BarroMetrics Views: A Personal Journey to Gold-Medal Trading
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be using the articles here as the framework for a new book I’ll be writing. It will be the story of a journey - from lawyer to novice trader to master. Along the way, I hope to be able to share some insights that will be of interest to all.
All good stories have a beginning, so where should I begin this one?
It would have to be with my father, E G (’Frankie’) Barros who started as the low man on the totem pole of International Molasses and rose to Managing Director with an equity share, albeit, a small one. Dad was a charismatic high achiever. When he died, mourners from all walks of life came to pay their respects. Sharing the limelight with Dad, is Mom (’Frecks’ Barros) and between the two of them they raised eight kids. We would have had a soccer team but for the deaths of two my elder brothers at childbirth and another death after Ricardo, brother number three.
I want to start with Dad because the success triangle in any field, starts with our values and beliefs; it is from him that my siblings and I have developed a base for success. Dad taught us our values by the way he lived rather than by what he told us; and that is a lesson in itself.
In our childhood, I don’t know what comes first, values or beliefs. But once we have attained adulthood, I believe that values drive beliefs. To succeed in trading we need certain values and three beliefs.
Dad taught us that success in life would demand:
- Financial straight dealing
- Keeping our word and walking our talk
- Admitting our errors, and doing something about them. Feeling bad was no substitute for remedial action.
- Never ever giving up. No matter how far behind the score board, he demanded we keep trying until we lost the last point. I can’t tell the number of badminton and squash matches I have won just following this dictum.
- If something wasn’t working to change what I was doing.
Much later in University, I read the Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Her philosophy provided the words to Dad’s lessons. So let me start my first ‘take-away’ with her description of the values needed for a successful life (in the order presented above):
- Honesty. The value of never consciously faking reality. In trading the lack of this value is only too apparent. In Singapore, we have ‘instructors’ who see nothing wrong in buying ‘Phd’s because it helps marketing. We also see this in ‘traders’ who never have any losses. A trader whom I know well tells me he has a method that never loses. That is technically true since he does not open broking statements that he knows record the losses!
The problem with dishonesty is this: since we won’t admit the consequences of our behaviours, we won’t take the remedial action that will lead to improvement. That’s why I have started with the Value of HONESTY as my first pre-requisite for success. Learning and improvement are based on knowing what is and is not working. Without honesty, no improvement is possible. But our psychological and cultural mores make it difficult for us to practice honesty. Most of us prefer ‘white’ lies but some ‘white lies’ turn into the frauds of Maddoff magnitude….
….I have sometimes been asked, when it comes to our trading results, if being dishonest with the outside world is OK as long as we are honest with ourselves. I suppose so - if we could keep the two separate and distinct. But it seems to me that once you get into the habit of being dishonest, it would be difficult to keep the distinctions when most we need it. It’s much easier to strive to be as honest as we can be all of the time.
Refer this blog post to a friend or colleague…
