Alex Pooley's Blog

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Well, for the last two weeks I have been mentally and physically exhausted. My work rate has dropped as you can probably tell from my decrease in blog postings. Anyway, I took the weekend off and have now set a few straight forward goals that should get the work rate flowing again. I think setting short/medium/long term goals is an excellent technique regardless of what you’re doing.

Do you know the story of Joe Simpson? He was climbing Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, became seperated from his climbing partner, and had to crawl his way down the mountain over three days (or something like that) with a broken leg and extreme dehydration! The only way he made progress was to set small achievable goals.

Joe’s story is re-enacted in the movie “Touching The Void”. It’s well worth watching.

Some people claim will power is a sham and there are better ways. Perhaps for those of us burning the midnight oil on side projects, small goal setting really is a better alternative to will power?

I first came across the word ‘bourse’ while reading about the planned Iranian oil exchange scheduled for April/May 2006. Since then, a stack of my news sources are using the word ‘bourse’ in all sorts of context. It’s funny how these things happen.

*bourse:* _A stock exchange, especially one in a continental European city._
“source”:http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dict.asp?Word=bourse

I’ve noticed similar behaviour with ‘totally’, ‘copious’, ‘insane’, and ‘bizarre’.

While words like ‘mate’, ‘hey’, and ‘gonna’ are far too entrenched in Australian culture to fall out of favour, ‘copious’, ‘bizarre’, and even ‘bourse’ will no doubt die quietly. For those less cool cats, ‘totally’ was out a long time ago, and last I heard it was laying in a ditch somewhere next to ‘ace’, ‘mintox’, and hyper colour t-shirts.

Mate, for those who don’t _already_ know, there’s a new lexical craze in town - ’sham’. I’m gonna weave ’sham’ in to copious sentences today hey. Those of you outside of Western Australia keep your ears open for a bizarre spike in the usage of ’sham’!

There’s a chapter in one of my books on Warren Buffet’s investing strategies entitled, “Mr. Market and the Lemmings”. It’s a discussion about the herd mentality where a few people will lead and the rest will simply follow without thinking for themselves. As you’re probably aware, this psychology applies equally well to everything in life and not just the markets.

Recently I have been doing a lot of reading - firstly regarding Apple speculation, and rumours and “just recently”:http://trading.alexpooley.com/articles/2006/01/19/iranian-oil-bourse about the Iranian oil bourse/nuclear issue. After reading so much about certain topics it was like being backstage in a circus. I could not believe the amount of incorrect or misleading information I found - too numerous to count. With some of this from so called “credible” news sources. At the end of the day the reported news is still from some person doing the work because it’s their job. Sometimes you have no choice but to trust what people say, but do your own research when you can.

If you want to stand out from the crowd, do your homework. There’s a belief among many people that the crowd knows best. There are books about that stuff! Out of interest, people who back this logic often sight a supposed true story about a man at a fair that asked people to guess the weight of a cow standing behind him. The guesses varied wildly but after he tallied the guesses he found the “average” guess was really close to the actual weight of the cow. What a bunch of crap. Quote me on that.

Take a chance and stand out from the crowd!