Posted by philosoraptor on 10th of Aug 2011 at 09:50 am
Matt, I can no longer see your old MA / pivot reversal
mechanical systems on the site (SRS / FAZ / AIG / etc). Have you
removed them? With this heightened volatility, I bet they have made
some great momo trades in the past couple of weeks.....
Interesting post, fishbait. Your
comment is backed up by comparing the VIX:
Specifically, date of previous
largest drawdown (10.04%) was 03/06/09.
VIX O/H/L/C data on that date were
a whopping 50/52/48/49 (using round numbers)
Yesterday’s low was the point of
maximum drawdown for the current trade, which I calculate as
10.26%
VIX O/H/L/C data yesterday were
28/39/28/32 (using round numbers)
So, current trade represents a
slightly greater drawdown but on much reduced volatility – in other
words, the trade is even more stretched to the downside (in both
senses of the word) than perhaps we first thought.
The potential good news on the
horizon is our old and timeless friend Mr Mean Reversion. If price
snaps back to this mythical mean with even more ferocity than the
aforementioned trade of Feb-Mar 09, we could be looking at a winner
of greater than the c. 20% profit that that trade ultimately
achieved.
Posted by philosoraptor on 4th of Aug 2011 at 11:58 am
No stops, largest (intra-trade) drawdown for the system has been
c. 10% - however this trade did turn into a very nice winner
ultimately. Patience grasshopper.....
Posted by philosoraptor on 5th of Jul 2011 at 10:49 am
Chlo888, go to
www.FreeStockCharts.comfor live charts, plus all the usual
indicators and technical analysis tools. Symbol for S&P500 cash
index is '$INX'.
Posted by philosoraptor on 4th of Jun 2011 at 06:23 pm
Matt, if you follow the URL link provided in the spreadsheet and
scroll down to the bottom of the first page, you will see that the
programmer has provided an additional spreadsheet download that
analyses
monthly data
for longer time periods - the screengrab example shows the Dow back
to 1958!
[Indeed, you have to click on this screengrab in order to
download the spreadsheet]
Posted by philosoraptor on 24th of May 2011 at 11:56 am
Susan, remember that although Matt's charts are based on $100k
per trade (purely for illustrative purposes), he personally is
committing $250k per trade using the multi-entry system.
As such, a 40% scale-in is $100k, pretty close to your initial 2
x e-mini contracts. At a level of 1,000 on the S&P500, you and
he would be in effect trading the exact same amounts. Who knows, we
could be there or lower by year end...
Posted by philosoraptor on 16th of May 2011 at 06:12 pm
Algyros, I agree that the system buys weakness and shorts/sells
strength in terms of
entering trades.
However, if you look at the charts of past trades, some longs
have
exited after
a period of relative weakness.
For example, the single-entry long trade of early July 09 to
early September 09 exited after a short period of weakness. Same
for the multi-entry long trade of late November 08 to late December
08. In both cases, price actually bounced soon after exiting so
perhaps the system was looking to avoid a 'crash' or similar in
exiting under those (weak) conditions.
Posted by philosoraptor on 13th of May 2011 at 04:05 pm
Go to the search function in the side bar to the left, using the
keyword 'options' by member 'matt'. You will find Matt's post with
the linked spreadsheet.
It's
like he's been snooping on the SPY Swing System blog...
THE EFFECT OF COMPOUND EFFORT OVER
TIME
In the past, we offered dear readers a look at one of our
principles of financial success. 'Financial escape velocity' we
called it.
Today, we give you one of our principles of success in life:
'Compound effort over time'. You've heard of the 'miracle of
compound interest.' Well, there's a similar miracle at work in the
rest of life...
"I'm about ready to give up," said Jules (23) over the
telephone.
The young man graduated from college two years ago. He could
have easily entered the family business. Instead, he decided to try
to make his career in one of the world's most difficult métiers –
as a singer, musician, songwriter.
He moved to Brooklyn, which seems to attract young musicians
like London attracts fund managers. He took courses at Julliard
conservatory. He wrote songs. He put them on the internet. He sang
on 'open mike' nights in clubs and bars.
But after six months, it didn't seem to be going anywhere.
Meanwhile, his sister, Maria, voices similar disappointment and
impatience.
She too has chosen a difficult career; she trained as an
actress, moved to
LA, and had – like her brother – approached her career
in a disciplined, organised way.
But these are not careers where discipline and organisation come
easily or pay off readily. There are no fixed hours. And no fixed
route to professional advancement. Half the work you do, at least
it seems to us, is just figuring out what work to do.
Maria has had some success on TV and the movies. But she hasn't
gotten the major roles she hopes for.
"I've been in LA for two years already. I'm going to keep at it
for another three years, according to my plan. But if it still
isn't working, I'm going to have to find something else to do."
It's a rough life. Maria lives in a tiny studio apartment and
works from dawn to dusk trying to get acting jobs. She supports
herself, barely, by doing modelling work on the side. Jules,
meanwhile, is literally a starving artist, working one day a week
as a handyman to help pay the bills.
We don't know how others do it, but our children couldn't afford
to be starving artists without family support. Rents are too high.
Health care, transportation - if they were forced to pay 100% of
their living costs, they'd have to give up on their artistic
careers and find other lines of work.
The point we are making is that success doesn't always come
immediately. And it's not easy to sustain a career that doesn't
provide quick, positive feedback. But in our experience, it pays to
stay the course.
Starting out in life, young people are practically
interchangeable parts. They leave school not knowing much of
anything. If they can read and write clearly, they have an
advantage over most college graduates.
But school doesn't prepare them very well for real life. School
problems are bounded, controlled, and simplified. Usually, they are
idealised, with the confusing parts taken out. In history, for
example, they are taught broad themes and specific 'facts'. But the
sequence of events in real life doesn't follow simple scripts.
Instead, it is endlessly complex.
Historical characters are like stick figures, heroes or villains
according to the storyline. In real life, they are like the people
we know personally – they have their positive qualities and their
negative ones; they perform well in some circumstances and poorly
in others. They are neither good nor bad, but subject to
influence.
That's why you cannot make a good history out of recent events:
you know it too well!
In every discipline, the phenomenon is the same – in school, the
complexities of real life are removed so that students can be
tested on set groups of memorable, learnable, understandable bits
of stripped down, sanitised 'knowledge'.
That is why more education does not always lead to more success
in the real world. In fact, it could go in the opposite direction.
The better you get at handling the artificial world of academia,
the worse you may do at solving the real world's infinitely-nuanced
challenges.
Problem solving in the academic world typically involves a part
of the brain – but only a part of the brain. It is the 'rational'
part: the part that remembers facts, reads, writes, and connects
the dots. That is the skill measured by the SAT tests, for example.
They are tests of 'scholastic aptitude'. And they are pretty good
at it. If you able to do the kind of tricks the tests require,
you'll be able to handle the kind of work they give you in
school.
But life sends very different tests your way. Life's tests
involve many, many more variables – so many that your 'rational'
mind is frequently overwhelmed. The human face, for example, is
capable of hundreds - or thousands - of different expressions. Some
people seem better able to read these messages than others.
In the world of textbooks, other people scarcely matter. You
read. You write. You tick the boxes. But once you get into a
workplace, you are faced with an entirely new test. How well can
you get along with others, motivate them, lead them?
In school, tests are anticipated. In real life, you never know
when you will be tested. You never know what you will be tested on.
And even when you are in the middle of an important test, you often
don't know it.
In some careers you are able to apply the body of knowledge you
picked up in school, but not many. In most careers, you have to
learn on the job - a new body of knowledge, often additional,
sometimes completely new and different. And unless your job is to
throw the switch on a toll bridge, or to collect tolls on a toll
road, your new knowledge is likely to involve a great many things
that are uncertain, unknowable, and variable.
Even in 'routine' careers there is still plenty of room for
career advancement and money-making. But it requires you to step
beyond the routine. If you are a school teacher, for example, you
might have to write a book on education or start a school of your
own. Or, if you are a carpenter, you could set up a carpentry
business or use your skills to build something rare and interesting
enough that it could be sold at high margin, or mass produced.
Generally, the more formulaic the work, the less scope for
making money at it. The more limited, that is to say, the more like
school any job is, the less likely you are to turn it into a source
of wealth, power, or outsize success.
But assuming you are doing something that is not routine, not
formulaic, and not limited (an assembly-line worker, for example,
may be able to earn a good living, but it is not a way to build a
fortune), what is the secret to making a success of it? Ah, glad
you asked. At least part of the secret is sticking to it. Here's
why.
If your work is not simple and not formulaic, you need to use a
fair amount of creative thinking, innovation and entrepreneurship
to get ahead. Sometimes your work can be reduced to simple,
school-like thinking. More often, it is more complex, involving
subtle judgments about people, guesses about how others will react,
mastering new technology and leadership skills needed to get others
to follow your plan, and so forth. It may involve raising money;
'selling' your ideas; taking a chance on a new career or a new
business; convincing clients to leave their habitual sources; or
convincing employees to work harder or better.
You may have to develop a new product. Or, maybe you have an
insight that tells you how to invest your firm's resources more
productively.
Whatever it is, it is likely to require more than your 'school
brain' to make it happen. It is likely to involve wisdom,
intuition, and 'people skills.' It is likely to require more of you
- your brain, your personality, your heart. And maybe soul too.
It is likely to require trusted contacts, seasoned hunches,
educated guesses.
Where do these things come from?
Malcolm Gladwell's book, '
Outliers', makes the point that there is no secret to
success. Successful people just put in more hours than other
people. Our point today is similar. Success is usually the product
of compound effort over time. It takes time to develop contacts. It
takes time to develop trust - both of your own team and outside
clients/customers/associates. It takes time and experience to
develop the hunches and instincts that are useful in real life. It
takes time too to understand other people and learn how to work
with them. It also takes time to build a foundation of human and
financial capital that allows you to take advantage of the insights
and opportunities that experience bring you.
Time does not work in a linear, mathematical way. As with
compound interest, time pays off geometrically. As contacts,
experiences, wisdom, innovations and intuition are added one to
another, your opportunities multiply. A $100,000 deal that you
might have done when you were 25 grows into a $1 million deal five
years later. And instead of doing two deals a year, you might do
ten a year.
This is also why it is so important to put in lots of time.
Gladwell refers to the Beatles, major league athletes and people
such a Bill Gates. In every case, he found that the leading figures
in their industries put in thousands of hours - usually far more
than their competitors. They may appear to be 'gifted'. Their
achievements may seem effortless. But they are almost always the
product of time.
Not only that, but the time spent at the end is much more
powerful than the time at the beginning. You can see this by
looking at charts of compound interest. Starting from a low base,
the first series of compound interest produce little difference.
But at the end, the results are spectacular.
Start with a penny. Double it every day. At the end of a week
you are still only adding 32 cents per day. By the end of the third
week, however, you're adding more than $10,000 per day. So you see,
the last increments of time are much more important than the
first.
It doesn't exactly work that way in real life, of course. Hang
around too long and you get tired, and the lessons you've learned
might not be applicable to the new realities. Suppose, for example,
that you had learned to make the perfect buggy whip, at age 55, in
1910! Or imagine that you were the leading expert on silent movies
just before the 'talkies' started. Or maybe you were cornering the
classified advertising market just as Craigslist and e-Bay made
their appearance.
But aside from that kind of a setback, time compounds your
advantages. At age 20, you may know less than everyone in your
business. But then, you work ten hours a day, while others only
work eight hours. In 20 years, you may know more than just about
anyone. Then, who gets the new contracts? Who finds the new
opportunities? Who has pricing power?
Who makes money?
Compound interest works because each addition is then put in
service to earn another increment of gain. Compound effort works
the same way. Every insight, innovation and useful contact helps
bring on another, bigger and better one.
Remember, success is competitive. While you are adding to your
business capital, your competitors tend to wear out, move on, or
retire. Sticking to it is not easy. People tend to get distracted.
They often want easier, simpler, faster opportunities. They give up
their accumulated capital and take up something new. That leaves
you in a commanding position.
Stick to it.
Newsletter
Subscribe to our email list for regular free market updates
as well as a chance to get coupons!
The community is delayed by three days for non registered users.
Sliced through S3 - look
S3 on SPX is at 1147.35 another target level
Posted by philosoraptor on 18th of Aug 2011 at 10:06 am
Sliced through S3 - look out now for S4 and first the midpoint between S3 and S4.
Matt, I can no longer
SPX 5 with Pivots and Fibs
Posted by philosoraptor on 10th of Aug 2011 at 09:50 am
Matt, I can no longer see your old MA / pivot reversal mechanical systems on the site (SRS / FAZ / AIG / etc). Have you removed them? With this heightened volatility, I bet they have made some great momo trades in the past couple of weeks.....
low point draw down
Historical Draw Downs to the system
Posted by philosoraptor on 6th of Aug 2011 at 01:10 pm
Interesting post, fishbait. Your comment is backed up by comparing the VIX:
Specifically, date of previous largest drawdown (10.04%) was 03/06/09.
VIX O/H/L/C data on that date were a whopping 50/52/48/49 (using round numbers)
Yesterday’s low was the point of maximum drawdown for the current trade, which I calculate as 10.26%
VIX O/H/L/C data yesterday were 28/39/28/32 (using round numbers)
So, current trade represents a slightly greater drawdown but on much reduced volatility – in other words, the trade is even more stretched to the downside (in both senses of the word) than perhaps we first thought.
The potential good news on the horizon is our old and timeless friend Mr Mean Reversion. If price snaps back to this mythical mean with even more ferocity than the aforementioned trade of Feb-Mar 09, we could be looking at a winner of greater than the c. 20% profit that that trade ultimately achieved.
Fingers crossed...
Doug, if you look to
Historical Draw Downs to the system
Posted by philosoraptor on 5th of Aug 2011 at 12:56 pm
Doug, if you look to the left of the spreadsheet you can see the Dollar amount profit of $15,400, so it must be a 15.4% win - I think?
Title: Eaten alive? Yes, the other
Posted by philosoraptor on 4th of Aug 2011 at 02:01 pm
Yes, the other side of this trade is hoping to dine out on us tonight - so to speak...
No stops, largest (intra-trade) drawdown
Spy Swing System Alert
Posted by philosoraptor on 4th of Aug 2011 at 11:58 am
No stops, largest (intra-trade) drawdown for the system has been c. 10% - however this trade did turn into a very nice winner ultimately. Patience grasshopper.....
SPY S4 pivot level breach
S&P 5min with levels
Posted by philosoraptor on 27th of Jul 2011 at 04:02 pm
The seldom seen S4 pivot level was tested, breached and regained at the death today.
S4 has only been breached a handful of times in the past couple of years, including the Flash Crash. Scary stuff.
Chlo888, go to www.FreeStockCharts.comfor live
Short term SPX charts to watch on Tuesday
Posted by philosoraptor on 5th of Jul 2011 at 10:49 am
Chlo888, go to www.FreeStockCharts.comfor live charts, plus all the usual indicators and technical analysis tools. Symbol for S&P500 cash index is '$INX'.
Pivot mid points
Posted by philosoraptor on 15th of Jun 2011 at 02:54 pm
The midpoint between S3 and S4 has clearly been the line in the sand so far today - tested a number of times but continuing to hold......
Stefano, just scroll down about
Statistics
Posted by philosoraptor on 8th of Jun 2011 at 02:15 pm
Stefano, just scroll down about eight posts!
Matt, if you follow the
Very cool spreadsheet
Posted by philosoraptor on 4th of Jun 2011 at 06:23 pm
Matt, if you follow the URL link provided in the spreadsheet and scroll down to the bottom of the first page, you will see that the programmer has provided an additional spreadsheet download that analyses monthly data for longer time periods - the screengrab example shows the Dow back to 1958!
[Indeed, you have to click on this screengrab in order to download the spreadsheet]
http://www.gummy-stuff.org/historical-compare2.htm
TS did have the SPY
Just curious. With stockcharts.com SPY daily candlestick chart, I'm showing ...
Posted by philosoraptor on 24th of May 2011 at 04:39 pm
TS did have the SPY spike but no longer - curious.
Susan, remember that although Matt's
leverage
Posted by philosoraptor on 24th of May 2011 at 11:56 am
Susan, remember that although Matt's charts are based on $100k per trade (purely for illustrative purposes), he personally is committing $250k per trade using the multi-entry system.
As such, a 40% scale-in is $100k, pretty close to your initial 2 x e-mini contracts. At a level of 1,000 on the S&P500, you and he would be in effect trading the exact same amounts. Who knows, we could be there or lower by year end...
jdwm, you can get real
Can you put out live chart of SPY
Posted by philosoraptor on 23rd of May 2011 at 04:14 pm
jdwm, you can get real time prices of most ETFs, stocks, etc all the way down to 1min bars via www.freestockcharts.com
Sorry, I didn't know Star
spx5. HS top target 1334.74
Posted by philosoraptor on 20th of May 2011 at 04:11 pm
Sorry, I didn't know Star Wars was a religion in Cape Town...
Kobie wan, is it possible
spx5. HS top target 1334.74
Posted by philosoraptor on 20th of May 2011 at 03:56 pm
Kobie wan, is it possible to buy your textbook? Yours, a humble padawan...
Kobie wan, did you write
spx5. HS top target 1334.74
Posted by philosoraptor on 20th of May 2011 at 03:40 pm
Kobie wan, did you write the textbook?
Algyros, I agree that the
Educational Question
Posted by philosoraptor on 16th of May 2011 at 06:12 pm
Algyros, I agree that the system buys weakness and shorts/sells strength in terms of entering trades.
However, if you look at the charts of past trades, some longs have exited after a period of relative weakness.
For example, the single-entry long trade of early July 09 to early September 09 exited after a short period of weakness. Same for the multi-entry long trade of late November 08 to late December 08. In both cases, price actually bounced soon after exiting so perhaps the system was looking to avoid a 'crash' or similar in exiting under those (weak) conditions.
Go to the search function
what happened to the option backtest that was up?
Posted by philosoraptor on 13th of May 2011 at 04:05 pm
Go to the search function in the side bar to the left, using the keyword 'options' by member 'matt'. You will find Matt's post with the linked spreadsheet.
Learn how to trade
Posted by philosoraptor on 12th of May 2011 at 06:37 am
It's like he's been snooping on the SPY Swing System blog...
THE EFFECT OF COMPOUND EFFORT OVER TIME
In the past, we offered dear readers a look at one of our principles of financial success. 'Financial escape velocity' we called it.
Today, we give you one of our principles of success in life: 'Compound effort over time'. You've heard of the 'miracle of compound interest.' Well, there's a similar miracle at work in the rest of life...
"I'm about ready to give up," said Jules (23) over the telephone.
The young man graduated from college two years ago. He could have easily entered the family business. Instead, he decided to try to make his career in one of the world's most difficult métiers – as a singer, musician, songwriter.
He moved to Brooklyn, which seems to attract young musicians like London attracts fund managers. He took courses at Julliard conservatory. He wrote songs. He put them on the internet. He sang on 'open mike' nights in clubs and bars.
But after six months, it didn't seem to be going anywhere.
Meanwhile, his sister, Maria, voices similar disappointment and impatience.
She too has chosen a difficult career; she trained as an actress, moved to
LA, and had – like her brother – approached her career in a disciplined, organised way.
But these are not careers where discipline and organisation come easily or pay off readily. There are no fixed hours. And no fixed route to professional advancement. Half the work you do, at least it seems to us, is just figuring out what work to do.
Maria has had some success on TV and the movies. But she hasn't gotten the major roles she hopes for.
"I've been in LA for two years already. I'm going to keep at it for another three years, according to my plan. But if it still isn't working, I'm going to have to find something else to do."
It's a rough life. Maria lives in a tiny studio apartment and works from dawn to dusk trying to get acting jobs. She supports herself, barely, by doing modelling work on the side. Jules, meanwhile, is literally a starving artist, working one day a week as a handyman to help pay the bills.
We don't know how others do it, but our children couldn't afford to be starving artists without family support. Rents are too high. Health care, transportation - if they were forced to pay 100% of their living costs, they'd have to give up on their artistic careers and find other lines of work.
The point we are making is that success doesn't always come immediately. And it's not easy to sustain a career that doesn't provide quick, positive feedback. But in our experience, it pays to stay the course.
Starting out in life, young people are practically interchangeable parts. They leave school not knowing much of anything. If they can read and write clearly, they have an advantage over most college graduates.
But school doesn't prepare them very well for real life. School problems are bounded, controlled, and simplified. Usually, they are idealised, with the confusing parts taken out. In history, for example, they are taught broad themes and specific 'facts'. But the sequence of events in real life doesn't follow simple scripts. Instead, it is endlessly complex.
Historical characters are like stick figures, heroes or villains according to the storyline. In real life, they are like the people we know personally – they have their positive qualities and their negative ones; they perform well in some circumstances and poorly in others. They are neither good nor bad, but subject to influence.
That's why you cannot make a good history out of recent events: you know it too well!
In every discipline, the phenomenon is the same – in school, the complexities of real life are removed so that students can be tested on set groups of memorable, learnable, understandable bits of stripped down, sanitised 'knowledge'.
That is why more education does not always lead to more success in the real world. In fact, it could go in the opposite direction. The better you get at handling the artificial world of academia, the worse you may do at solving the real world's infinitely-nuanced challenges.
Problem solving in the academic world typically involves a part of the brain – but only a part of the brain. It is the 'rational' part: the part that remembers facts, reads, writes, and connects the dots. That is the skill measured by the SAT tests, for example. They are tests of 'scholastic aptitude'. And they are pretty good at it. If you able to do the kind of tricks the tests require, you'll be able to handle the kind of work they give you in school.
But life sends very different tests your way. Life's tests involve many, many more variables – so many that your 'rational' mind is frequently overwhelmed. The human face, for example, is capable of hundreds - or thousands - of different expressions. Some people seem better able to read these messages than others.
In the world of textbooks, other people scarcely matter. You read. You write. You tick the boxes. But once you get into a workplace, you are faced with an entirely new test. How well can you get along with others, motivate them, lead them?
In school, tests are anticipated. In real life, you never know when you will be tested. You never know what you will be tested on. And even when you are in the middle of an important test, you often don't know it.
In some careers you are able to apply the body of knowledge you picked up in school, but not many. In most careers, you have to learn on the job - a new body of knowledge, often additional, sometimes completely new and different. And unless your job is to throw the switch on a toll bridge, or to collect tolls on a toll road, your new knowledge is likely to involve a great many things that are uncertain, unknowable, and variable.
Even in 'routine' careers there is still plenty of room for career advancement and money-making. But it requires you to step beyond the routine. If you are a school teacher, for example, you might have to write a book on education or start a school of your own. Or, if you are a carpenter, you could set up a carpentry business or use your skills to build something rare and interesting enough that it could be sold at high margin, or mass produced.
Generally, the more formulaic the work, the less scope for making money at it. The more limited, that is to say, the more like school any job is, the less likely you are to turn it into a source of wealth, power, or outsize success.
But assuming you are doing something that is not routine, not formulaic, and not limited (an assembly-line worker, for example, may be able to earn a good living, but it is not a way to build a fortune), what is the secret to making a success of it? Ah, glad you asked. At least part of the secret is sticking to it. Here's why.
If your work is not simple and not formulaic, you need to use a fair amount of creative thinking, innovation and entrepreneurship to get ahead. Sometimes your work can be reduced to simple, school-like thinking. More often, it is more complex, involving subtle judgments about people, guesses about how others will react, mastering new technology and leadership skills needed to get others to follow your plan, and so forth. It may involve raising money; 'selling' your ideas; taking a chance on a new career or a new business; convincing clients to leave their habitual sources; or convincing employees to work harder or better.
You may have to develop a new product. Or, maybe you have an insight that tells you how to invest your firm's resources more productively.
Whatever it is, it is likely to require more than your 'school brain' to make it happen. It is likely to involve wisdom, intuition, and 'people skills.' It is likely to require more of you - your brain, your personality, your heart. And maybe soul too.
It is likely to require trusted contacts, seasoned hunches, educated guesses.
Where do these things come from?
Malcolm Gladwell's book, ' Outliers', makes the point that there is no secret to success. Successful people just put in more hours than other people. Our point today is similar. Success is usually the product of compound effort over time. It takes time to develop contacts. It takes time to develop trust - both of your own team and outside clients/customers/associates. It takes time and experience to develop the hunches and instincts that are useful in real life. It takes time too to understand other people and learn how to work with them. It also takes time to build a foundation of human and financial capital that allows you to take advantage of the insights and opportunities that experience bring you.
Time does not work in a linear, mathematical way. As with compound interest, time pays off geometrically. As contacts, experiences, wisdom, innovations and intuition are added one to another, your opportunities multiply. A $100,000 deal that you might have done when you were 25 grows into a $1 million deal five years later. And instead of doing two deals a year, you might do ten a year.
This is also why it is so important to put in lots of time. Gladwell refers to the Beatles, major league athletes and people such a Bill Gates. In every case, he found that the leading figures in their industries put in thousands of hours - usually far more than their competitors. They may appear to be 'gifted'. Their achievements may seem effortless. But they are almost always the product of time.
Not only that, but the time spent at the end is much more powerful than the time at the beginning. You can see this by looking at charts of compound interest. Starting from a low base, the first series of compound interest produce little difference. But at the end, the results are spectacular.
Start with a penny. Double it every day. At the end of a week you are still only adding 32 cents per day. By the end of the third week, however, you're adding more than $10,000 per day. So you see, the last increments of time are much more important than the first.
It doesn't exactly work that way in real life, of course. Hang around too long and you get tired, and the lessons you've learned might not be applicable to the new realities. Suppose, for example, that you had learned to make the perfect buggy whip, at age 55, in 1910! Or imagine that you were the leading expert on silent movies just before the 'talkies' started. Or maybe you were cornering the classified advertising market just as Craigslist and e-Bay made their appearance.
But aside from that kind of a setback, time compounds your advantages. At age 20, you may know less than everyone in your business. But then, you work ten hours a day, while others only work eight hours. In 20 years, you may know more than just about anyone. Then, who gets the new contracts? Who finds the new opportunities? Who has pricing power?
Who makes money?
Compound interest works because each addition is then put in service to earn another increment of gain. Compound effort works the same way. Every insight, innovation and useful contact helps bring on another, bigger and better one.
Remember, success is competitive. While you are adding to your business capital, your competitors tend to wear out, move on, or retire. Sticking to it is not easy. People tend to get distracted. They often want easier, simpler, faster opportunities. They give up their accumulated capital and take up something new. That leaves you in a commanding position.
Stick to it.