Beating the market by trading like a sociopath (part 1)

I love money.  It’s so impersonal.  In a world where winning is the best thing, money is frequently how I keep score.  I don’t like spending it, necessarily.  Money doesn’t matter to me in itself.  I only like it because other people care about it a lot (more than almost anything else in the world).  Because they care about it so much, they will fight hard for it—against me or anybody else.  It makes the game very fun.  And although it is never high stakes on my part, it almost always is with whomever I am playing against.  I play because it’s a game.  Others play because it’s their life.  People are frequently ruined.

I have an incredibly green thumb for money.  I fully funded my retirement by the time I was 30 years old.  Since I started investing seriously in 2004, I have averaged a 9.5% return in the stock market—257% better than the average returns of the S&P 500 over the same period of 3.7%.  It’s sick how well I do trading stocks.  Beating the market this soundly and consistently is unheard of and many argue it is impossible (or due solely to luck).  In 2011, only 4 out of 5 mutual fund managers beat the market, and only a handful of individuals have managed to do so with any regularity. One Forbes article (“Why Smart People Fail to Beat the Market") put it this way “There are only two ways to beat the stock market in the long-term, net of expenses: one, trade on superior information; two, be lucky.” (Unfortunately, the efficient market hypothesis holds that all available information about a company’s future prospects are already widely known and reflected in the price of a stock,  so that just leaves one way to beat the market.  The one exception is so-called insider information, which is largely illegal to trade upon.).

But I am not trading on better knowledge.  I am a relatively unsophisticated investor.  Instead, I am trading on a special vision.