The Edge
The Edge
One question that I have struggled with my whole career is, “What’s your edge?”
It’s tough, what can I say that I actually believe in my heart of hearts to be true? Not for a lack of trying, but my search has remained elusive. To this day, there is no proprietary model or magical method I have come across that I could say with confidence gives me an unfair advantage over others. There’s no special technique or trading approach.
I know I am not unique in what I do. The only thing that is unique is me. So how I have learned to respond usually is by citing how I’m different. I didn’t study at an Ivy league school, wasn’t trained by an investment bank, and never worked for a hedge fund. I started my career as a bank teller.
And so, for the longest time, I thought my unconventional background was a shortcoming. I felt awkward in front of clients. But through their support and encouragement over the years, I saw that my perceived weakness was actually my core strength, as it helps me view the world differently from the vast majority of Western-born-and-trained analysts. As one client said to me, “There is great power in humility.”
I’m not alone. Some of the greatest writers of all time had talents that were at odds with their experience. Far from undermining their credibility, the feeling of being far away from the work they wanted to accomplish was an essential part of its very discovery. They looked more closely at the subject precisely because they were curious and unfamiliar with it.
Alden Nowlan’s poem, The Seasick Sailor and Others, portrays this genius. Can you guess which artists he is referring to?
The awkward young sailor who is always seasick
Is the one who will write about ships.The young man whose soldiery consists in the delivery
Of candy and cigarettes to the front
Is the one who will write about war.The man who will never learn to drive a car
And keeps going home to his mother
Is the one who will write about the road.Stranger still, hardly anyone else will write so well
About the sea or war or the road.And then there is the woman
who has scarcely spoken to man except her brother
and who works in a room no larger than a closet,
she will write as well as anyone who has ever lived
about vast open spaces and the desires of the flesh.And that other woman who will live with her sister and
rarely leave her village, she will excel
in portraying men and women in society.And that woman, in some ways the most wonderful of them all,
who is afraid to go outdoors, who hides when someone knocks,
she will write great poems about the universe inside her.
From the top, you have Herman Meville, Ernst Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, and Emily Dickinson.
Melville jumped ship because he could not stand life aboard a whaler. He wrote Moby Dick. Hemingway spent most of his days in wars away from the fighting, hence he became one of the greatest wartime writers. Kerouack was famously nomadic but wrote, On The Road, at the home of his mother. Jane Austen became the revered chronicler of courtship, love, and marriage. But she remained single. Emily Bronte was happiest in her own company, but in Wuthering Heights she painted a viciously brutal world that led the Victorian public to think that it had been written by a man. And what can we say of Emily Dickinson? By choosing to live life internally, her poetry unveiled the secrets of the universe.
Could this be where a sustainable edge comes from? To observe from an unbridgeable distance with a mind freed from all conditioning.
I don’t own any stock or bond or any investments for that matter. Could it be my own exile offers a very particular way of looking at markets that no one else possesses and inadvertently bestows very precise insights? To play on the words of the eminent Indian philosopher, J. Krishnamurti…
Edge is something extraordinary
That comes naturally when you are watching without
motive,
Without any kind of demand,
Just to watch and see the beauty of a single star in the sky,
Or watch a single tree in a field…
Then, in that watching
In that alertness,
There is something that is beyond words,
Beyond all measure.