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Follow the Trend
Don’t try to guess how far a trend will go. You can’t. Peter Borish, former second-in-command with Paul Tudor Jones, lays bare the only concern a trader must have:
“Price makes news, not the other way around. A market is going to go where a market is going to go.”28
The concept of price as the trading cue is just too darn simple for people to accept. This is seen in the mainstream press that always emphasizes the wrong numbers. Bill Griffith, an anchor at CNBC, once pondered:
“At some point, investing is an act of faith. If you can’t believe the numbers, annual reports, etc., what numbers can you believe?”
Griffith misses the point when he asks what numbers you can believe if you can’t believe a company’s annual report. It doesn’t matter whether you can or cannot believe the earnings statement. All of these numbers can be doctored, fixed, or cooked. The traded market price can’t be fixed. It’s the only number to believe. You can see it every day in the paper or online. However, this simple fact does not diminish the confusion. Alan Sloan, by all accounts a fine finance reporter, searches for numbers to trust without ever understanding how futile his search will be:
“If some of the smartest people on Wall Street can’t trust the numbers, you wonder who can trust the numbers.”
