Friday, December 5th, 2008
The big bucks are in optimism
Tradingmarkets.com has an excellent interview with Gil Morales, who ran some of William O’Neil’s money. Morales is also co-author with O’Neil of ‘How to Make Money Selling Stocks Short’. But, despite that, he says traders are better off have an optimistic bias:
“I actually think that you’re better off being bullish most of the time because you make more money on the bull side. When the market turns if you have too much of a bearish mentality - and I’ll suffer from this sometimes - you won’t see it right away. It’ll take you a little bit of time. And if you’re bullish most of the time your orientation is that way. You’ll pick things up a lot faster.”
It might seem an unusual thing to say during this bear market, but it gels with what I’ve found: there is more money to be made and greater opportunities in being optimistic, particularly when others aren’t.
As Morales says, if you get stuck in the bear mindset, you’ll miss the start of the next bull market which is when growth investors make most money. Indeed, aggressive growth investors should be positioning themselves constantly for that period, because that is when their edge is greatest.
Morales says optimism is one of Bill O’Neil’s greatest strengths:
“This guy grew up in the Depression. He started trading, I think, when he got back from the Air Force, which I think was in early ’50s or late ’40s. And so he’s seen everything, bad and good. And yet he’s still able to maintain this sort of relentless optimistic force that allows him to see things clearly. I think that’s really the key. You don’t allow your mind to get into a rut one way or another. And I think Bill is great at keeping things fresh in his head and also eager to find the next opportunity.”
Word Count: 308. This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 12:56 am and is filed under Gil Morales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
