As my book readers know, I have always had interests outside of trading since I left the Turtle program.
I guess like most people, I’d like to leave the world a better place for my having been here. I’ve been lucky at times and have been helped by some amazing people along the way. So I want to give back.
One of my core interests has centered around using technology to make change easier and more effective. I have been thinking about ideas for tools to help change for perhaps 15 years now. I keep up on the latest trends and languages and dabble here and there to understand what is going on. I have some good ideas that I have been waiting for the right time and opportunity to develop.
Lately, I’ve been thinking alot about communication tools for focused groups of people looking to make change.
Seth Godin calls these groups with common interests and goals: Tribes. I like that word (except in trading it tends to make people think of Ed Seykota and his Trading Tribe which is more specific than Seth’s use or the normal English meaning). In the more general world outside of trading, the word tribes works well. A tribe is a group of people with common interests and purpose.
I believe that the social tools and structures we have no longer work well. Governments are too slow to react and too far disconnected from the domains over which they legislate. Corporations can’t keep up with the pace of change without massive government assistance. This will only get worse until it gets better.
The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different and probably different in ways that we can’t anticipate.
So the question arises: Will the future be one that happens to you, or one that you help make happen?
Any decent trader can look at the trends of current society and see that there will be some major problems in the future if we don’t make some big changes. Many different kinds of problems under many different potential scenarios. We can let the future happen. Or we can give it a push.
I prefer to take an active role in the future. I have a 9-month old daughter. I don’t want her to grow up in the world as it will be if we don’t pull together and make some things different.
If you are interested in helping make the world a better place, contact me via the About page and let me know what you want to change and what kind of help you need to make that change. I can’t promise that I’ll be able to help everyone but I would like to get some idea what each of you would like to see different and what kinds of assistance you need so that as I’m assembling the tribes and technologies for change, I can help as many people as I can along the way.
Even just a few of us working towards the same goals will be more successful than we will be if we work alone.
Trading From Your Gut
Way of the Turtle
Inside the Mind of the Turtles
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
When you use the term ‘change’ in this blog posting. Do you refer to the fight towards the cause of progressive socialism? Would you consider yourself to be a socialist?
I don’t believe in socialism. I don’t believe in governments forcing people to do things. I think it is counterproductive. Neither those taxed nor those who received “entitlements” benefit as well as they might under other circumstances.
I don’t think governments and coercion help. Some things might work okay under a more socialist environment but, in general, socialism is a poor replacement for individual initiative.
I believe in maximum freedom, maximum equality, and the minimum set of rules required to ensure the other two.
check out the permaculture tribe…
I think we can only try to prepare ourselves for future changes. This future trends seems to me like big tsunami wave – you can build a dam, but it’s more useful to leave the coast. However, it’s easier to meet this changes in tribe, than alone
I found this site after reading “Trading from your gut” and “Way of the Turtle” – thank you very much for this books.
Hi Curtis,
I would like to take a minute and thank you for sharing your experiences as a Turtle trader in the book Way of the Turtle. I would highly recommend this book to anyone considering trading as a profession. Also, all the very best to you and your young family.
Best regards,
Dan
I believe changes greatest potential would be in designing it directly into flawed or non competitive business models,rebuilding the freedom based GDP from the consumer up.Designing success back into the Worlds free countries through simple ajustments in money already there.Very profitable and very good for all.E-mail for further details,I am a trader an entreprenur
Curits – i just finished reading your book “Trading From Your Gut” – very impressive – i can assure you that the next book i will be reading is “Way of the Turtle” – right after i attempt to put into practice the right brain concepts and strategies put forth in your book. I found your book to be a most exciting read and look forward to continuing my trading education with your help – thanks again – Richard
Hi Curtis,
Thanks for post. My two cents.
We’ve got to get govt. out of legislating every aspect of human behavior they can. Most govt. entities over past 40 years have one main reason for existence – get bigger, more people, larger budget and grow, grow, grow. Rationality for growth for self interest has totally overwhelmed governing for public interest.
Govt. entities should strive to be less powerful, eliminate rules rather than add, and stay striclty in a very narrow area of public interest not special lobby interest.
Only thing I know that will compel that is shrinking funding. Without funds then the incentives are removed to spend more. Decrease govt until it has to be efficient.
Hi Curtis,
I jumped at the chance to leave a comment as your blog entry does resonate as do some of the comments. I work somewhat reluctantly (most of the time) for a technology firm (IT Management software and solutions to be precise) and am forever amazed how grand ideas and software development quite often forgets and/or neglects the user experience. It is the same with Governments. Everything seems to be geared to scale, bigger the better. I suppose it ultimately boils down to greed and us wanting more of everything and wanting it now. Bigger companies and bigger Government at some point was concluded to be the best way to satisfy that insatiable appitite for more of everything and right now. I suppose it worked to a point in the short term (instant gratification) but in the longer term the simple but hugely important things have been forgotten. Our Governments as they grow (like many companies that grow too big for their own good) simply lose touch, cost too much and become inefficient. I am capitalist at heart and believe in freedom with a social and moral fibre (I think anyway) and feel leveraging technology the right way is a good way.
BTW I read “Way of the Turtle” – congratulations. It is a great read for Traders – you are the only one to really get across the ups and inevitable downs a Trader will experience. Although I have read this sort of thing elsewhere (drawdowns and losing streaks) and everywhere, you are the only one who has managed to help me really understand this at the required profound level. I am going to look up your other books.
Cheers, Ben.
Hello, congratulations for the initiative, I hope to learn more about you. I am here in Brazil, and we need talking heads to make the right move.
Thanks,
It sounds like a great initiative. The one area I would really like to help people tackle are frauds in the financial arena. Maybe if we all get together we can stop this or at least put a damper on it. For example, there is a guy named Michael Covel who goes around selling books on trading but he himself can’t even make a living trading. After 15 years of supposedly teaching people how to trade, he himself still can’t do it. And now he is essentially paying people to write testomonials on amazon about his books. And he is now also publishing people’s personal information on his blog without their consent if they criticize him in any way. This type of unethical, immoral behavior needs to be stopped. There are many more like him too in the “investment advice” space. If a guy like him is so unethical on his silly blog, can you imagine the level of fraud in his overall business? Maybe there is some way to use technology and tools to stop these sorts of frauds? Any ideas?
Almost everyone wants the world to be better Curtis but I don’t think most people are willing to make it better if it means they personally have to change the way they behave, which it probably does.
I’ll give you an example of what I mean, I heard today about Chinese workers making hi-tec phones threatening a mass suicide in protest over the appalling conditions they were being forced to work under, 150 of them had to be talked down from the roof over a period of few days. People will say that they care about this, but obviously they don’t care enough to refuse to buy these gadgets unless the workers that make them are treated well. They don’t care enough to make that a condition of consumption.
Or look closer to home at your own country where a large voter block of baby boomers say they are worried about the country’s young inheriting huge debts, they say they care about that, but not enough to pay higher taxes and give up THEIR entitlements (although I imagine they’d be quite willing to vote to strip these entitlements from younger generations).
For the last 30 years we have had a culture where everything is about ‘me, my and mine’. Sociopaths have been held up as role models, greed they tell us is good. We don’t even demand that money is made through productive activities any more either, society doesn’t care if you made your millions through gambling with other peoples money, asset stripping or producing things that people actually want and need because it’s all about what you have, who might have got hurt making it doesn’t seem to come into the equation.
Unfortunately I can’t see things changing until people are prepared to make the sacrifices that change requires and that won’t happen until Western societies start suffering the consequences of their selfishness.
Good luck though.