Losing Sportsmanlike

作者:Victor Niederhoffer
日期:2011/08/18

The first sanctioned ALTA tournament I played in at 12, my first round match was against the second seed. I was on court 2 and the number 1 seed was playing on court 1. My opponent was beating me handily. Then he called out to Peter Lebhar on court 1, "Hey, Pete see you in the finals". I got so mad I won the match. Similar thing happened when I played Martie Hogan in the quarter finals of the national paddle ball tournament in 1987. Every time he made a point he'd yell, "Hold him under 10 ". Apparently he had bet that he would hold me under that level with others. He was much younger than me, and I took the liberty of taking the ball and placing it between his eyes before I beat him 21-20 in the third game.

I have always had an aversion to losing and then having an opponent or adverse spectator add fuel to the fire by lording it over me as I was losing or after the game. Sharif Khan had an annoying habit when he was beating me of yelling "Come on, Pakistan" near the end of the third or fourth game. I guess I had a similar guttural reaction when out of the clear blue sky, I got a similar in your face reaction about my losses in Rimm. Bad enough that I lost and humiliated myself and ended my forays into individual stocks. But to then have it placed back in my face and twisted in my gut, — why, it rankled.

I kept statistics on all mergers and acquisitions for 10 years when I was in the business and did note a pronounced tendency for a rash of acquisitions in a field to be a precursor of decline in the field and signals of decline in the acquirer. Certainly it was not true in every case, and it would have been hard to quantify. Certainly the variation as it applies to a single acquisition like google motorola would be many thousands of times greater than any general, amorphous tendencies.

The back and forth betwee three very erudite people about the acquistion, Dylan, Gary and Mr. X. is quite educative. If it takes me eating crow, raw squawking and fully feathered as Osborne said about Morgenstern's foray into spectral analysis applied to stock markets, it is not an inordinate price to pay.

There is no need for anyone to buy drinks, but please in the future, the dailyspec is a considerable undertaking, and it would be nice if one applied the rules of the British Navy at dinner, (we are all on a long journey together and have to get along with each other or else the ship will sink), to the host as well as the others.