Most bloggers eventually get ’round to answering the question ‘Why do you write?‘. If I recall, I’ve made plenty of related asides & comments myself (damn, I wish I had ‘em to hand!) over the past year – but high time for a proper post, eh?!
As I mulled over this post, I came to a surprising realization – I guess the origin of the Wexboy blog actually stretches waayyy back. At one point, I wrote a daily market commentary for a number of years. Seemed like a good idea at the outset – oh, what sweet & naive foolishness! If you’ve tried it, you’ll know writing a daily 7 am commentary becomes a rather daunting (& boring) prospect pretty quickly! But it wasn’t something I could quit once I’d started, and whining about writer’s block wasn’t a feasible option either. So – my solution?
The old Mae West – I quickly drifted… My commentaries began to include anything & everything that took my fancy: Stocks, dumb celebrities, current affairs, political lampoons, hangover cures, primers on technical analysis, etc. Anything to distract & entertain myself as I tried to nail down a picture of the market each day/week. Over time, I’d indulge myself with various series & running gags. I’d often anthropomorphize the markets in terms of movies, celebrities, farming, whatever..! USD/JPY moves & intervention were huge then – I vividly recall writing Godzilla mini-plots to explain exactly (?!) what was going on in the markets.
I do recall the institution I worked for was rather staid – lawks, they still had bloody tea ladies when I left! I’m sure if anybody senior enough had ever read those commentaries, I’d have been rapidly replaced as author & perhaps employee. But, like with most companies, that would have completely missed the point… Because I’d actually discovered, to my astonishment, something very valuable:
First, I realized the very act of writing about the market – no matter how jocular my tone – actually crystallized my own market opinion & trading strategies. And I was able to measure this effect as a tangible improvement in my P&L. You know, I’m all for education, but regular education methods bore me to tears – I’m definitely an autodidact. Which might explain why I wasn’t happy with the notion that simply setting something down on paper could actually…
