I have been reading Luca Dellanna’s excellent little book “100 Truths You Will Learn Too Late” in which he creates a riff on the Serenity Prayer which really resonated with me:

May I have the honesty to acknowledge what is important for me, the wisdom to know its costs, and the discipline to pay them.

The best parts of the book are a slap in the face about everything you aren’t doing to achieve your goals and how you might be able to correct that. He describes how people are exceptionally good at succeeding at their priorities, but extremely dishonest about what those priorities really are.

This reminded me of a line in the first Market Wizards book where Ed Seykota, the legendary trend follower, stated “Win or lose, everybody gets what they want from the market.” When I first read this the market had undergone a correction and I was feeling particularly beaten up. I thought “this has to be nonsense?”* but the line really hit me hard and got me thinking.

Surely… everybody wants to win in the market. Everybody wants to beat the market. Doesn’t everybody want the same thing? But the more I thought about it, and reflected on the behaviours of myself and everyone else I knew, I realised that we can have a real dishonesty about what we really want from the market.

So what do people really want from the market?

  • Some people want to invest in the market, because that’s what everyone else does
  • Some people want to invest for good and feel good about themselves for doing so
  • Some people want to feel the thrills and spills of wild speculation
  • Some people want to make friends and companions
  • Some people want to look good to their bosses, friends or other halves
  • Some people want to have results without putting in the hard work of transforming their habits
  • Some people want to support company executives they like and believe in
  • Some people want to follow the stories of the shares they own wherever those stories go
  • Some people want to blame others if their investments go wrong so outsource their thinking to gurus
  • Some people want to prioritise sheltering their income or capital from tax
  • Some people want to pretend to themselves that paper losses aren’t real losses
  • Some people want to feel part of a tribe on a mission against the world
  • Some people…

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