{"id":39,"date":"2012-10-09T12:35:32","date_gmt":"2012-10-09T19:35:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lambla\/?p=39"},"modified":"2012-10-09T12:35:32","modified_gmt":"2012-10-09T19:35:32","slug":"lessons-learned-a-reflective-look","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lambla\/2012\/10\/09\/lessons-learned-a-reflective-look\/","title":{"rendered":"Lessons Learned – a reflective look"},"content":{"rendered":"

I learned a few things over the last few weeks, most notably that trading in speculation is really, really complicated to conceptualize.<\/p>\n

After two crazy weeks of travel and work, I finally got a chance to look at what my various contracts had done over the last 3 weeks. Unfortunately, it didn’t look great. First,\u00a0I think I misinterpreted my research and the markets in going long on corn last week. Compared to my classmates,\u00a0I am not a very active trader.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

My research from last week clearly told me that the corn markets were not looking spectacular, but for some reason that meant I went long.<\/p>\n

More importantly, though, I spent some time working through my fundamental understanding of the role of producers, buyers, and speculators in the market, thanks to my classmates. This is a completely foreign language to me, unlike many of my MBA colleagues. Therefore, the lessons learned below may seem very simple; but for me, they are valuable.<\/p>\n

1. Both corn and wheat prices fell at the end of last week. This was good for my wheat contracts, because I was short, but not good for my corn contracts, because I was in a long position.<\/p>\n

2.\u00a0I would be a really bad day trader, and an even worse scalper. I am perfectly happy to check my balance at the end of the day and try to do better in the next few days, as opposed to making multiple trades in one day and track short price changes. \u00a0I don’t consider myself a risk-averse person, but I do consider myself patient, and I certainly feel overwhelmed by the huge number of influences on the markets.<\/p>\n

3.\u00a0I thought I would enjoy learning about agricultural markets because agriculture is an industry based in tangible production with tangible inputs and outputs. As it turns out, even agricultural futures markets aren\u2019t real either. Everything in the markets is about trading and guessing about money that doesn\u2019t really exist.\u00a0 Determining value based on someone else\u2019s estimation of your determination of value fundamentally makes no sense to me.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I learned a few things over the last few weeks, most notably that trading in speculation is really, really complicated to conceptualize. After two crazy weeks of travel and work, I finally got a chance to look at what my various contracts had done over the last 3 weeks. Unfortunately, it didn’t look great. First,\u00a0I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8589,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[568639],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-what-went-rightwrong"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lambla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lambla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lambla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lambla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8589"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lambla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lambla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lambla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions\/41"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lambla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lambla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/lambla\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}