Larry, Curly, or Moe: Which Trader Are You?

There are three kinds of traders in every market. I call them Larrys, Curlys, and Moes. The one you happen to be decides how the market treats you, and most people never find out which they are until the tuition is paid.

The Larrys do not know the three types exist. Tell them, and it lands as an abstraction, because they cannot picture anything beyond themselves. They are the well-meaning crowd on Main Street, pleasant and ineffectual, destined to be the liquidity everyone else trades against, usually without ever guessing their status. They do not know that the secondary market drives the economy rather than the other way around, and they would rather not hear about the bear market of '72 to '74 or the fortunes that panics have quietly minted.

The Curlys know about the pecking order and recognize it for what it is. They are the artists, the unsung statisticians, original and accident prone, intuitively aware of the forces working against them and trying to fight back. They are the ones who coin overbought, oversold, impulse wave, and efficient frontier, then argue about theory that has little to do with managing risk. They can never beat the Moes without becoming one, which a true Curly cannot do. So they battle on, happy to break even.

The Moes know the archetypes and exploit them. They are the gurus, the wizards, the renaissance debunkers of the old school. They make the decisions, and they carry a chronic paranoia their underlings never feel.

Here is the edge. Forecasting is old school. It only makes a market, and it is about as useful as a crystal ball. The new school puts risk and opportunity management on the left side of the strategy, built on price rather than money. You do not need to predict direction when you can see the turning points as they form and read their meaning from context.

Be a Moe. Join the ContraryThinker™ community and review our subscription plans.