I graduated from a high school for nerds back in 1985. We had a fencing team that went to the Junior Olympics, advanced placement calculus and physics classes, and the foreign languages offered included Russian. However, we had no basketball or football team. That’s pretty darn nerdy. When I drank my way out of a scholarship and a semester with something below a two-point-oh average, I decided that college was better left alone until I had some direction.
So after a few years of working for a living, it was back to school I went. It’s easier to go to college as an adult, in my opinion, because you absorb less of the bullshit and the deprogramming is easier. I got a Bachelors in Mathematics with some emphasis on statistics while I was working the overnight shift in a grocery store.
Since then, I’ve been in the property and casualty insurance industry as an actuary, product manager, and pricing manager. My good-lookin’, good-cookin’ Wifeykins and I are amateur investors with a variety of holdings, but we gravitate towards contrarian and value investments, and living below our means.
My exploration of the broader range of equity trading – technical analysis, active trading, trend following, and systems – initially was born out of a desire to improve some of the pitfalls I came across while “value investing.” Now that I can see there is no such thing as “investing” – only “trading” – I’m trying to experiment and synthesize some less-active means of equity trading that can generate above-market returns over the long term. In the meanwhile, I’m going to write about what I find, here, on this blog.
You might be thinking, “what’s up with this anarchy thing?” It’s been a long journey. I’m the son of a mustang who made sergeant five times, and who met his wife (my mom) in the Marine Corps. I moved from a pretty militant ROTC-type into something else, probably because I liked the word “why” too much for a military career. That infatuation with “why” had me applying logic to, and questioning, all of the conventional thinking about politics. I moved from what most consider “right” to “left,” realized there’s hardly a dime’s worth of difference between ‘em, and then discovered Rand and Chomsky at the same time. I had a cup of coffee as a “libertarian” before I took the idea of personal liberty and free exchange to its logical conclusion – anarchy. So when I write about politics, you’re going to be exposed to a different point of view than you’ve probably ever seen. Check out the links on my blogroll for more on this.
And if you’re wondering how I came up with the original blog name “Absolutely NO DooDahs”, well, my first fantasy football team way back in 1996 was the “New Orleans DooDahs,” with “DooDah” being an Uncle Remus reference. Rather zippity, don’t you think?
