<p>I just had a look at John Maudlin’s column where he talks a little about all of the kids coming out of college looking for jobs in the financial industry, ideally to be money managers and traders. This as the financial industry is shedding tens of thousands of jobs and where the overall pool of money is shrinking. Competition for these jobs will be fierce. He makes the case that one should be aware that they are competing with very, very smart people out there in trading their own account. I like to trade my own account as I don’t have to trade every day. I don’t have to be invested every day. I just look for low-risk opportunities these days and exit when the profits are good enough. This approach has worked well for me the past few months.</p>
<p>These professional managing endowments do it for a living and it seems like they always want to be invested and in stuff that will allow them to hit it out of the ballpark at the cost of liquidity. I don’t have any Ivy League degrees, high-power connections and insider information but these guys sound just plain stupid to me. They were basically right until they weren’t. That’s happened to me too. But when I stop being right, I just get out. Sometimes it’s nice to be the little guy.</p>
<p>I take it that these guys coming out of college have been taught these systems for managing money that may be useless now.</p>