Market Wizards

Market Wizards: Compare and Contrast

By Madison Nef

The first interview I read was an interview with Mark Weinstein. He’s a well known commodity trader who got a rough start trading when he lost all his money trading and not knowing anything about how the stock market worked. He quickly picked up his game, and since losing that one trade on soybeans in 1980 continued and had no losing months or weeks from there on out.

The second interview I read was Brian Gelber’s interview. He started trading from the very bottom without a license and without any real knowledge of the market or how it worked. He saw it could be used to make money from a young age, so he got his broker’s license, studied charts and then worked the market as both a trader AND a broker for 3 years. He traded equities as opposed to commodities.

The personalities of these two seemed very different simply from HOW they answered their questions. Gelber seemed more self-assured, proud and outgoing. He seemed to know exactly where he stood and what strategy used. Weinstein, on the other hand, seemed to be a laid back, go-with-the-flow type and seemed shy from how the book was written. If he was being quoted, I get the feeling that he was quieter.

The second difference I noticed was how the two approached the market. Gelber believed that one of the best things you could do is listen to other traders and listen to the ideas of those around you. He felt that by doing so, you could get some of the best trades off. He held a lot of long positions throughout his career and was very successful. Gelber used a lot of other people’s trading ideas and became successful while trading AND being a broker at the same time… something that not many chose to do because of the long hours and the fact that you were not SUPPOSED to run others’ stocks and your own at the same time.

On the flip side of things, Weinstein felt that the best strategy was to listen to your gut and follow your own instincts. He learned early on in the game to not always trust what other people tell you in the “game” of sorts that he was in; and that had an impact on how he traded for his entire career. He often held more short-term positions, trading only a few longs.

I don’t necessarily agree with either of these traders… I just would MODIFY some of their strategies. For example, instead of just always listening to the ideas of those around me, I would try to incorporate my own too… not just rip ideas off of others (which is what Gelber seemed to be doing). If you combine both their strategies, you can have a pretty successful one simply by using the rule that while listening to others and gathering ideas is good, you also have to trust your own instincts and use your own plans… because not everything told to you will be the truth.

Now, this is coming from someone who knows virtually nothing about the stock market or how it really works… I’m sure I missed some things that people who have been working in it for a bit could have picked out. This is simply what I thought about their strategies and some of the differences I noticed in particular throughout the interviews. What did you notice?

Maddie