1. The research (Part B)
Kindly do remember before reading further that most part of my research was done prior to on-line trading and some part even before personal computers.
Later, I turned my focus from gambling to stock markets. Here I was not looking for a flaw or statistical method but how to consistently make money without losing.
I soon found out that there is no such thing as zero risk. One has to lose money in order to make some. The research objective now was how to consistently make money in the stock market by losing less and gaining more?
Finding answer to this question was not easy at all. That required studying the whole bloody market, each and every aspect and detail of it. Starting from how market indices work, how stocks are traded and trading reported, what moves the market, how liquidity flows, roles of jobbers, runners, brokers, you name it.
I met several brokers, mutual fund managers, investment bankers, big market players, a person who designed a new stock market index and tested it for nine months before replacing the existing index. Luckily my job with the world's biggest firm of independent accountants provided me all these opportunities. But no one could convince me that they had a fool proof method.
I decided to create one of my own, using all the knowledge and skills gained in those years.
Initially I thought it would take trying five or six methods before my job is done. That was foolish. It took me over a hundred methods to develop and discard before I finally settled for a couple of them. A friend of mine helped me in refining these methods. He was my Hacker, that is, every time I came up with a method his job was to break it and make it fail. He would brutally test my new method / modification to a method and do his best to show me it doesn't and cannot work. Many times we had to again dig out a discarded method on finding something new or after developing a new concept. That means we repeatedly tested each and every of those scores of methods.
The Thief of Wall Street