The Keno Brothers from Antiques Roadshow and Dovetails

I was thinking further on the previous post "temperment" and I thought about something I heard one of the Keno Brothers talk about a few years ago. I was visiting a famous auction house in NYC on business and saw one of them outside the auction room so I approached. I gave him the "i'm a big fan" thing and we just chatted. In the course of it I opined that an 18th century craftsman must have spent "forever" making those little dovetail joints that fit so perfectly and would hold up for 250 years yada yada.

He gave me a very interesting answer. He said "the comparative cost of labor was, in the end, fairly cheap. It was the quality that was expensive" - meaning anyone could make a rough dovetail to hold things together - but only the quality of the fit distinguished a functional piece from a work of art that was also a functional piece.

A true craftsman takes a function stance and refines it so it still works as good but has lasting result as well. perhaps another view of temperment?

Temperment

I read a great article put out by Legg Mason and will quote part of it here:

"History clearly shows that being smart and having an appropriate temperament for investing are distinct. Of course, ideally you want an investor to have both smarts and a proper temperament. But if given a choice between the two, temperament seems the more rare and valuable.

Curtis Faith’s new book, Way of the Turtle, is a story about trading. Yet the importance of temperament comes through loud and clear. He shows persuasively how psychological pitfalls repeatedly stymie good investment results. The story of the turtle traders is fascinating, and warrants going back to the beginning. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Richard Dennis was one of the best-known and most successful commodities traders in the United States. In the early 1980s, Dennis and his partner Bill Eckhardt debated whether great traders are made (Dennis’s view) or born (Eckhardt’s contention). The back-and-forth gathered steam one day when the partners were visiting a turtle farm in Singapore, prompting Dennis to claim, “We’re going to raise traders like they raise turtles in Singapore.”

So Dennis and Eckhardt ran an experiment. They put an ad in major financial newspapers soliciting applicants for a training program. The ad explained the partners would train the group and seed them with a substantial trading account. Over 1,000 people applied, and after rigorous screening and testing, Dennis and Eckhardt invited 40 candidates for interviews in Chicago. The interviewers sought to evaluate the intellect and reasoning of the candidates. They ended up selecting 13 people, less than 1-in-100, for the maiden class. They dubbed the group the “turtles.”

Faith was only 19 at the time, the youngest of the turtles, and had a background in the nascent computer programming field. Other turtles included a Ph.D. in linguistics, a handful of traders, and a professional gambler. The group was clearly very smart, in Faith’s words, “among the brightest I had ever met.”

In late 1982, Dennis and Eckhardt trained the group, covering concepts including probability,
money management, and risk of ruin. In early 1983, the partners gave each turtle an account equivalent to $50,000 – $100,000 and let them loose. By agreement, the partners would assess the results after a month and adjust capital levels—more for the successful traders and less for the unsuccessful ones—accordingly. After the initial period, Faith was up the most in the class. Dennis rewarded his results with $2 million. More relevant is why Faith did the best: It turns out he was the only turtle who actually followed the system. All of the other traders decided to override the system at one point or another, owing mostly to psychological factors.
Many outsiders deemed Dennis the winner of the nature/nurture bet because the turtles in aggregate went on to enjoy long-term success.

Faith, however, argues it was a draw because while the trading approach can be taught to most people, some are better suited to deal with the psychological aspects than others."

I was a professional musician in my first life as a trumpet player and an orchestra and band conductor. there were some persons in the workforce who were better or worse technically but the really great ones were of a particular temperment..particularly the trumpet players. There is a great story about Adolph Herseth who was principal trumpet of the Chicago Symphony for decades and one of the great orchestral musicians of the 20th or any century. When he first auditioned Fritz Reiner the rather difficult conductor chose a piece with a very hard trumpet solo that came "out of the blue" after sitting cold for 10 minutes waiting for it. Emotionally enough to drive you nuts. Reiner had Herseth play the part over and over. finally Herseth said "Mr. Reiner, you can send the orchestra home now. We can do this all day long and I ain't gonna miss". That is temperment.

Little things that make me crazy

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So, I'm in advertising. We usually denote "self advertising" or "astroturfing" with "special advertising supplement" which is jargon for an advertorial...something that is shaped like an editorial or "content" but is a trojan horse...just yap from the company.

Let's call it for what it is. If a company, a big established company, has to use this silly form of trickery, then what gives? Can you believe anything is real or is this just more crap...like the "fine print" commercial stuff you see on those banking ads...the ones with the kid trying to ride a bike in a little square or the cardboard cutout truck....

Why do people do that?

The OPUS ONE post

I come from a world of advertising and marketing where it takes forever to get things right and even then "right" is in the eye of the beholder. I'm surrounded daily by 40+ traders (the number grows all the time) and the culture and environment changes significantly in a very contrary way.

More people doing the same thing for me is chaos. More traders following risk management rules and their own varying degrees of discipline and concentration just bring order to an otherwise troubled universe.

There is something very satisfying about concentration.