MICHEL PIREU: ‘Get your head out of the mixer’ and other lessons from failure
Author and fund manager Jack Schwager recounts the ups and downs of investment marvels
You can often learn more from studying the investing failures than the investing greats. Besides, mistakes in the market are invariably costly. So, what better way to learn than through other people’s mistakes? To this end Jack Schwager’s interviews with stock market wizards are as good a place as any to go in search of a few examples. At one time Bruce Kovner may have been the world’s largest trader in the interbank currency and futures markets. Two thousand dollars invested with Kovner in early 1978 would have been worth more than $1m a decade later. Kovner said: "In my first year, I had just quit graduate school to trade. One day, I made a particularly bad trade and lost about $300. Since I only had about $3,000, that was a very big loss and it was destabilising. I then compounded the error by reversing my original position and losing again. To top things off, I then reversed back to my original position and lost a third time. By the end of the day, I had lost $1,000, or one-thir...
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