The Traders Journal

Believe Your Eyes, Not Your Brains Ask Yourself What, Not Why

Gatis Roze

Gatis Roze

Author, Tensile Trading: The 10 Essential Stages of Stock Market Mastery

Images (2)Seventeen thousand money managers around the globe pay to use BlackRock’s Aladdin risk assessment platform to manage $15 Trillion.  Therefore, nearly 7% of the world’s $225 Trillion in financial assets are being managed by people who all ponder the markets using the same tools.  As a result, 30,000 of the world’s most significant investment portfolios are kept track of by Aladdin.  And so, by default, any flaws in the system matter to every investor, not just to Aladdin subscribers.

It is my belief that there is no professional out there who truly understands the truckloads of reports and analysis that Aladdin regularly produces.  Certainly there is no way for individual investors to do their own legwork and come up with the equivalent of Aladdin’s risk models, but I submit to you that this should never be our focus.  Instead, let your eyeballs do the work.  What matters most is not why these 17,000 money managers vote with their dollars in a particular manner.  What matters most is that we see where they are deploying their assets and what they are voting for.  Believe your eyes and not your brains.  It’s their gigantic footprints that they leave all over our charts that really matter.


 

BlackRock claims that Aladdin is designed to be “perpetually neurotic”.  It seems to me that our individual investors genie should be to create a personal orthodoxy based on a similar mantra – “perpetually neurotic and unceasingly vigilant.”  Ours is not to understand why.  Ours is to accurately see what and then react accordingly with a nimbleness and decisiveness that big money professionals can only envy.

Data from The Economist, December 7, 2013 issue.

Trade well; trade with discipline!
-- Gatis Roze

Gatis Roze
About the author: , MBA, CMT, is a veteran full-time stock market investor who has traded his own account since 1989 unburdened by the distraction of clients. He holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, is a past president of the Technical Securities Analysts Association (TSAA), and is a Chartered Market Technician (CMT). After several successful entrepreneurial business ventures, Gatis retired in his early 40s to focus on investing in the financial markets. With consistent success as a stock market trader, he began teaching investments at the post-college level in 2000 and continues to do so today. Learn More