2006 November 15 | The Underground Investor

Archive for November 15th, 2006

Be A Master of Few, Not a Student of Many to Improve Your Portfolio Returns, Part II

November 15, 2006 - This blog is a continuation of my previous entry. I was going to wait uintil next week to post it, but was in a writing mood today so since I finished writing it earlier, here it is. From March 2005 to March 2006, I achieved a 40% return in my portfolio with 100% long positions. This year, from March to mid-September, I was up 35%. And if you’ve been following my newsletters and blogs, you’ll see that for the past six months, my calls on the price of gold have been more accurate than the Chief Global Economists of most major global investment houses

Be A Master of Few, Not a Student of Many to Improve Your Portfolio Returns, Part I

November 15, 2006 - Today, I’ve decided to trump Kaeho at his own game. Having considerable training in martial arts myself, I’ve noticed many strategies and techniques that have improved my martial arts training that are applicable to the art of investing. After all I named my blog the Zen of Investing for this very reason. So today, I’m going to branch out a little and cover how martial arts has made me a better investor.

In the seminal book about martial arts strategy, “The Book of Five Rings” by Miyamoto Musashi, the author mentions that teaching any more than five cutting techniques for the sword is all for show and will actually detract from your progression in mastering the sword. He said there are only a finite number of ways to kill someone with a sword and that he “fails to see the reason for practicing hundreds of little tricks to do it. It is better to be the master of a few techniques than the student of many.”