Happy new year, and thoughts for the year
Wishing you all a great Christmas and happy new year
ust a note to wish you a great Christmas and safe and happy New Year.
2020 of course was not the year we all expected.
Family:
My wife, Kerryn, resigned from her sales/marketing role in a consulting firm in February - just before Covid hit here in Australia. This turned out
to be a very good decision as supporting our three girls during their home/ Zoom-schooling experience would have been incredibly difficult if she was
still working in that previous role. She’s enjoyed starting her own business (www.Here2There.com.au) part-time in which she helps individuals and teams flourish through leveraging Intentional Communication skills. We
celebrated 20 years of marriage in December – though no trip to Hawaii as planned due to Covid!
Two of our kids coped quite well through the challenges of studying at home in 2020, but the youngest found it very hard as it was also the year she
transitioned from primary to secondary school. Change is difficult for many of us, but especially hard for some.
Our oldest daughter, Bethany, finished her high school certificate last month, and had the privilege of being chosen to do the end of year
valedictorian speech for her year level. She is already a very skillful graphic designer (check out my logo created by her!) who has already had her
own business part-time while at high school…if you need any graphic design work done, please reach out to her on Linkedin. 😊
Bethany has many inspiring qualities. One of them is her choice to take a 24 hour break once a week from all forms of technology. She challengers her
friends on this too, but few can make even one hour.
It was my first Christmas with no living parents, but I'm still privileged to have both my parents-in-law doing well. My children have grown up in
such a different context to me. My own parents immigrated to New Zealand from Holland, with English as their second language which made it more
difficult for them to help my brothers and me to do well academically at school. Towards the end of my first year of school, my teacher told me I
would never learn to read. (I believe she was not well-suited for the teaching profession!)
Fortunately, a family friend who was a skillful teacher and came from the Netherlands on the same boat as my Dad, invested a few weeks with me and
taught me to read in the school holidays! It goes to show how sometimes we can do the tiniest thing to invest into someone's life, with dramatic
results. Initially I had been put back one year in school, but then skipped two years of school!
My mother-in-law, Wanda, (who is now 91) was a professional singer in her younger years. My 16-year-old daughter seems to have inherited some of her
musical skills. She made and dedicated this music video for her Grandma, who used to sing this very song so often at Christmas time.
https://youtu.be/K2wXGndybfE
If I was asked would I rather speak in public, or be executed, my response would be: “Would that be death by lethal injection, or the electric
chair?” 😊
This is a big contrast to my children. They love singing, public-speaking and performing— qualities clearly from their grandmother and my wife Kerryn.
A contrast to my brothers & I who would go by ourselves into the bush for a day, shoot tin cans with our air rifle, make bolt bombs, trap & skin
possums (pests in New Zealand) etc. Later I just loved electronics which lead into computing.
My 2 cents / personal view on the world:
The article below, a true story I found about via free newsletter from mauldineconomics.com, is worth a read. Their free newsletter is a good big
picture of USA and world economy and politics.
It’s a fascinating story about a 10-day meeting with the leader of the Ku Klux Klan with a gun, and a black lady armed with a knife.
https://aeon.co/ideas/reach-out-listen-be-patient-good-argum...
It seems to me that nothing has changed since then. Our world might be even more polarized, so the lessons still need to be re-learnt.
One person who has really inspired me in my life was a Dutch man called Peter.
Peter miraculously survived a Japanese POW camp as a teenager in Indonesia. He said in the Netherlands, there were 7 groups. I forgot them all, but
they included Free thinkers, Atheists, Protestants, Catholics. They all held the same beliefs. They were right, the other groups wrong, and other
groups had nothing of value in their opinions. Peter said this is a bad thing and should not be the case. In today's world, the issue is compounded in
that our media feeds (regardless of your ideology) exaggerated facts, omit facts, distorts / lies to protect their sacred cows / ideologies.
This issue is not just a Western-world issue, and made worse by the trend to now to increasingly disallow free speech.
Rowan Atkinson did a funny speech on this some time ago that's worth listening to:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiqDZlAZygU
Other highlights, outside of the family, through very unexpected events, I read and discuss the teachings of Jesus over Zoom with new found friends in
and or from Shanghai. It's thrilling that something so simple to do and duplicate leads to lives very transformed. You are most welcome to email me
more about this if you are interested to know more.
Trading:
In terms of trading, March sure was as good as it gets! April was also great, due to compounding effects of profitable trading in March.
In 2019, I worked very long hours spending most of my time on methodology & a bit on system building. While 2020 was a great year for trading, it
would have been even better if I was a few months ahead in system trading development. It's one thing to improve GSB methodology, but another to apply
it, and build the systems.
I was not set up for trading metals until the middle of the year. Metals, such as gold, were brilliant to trade – perhaps the best ever. The good
thing is the speed it takes to learn a new market, and build systems is dramatically reducing over time for two reasons. First what we learn from one
market we apply to the next market. Second, GSB automation dramatically reduces human time to learn a market.
Not my area of expertise, but in the big economic picture, I think it is likely that volatility and market corrections will continue to occur - so
this is good for trading!
The GSB community is fabulous. It’s a safe place where we can often agree to disagree on things. GSB challenges us and lets us test our assumptions.
Disagreements can be healthy—if they result in improvements in our approach and have a positive effect on trading outcomes.
Users often comment that the GSB methodology now gives us an objective and robust way to see what one little tweak does to our system building setup.
One of my favorite books to read over the last year or so has been Atomic Habits by James Clear. It presents a very strong case for focusing on
numerous “1%” improvements that lead to dramatic positive changes in outcomes.
I am very thankful for our GSB community. Ultimately the GSB methodology is something that we have built and keep improving together. I look forward
to continuing our fruitful collaboration as we head into 2021. A lot has been learnt working together on trading gold, but im still finding ways to
improve, so that task is not yet finished.
Stay safe and be blessed,
Peter
Thanks received (10):
+1 asobi at 2021-01-07 21:14:21 +1 erlendsolberg at 2021-01-04 02:23:17 +1 Siem at 2021-01-01 03:15:19 +1 cotila1 at 2020-12-29 13:23:49 +1 moresi522 at 2020-12-29 07:46:59 +1 BlackBox at 2020-12-28 17:39:49 +1 NickW at 2020-12-27 14:42:57 +1 moveo at 2020-12-27 08:58:18 +1 uhrbi at 2020-12-27 02:36:52 +1 OUrocketman at 2020-12-26 20:46:36
|
![[*]](images/davis/default_icon.gif){kind=icon}
