At The Venetian
From the moment Friday when I plopped
myself down in the backseat of a cab at the Vegas airport and found a menu from
the Chicken Ranch brothel staring me in the face, I knew the weekend was not going
to resemble any other.
Now I am not one to mince words.
Exaggeration is not in my vocabulary.
However, if you missed
TradingMarkets.com’s first annual trader’s conference last weekend @ the
Venetian in Las Vegas, consider attending next year’s event.
At the conference, I asked about 30 or
35 traders what they thought of the event.
In every single case, the trader’s
face brightened and a smile appeared when they heard the question.
Words weren’t necessary.
I would like to thank those that took
the time to introduce themselves to me.
As I said on more than one occasion
over the weekend, it is not a turn-on for me to hear someone thank me for
getting them out of the market on March 15.
For the intention of this space is not
to act as a tip sheet or a tout service.
Giving you a fish is not the raison
d’etre of this space, nor of this site.
Teaching you how to fish is.
What is
a turn-on is when someone says how much they’ve learned about trading from this
space, or from this site in general.
When I began trading seriously in
1990, I had no one to turn to for guidance or advice.
I had no friends that were traders, no
family members that were traders that were still alive, and there was no
Internet. There was no one to bounce ideas off of and no
one to take me by the hand and say "Pssst…this is how it’s done."
It was like groping around in the
dark.
You make progress, but the going, when
compared with when the light is on, is slower by factors.
How amusing it was, then, when I heard
six months ago that a few members were disappointed that Mark Boucher didn’t
publish his stock picks in advance of his
column!
That Mark basically revealed his
entire "Long/Short" strategy in detail on the TM site — one that took
him years of painstaking research to uncover, not to mention one that helped
establish him as one of our era’s top-ranked hedge fund managers — wasn’t
enough for some members.
The times…they
are a-changin’
This site is all about someone taking you by the hand and saying "Pssst…this
is how it’s done."
Back at the Ranch…or, rather The Venetian.
Cooper blew many minds by debuting in
public for the first time.
They don’t call him the Mythical Man
From Malibu for nothing.
Haggerty was Haggerty, drawing crowds
wherever he went (even in The Venetian men’s room).
All you had to do to learn something
was to stand within earshot of him for about 30 seconds.
That’s all it took.
For me, the height of the weekend was
the Haggerty/Cooper joint session, Cooper very much on, Haggerty being, well,
Haggerty.
Baker — talented and knowledgeable
about the game far beyond his tender years, not unlike Magic Johnson during his
first year in the NBA — was introduced by Larry Connors as "the only
people I knew who became millionaires in college were bookies…that was until I
met Dave Baker, the trader."
And presiding over it all was Connors
himself, whom Jay Leno ribbed mercilessly at the beginning of Leno’s lunchtime
show.
You can thank Connors for the entire
Venetian conference, as well as for being the mastermind behind this Web site.
For without him, there would be no TM.