looking them in the eyes while life drains from them.  I hold a special place in my heart for the people I’ve loved and the people ive killed.  If i stab you in the heart I you mean more to me than the person I liked.  I remember everybody I slaughtered this way.  The people I love have a similar place.  My favorite was Lenore.  I remember every night with her.  Every kiss and every fuck.  She means more to me than any any other lover or victim of my blade.”

“How did you get over her?”

“She was both my lover and my victim.  At the age of forty, after twenty years together, she wanted my head.  Out of respect, I accepted the dule.  She got me in the stomach but it was I who made the fatal blow.  We kissed one last time and it meant more to me than anything.”

“Jesus!!!  Thats psychotic!”

“Was more common than you think.”

“Why did she want you dead?!”

“Family issues.  Ive moved on.  That final kiss was closure for me.  After her I took on few lovers and fiends who could match how she made me feel.”

“How do you go on knowing that you may never find another love like that?  That any love will just be meaningless compared to what you once had?”

“I don’t look at it like that.  Sure she made more of an impact than any person ive had the pleasure of loving or killing, but I don’t think about that while I’m having another experience.  I enjoy the times ive had and I don’t let the past make me miserable.  They’re little memories I collect during my life, But they don’t define my future.  Anyway, its harder to take many people seriously now considering Ive had so many experiences with people.  Now I’m just waiting to die.  I think that’s all I have to offer today.  I think that’s it.  If not today than tomorrow.  I wish you luck during your life.”

I slowly get up to leave when he touches my shoulder.

“Were you looking for this?”

The man hands me a photo.  The photo was of Mary.  Its the Polaroid I was looking for.

“Wow!  Thank you!  I was looking for this!”

“I found it here when I first got here.  Just laying in a pile crap.  There’s a note in the back.  I didn’t read it yet.”

I left the old school house shortly after the man handed me the photo.  I got the old photo.  Somehow I didn’t feel as excited as I thought I would.  As I looked at Mary i felt the way I did when I played old video games from my childhood.  Like I was looking for the finale of a rom com instead of an old memory from my past.  This wasn’t real.  

At this moment I felt like I needed to get my life back to reality.  To stop living in the past and to live now.  Hang with my friends again and stop being such a drag.  I looked at the photo one more time wondering if I should read the note.  The wind picked up and the photo went with it.  I braced to go catch it than I stopped.  I let it go.  Whatever the note said it doesn’t matter now.  She might not have even remembered.   I turned and walk toward my car.

#nastalgia #old #elderly #memories #creepy #death #coping