Having thought it over a great deal, I am left with the feeling that investing is an intuitive art.
People can tell me how to do it in all sorts of detail, and I still don't know how to do it.
Warren Buffett's system, for example is clearly explained in various place, and quite straightforward, and I've studied it quite extensively, but I still don't know how to do it.
I belong to a strange breed that hopes to make a lot of money fast starting with a very small amount of money, all through investing. It makes a certain amount of sense that intuition ought to play a part in such an improbable venture.
What, though, is intuition? What on Earth is it?
My best answer might be learning by doing. But I don't want to expend a lot of money on trading losses - or anything else - trying to do that. If what I've said thus far holds it becomes apparent that paper trading is not in any way optional. Rather, it seems to be the essence of the art.
Which is easy enough to say, but how is it done?
A strange implication is that it might behoove the paper trader to seek results in the minimum possible amount of time. This may or may not be a good practice for people trading with real money, but in the case of paper trading, whatever is to be learned from the endeavor will be learned by recording decisions and then recording results, and the more decisions and results a paper trader can record, the better.
This is related to the question of intuition, because it is practice in the discipline of making quick decisions based on uncertain information. A more measured decision making pace might hypothetically increase the certainty of the process, but how would we know? Ultimately, I think, we hope that this uncertain information, due to our extensive and not too carefully thought out experience with it, will become, in that way, actually more reliable for us.
So, I proposed that the discipline we seek to acquire is that of recording decisions and results. For that we could conceivably use paper. I have read something about how that can be done, but it sounds cumbersome, and this is the machine age, so we can treat the paper in paper trading as a metaphor. And in this area I might be able to offer some suggestions.
There is a more general problem I'm interested in, namely the general problem of recording information, or accumulating it. Writing on a related topic will give me an excuse to discuss that, to some extent, too.
