Shakespeare ‘was a ruthless trader’ Hoarder, moneylender, tax dodger — it’s not how we usually think of William Shakespeare.But we should, according to a group of academics who say the playwright was a ruthless businessman who grew wealthy dealing in grain during a time of famine.Researchers from Aberystwyth University in Wales argue that we can’t fully understand Shakespeare unless we study his often-overlooked business savvy.“Shakespeare the grain-hoarder has been redacted from history so that Shakespeare the creative genius could be born,” the researchers say in a paper due to be delivered at the Hay literary festival in Wales in May.Jayne Archer, a lecturer in medieval and Renaissance literature at Aberystwyth, said that oversight is the product of “a willful ignorance on behalf of critics and scholars who I think — perhaps through snobbery — cannot countenance the idea of a creative genius also being motivated by self-interest.”Archer and her colleagues, Howard Thomas and Richard Marggraf Turley, combed through historical archives to uncover details of the playwright’s parallel life as a grain merchant and property owner in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon whose practices sometimes brought him into conflict with the law.“Over a 15-year period he purchased and stored grain, malt and barley for resale at inflated prices to his neighbors and local tradesmen,” they wrote, adding that Shakespeare “pursued those who could not (or would not) pay him in full for these staples and used the profits to further his own money-lending activities.”He was pursued by the authorities for tax evasion, and in 1598 was prosecuted for hoarding grain during a time of shortage.The charge sheet against Shakespeare was not entirely unknown, though it may come as shock to some literature lovers. But the authors argue that modern readers and scholars are out of touch with the harsh realities the writer and his contemporaries faced.He lived and wrote in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, during a period known as the little ice age, when unusual cold and heavy rain caused poor harvests and food shortages.“I think now we have a rather rarefied idea of writers and artists as people who are disconnected from the everyday concerns of their contemporaries,” Archer said. “But for most writers for most of history, hunger has been a major concern — and it has been as creatively energizing as any other force.”She argues that knowledge of the era’s food insecurity can cast new light on Shakespeare’s plays, including “Coriolanus,” which is set in an ancient Rome wracked by famine. The food protests in the play can be seen to echo the real-life 1607 uprising of peasants in the English Midlands, where Shakespeare lived.Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate told the Sunday Times newspaper that Archer and her colleagues had done valuable work, saying their research had “given new force to an old argument about the contemporaneity of the protests over grain-hoarding in ‘Coriolanus.’ “Archer said famine also informs “King Lear,” in which an aging monarch’s unjust distribution of his land among his three daughters sparks war.“In the play there is a very subtle depiction of how dividing up land also involves impacts on the distribution of food,” Archer said.Archer said the idea of Shakespeare as a hardheaded businessman may not fit with romantic notions of the sensitive artist, but we shouldn’t judge him too harshly. Hoarding grain was his way of ensuring that his family and neighbors would not go hungry if a harvest failed.“Remembering Shakespeare as a man of hunger makes him much more human, much more understandable, much more complex,” she said. “He would not have thought of himself first and foremost as a writer. Possibly as an actor — but first and foremost as a good father, a good husband and a good citizen to the people of Stratford.”She said the playwright’s funeral monument in Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church reflected this. The original monument erected after his death in 1616 showed Shakespeare holding a sack of grain.In the 18th century, it was replaced with a more “writerly” memorial depicting Shakespeare with a tasseled cushion and a quill pen. 5 Trading Mistakes & Destroy Yourself Instead of cutting a loss the trader holds it stressing over it for the rest of the day or a week. This destroys the trader’s mental capital and inflicts completely unnecessary emotional pain. The first loss it the best loss. A trader that trades their opinion instead of the price action has a lower success rate than someone who just trades price action. The vast majority of traders make money by following trends and chart patterns not their own opinion A trader who puts on the one big trade that they think they just can’t lose on is usually the one that blows up their account. A trader must always have stops and must always manage risk regardless of their belief in any one trade. Believing that you are right about a trade and the market is wrong is a sure path to destruction. The market is always right because price is reality. How do we know when we are wrong? We lose money that is proof enough. A trader who endlessly searches for stock picks and predictions instead of learning how to trade a robust method while managing their own mind and using risk management is doomed to failure. Is this the next ‘edge’ for traders? It took Peter Borden a while to come around to modafinil. He never takes prescription drugs. He doesn’t drink to excess. He’s into acupuncture and alternative medicine. But he was working two jobs—by day, he does quantitative analysis and project management for a venture-capital-backed B2B start-up; by night, he’s developing a proprietary high-­frequency trading system for a Wall Street start-up of his own—and what he needed was more time to work. So a few months ago, Borden ordered a three-week supply by mail. (“It was a piece of cake,” he says.) He popped his first pill—“the maximum suggested dose”—as soon as the package arrived, and within a few hours he started feeling a pleasant fuzziness. “Not fuzzy-headed,” he says, “but crisp. A crisp softness to it.” Soon he was experiencing a level of concentration he’d never imagined. “My senses sort of shifted to the visual, and my auditory sense went down. Sounds didn’t even register. It was like walking around on a winter day when it just snowed. It was very easy to stay visually focused.” Next came a head rush. “I sensed it was blood actually moving to the optic nerve. Your eyes start to feel very sort of engorged, and your awareness comes to the front of your face, which is kind of a freaky sensation. I would describe it as being very much like Adderall, but without the speediness.” Tasks that were usually soul-crushing now had his undivided attention. He spent hours fine-tuning ad campaigns for his new business, and his output wasn’t just faster and longer—it was better. “I didn’t take as many breaks; I didn’t get as frustrated; the stuff came out with fewer errors,” he says. “I never felt, Oh, let’s just get it done. I polished things.” As long as he kept taking the pill, his focus never wavered. “Time took on an entirely different sort of quality.” He was even happier. “There were some very potent anti-anxiety effects. Which was strange. I didn’t think I was an anxious person, but I guess I was.” Modafinil, which is marketed as Provigil in the United States, was first approved by the FDA in 1998 for the treatment of narcolepsy, but since then it’s become better known as a nootropic, a “smart drug,” especially among entrepreneurs. More recently, it has attracted traders like Borden who don’t just need a pick-me-up to get through a deadline; they need to be on, without a break, for months, even years at a time.And that’s modafinil’s reputation. It is rumored to be the model for the fictional pills in the movie Limitless that allowed Bradley Cooper’s character to use 100 percent of his brain. Timothy Ferriss, author of the best-selling The 4-Hour Work Week, recently dished about its effects with modafinil fan Joe Rogan, the former host of Fear Factor,on Rogan’s popular podcast. Probably its biggest booster is Dave Asprey, founder of the Bulletproof Executive web forum, where he blogged about the drug’s powers (headline: “Why You Are Suffering From a Modafinil Deficiency”). Last summer, ABC News did a segment on Asprey in which he compared taking it to the scene in The Wizard of Oz where everything blossoms from black-and-white to color. Last month, modafinil’s penetration into the culture was confirmed by the American Medical Association’s journal Internal Medicine, which published a University of California, San Francisco, study reporting that U.S. prescriptions increased almost tenfold over the past decade. Far and away, most of those were for off-label use. In New York, Borden is hearing more chatter about it among traders and hedge-funders, though they don’t tend to boast about it in the same way as the tech guys. “There’s something, I think, about guys who write code for a living that makes them very interested in hacking things—finding shortcuts, stuff like that,” he says. “Whereas with guys on Wall Street, it’s more testosterone-fueled; it’s more just power through it.” In a conversation on WallStreet­Oasis.com titled “Viagra for the Brain,” one commenter gushed, “This is not like ­caffeine or 5 Hour Energy. This is the big leagues.” Unlike Ritalin or Adderall, modafinil isn’t an amphetamine and doesn’t flood the body with dopamine in the same way. For this reason, scientists originally believed it to be non-habit-forming, though some are beginning to doubt this claim. Users on message boards talk about how modafinil doesn’t so much speed them up as clear their minds. “Most of the drugs that people do in our society are things like alcohol that make you stupider instead of smarter,” mobile-software entrepreneur Jesse Law­ler said in a recent podcast about modafinil for his website SmartDrugSmarts.com. The entrepreneur Daniel Tenner used modafinil to launch his first company while still working for the consulting firm Accenture. “Every day,” he wrote on swombat.com, a site for entrepreneurs, “I would sleep at 11 p.m. sharp. I would then wake up at 4 a.m., work until 7 a.m., then nap for an hour before going to work at my day job. I then also worked weekends.” Of course, its ascendancy is also cause for some alarm. No scientist has conducted a study of its long-term effects on healthy brains yet. At the very least, doctors have warned that modafinil can bring about sleep deprivation (or, in the words of the Internal Medicinepaper, “hypersensitivity reactions and neuropsychiatric adverse effects”). The modafinil moment has even prompted a secondary conversation among sociologists and economists about the anxiety of staying ahead in today’s competitive economy, and microeconomic predictions about a future in which everyone sleeps less: fewer mattress sales, more dollars spent at bars and nightclubs, more sex, and more children.For Borden, life on modafinil really did feel like a real-life (if somewhat toned-down)Limitless. Things get hairy for the character in the movie—there’s addiction and withdrawal and tragedy before the tidy Hollywood ending. The first downside Borden noticed was in line with the film: He couldn’t drink. “I went out for a drink, and then I had another drink. And because I was so energized and focused, I got drunk faster. It kind of freaked me out, because time would sort of fly by. I’d be here, and then I’d be here. Almost like mini-­blackouts. I very quickly cut out alcohol.” Then he ran into an even bigger problem: Skip a dose, and there would be hell to pay. “I really would feel it. It was sort of like being thrust into dirty, messy reality, as opposed to a clean, neatly organized place. It was like crashing, and I actually found what would happen is the anxiety that got dialed down on the way in, when you were coming off it, all of a sudden you went through the reverse. So I got incredibly anxious. Eventually that concerned me.” He stopped after three weeks. He says he’s more comfortable trying to get the same effect through meditation and, of all things, getting a good night’s sleep. He remains a little in awe of the pill, though. “It’s a great hack.” The 10 Commandments

Shakespeare ‘was a ruthless trader’

Hoarder, moneylender, tax dodger — it’s not how we usually think of William Shakespeare.

But we should, according to a group of academics who say the playwright was a ruthless businessman who grew wealthy dealing in grain during a time of famine.

Researchers from Aberystwyth University in Wales argue that we can’t fully understand Shakespeare unless we study his often-overlooked business savvy.

“Shakespeare the grain-hoarder has been redacted from history so that Shakespeare the creative genius could be born,” the researchers say in a paper due to be delivered at the Hay literary festival in Wales in May.

Jayne Archer, a lecturer in medieval and Renaissance literature at Aberystwyth, said that oversight is the product of “a willful ignorance on behalf of critics and scholars who I think — perhaps through snobbery — cannot countenance the idea of a creative genius also being motivated by self-interest.”

Archer and her colleagues, Howard Thomas and Richard Marggraf Turley, combed through historical archives to uncover details of the playwright’s parallel life as a grain merchant and property owner in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon whose practices sometimes brought him into conflict with the law.

“Over a 15-year period he purchased and stored grain, malt and barley for resale at inflated prices to his neighbors and local tradesmen,” they wrote, adding that Shakespeare “pursued those who could not (or would not) pay him in full for these staples and used the profits to further his own money-lending activities.”

He was pursued by the authorities for tax evasion, and in 1598 was prosecuted for hoarding grain during a time of shortage.

The charge sheet against Shakespeare was not entirely unknown, though it may come as shock to some literature lovers. But the authors argue that modern readers and scholars are out of touch with the harsh realities the writer and his contemporaries faced.

He lived and wrote in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, during a period known as the little ice age, when unusual cold and heavy rain caused poor harvests and food shortages.

“I think now we have a rather rarefied idea of writers and artists as people who are disconnected from the everyday concerns of their contemporaries,” Archer said. “But for most writers for most of history, hunger has been a major concern — and it has been as creatively energizing as any other force.”

She argues that knowledge of the era’s food insecurity can cast new light on Shakespeare’s plays, including “Coriolanus,” which is set in an ancient Rome wracked by famine. The food protests in the play can be seen to echo the real-life 1607 uprising of peasants in the English Midlands, where Shakespeare lived.

Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate told the Sunday Times newspaper that Archer and her colleagues had done valuable work, saying their research had “given new force to an old argument about the contemporaneity of the protests over grain-hoarding in ‘Coriolanus.’ “

Archer said famine also informs “King Lear,” in which an aging monarch’s unjust distribution of his land among his three daughters sparks war.

“In the play there is a very subtle depiction of how dividing up land also involves impacts on the distribution of food,” Archer said.

Archer said the idea of Shakespeare as a hardheaded businessman may not fit with romantic notions of the sensitive artist, but we shouldn’t judge him too harshly. Hoarding grain was his way of ensuring that his family and neighbors would not go hungry if a harvest failed.

“Remembering Shakespeare as a man of hunger makes him much more human, much more understandable, much more complex,” she said. “He would not have thought of himself first and foremost as a writer. Possibly as an actor — but first and foremost as a good father, a good husband and a good citizen to the people of Stratford.”

She said the playwright’s funeral monument in Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church reflected this. The original monument erected after his death in 1616 showed Shakespeare holding a sack of grain.

In the 18th century, it was replaced with a more “writerly” memorial depicting Shakespeare with a tasseled cushion and a quill pen.

 

5 Trading Mistakes & Destroy Yourself

 

1. Instead of cutting a loss the trader holds it stressing over it for the rest of the day or a week. This destroys the trader’s mental capital and inflicts completely unnecessary emotional pain. The first loss it the best loss.
2. A trader that trades their opinion instead of the price action has a lower success rate than someone who just trades price action. The vast majority of traders make money by following trends and chart patterns not their own opinion
3. A trader who puts on the one big trade that they think they just can’t lose on is usually the one that blows up their account. A trader must always have stops and must always manage risk regardless of their belief in any one trade.
4. Believing that you are right about a trade and the market is wrong is a sure path to destruction. The market is always right because price is reality. How do we know when we are wrong? We lose money that is proof enough.
5. A trader who endlessly searches for stock picks and predictions instead of  learning how to trade a robust method while managing their own mind and using risk management is doomed to failure.

 

Is this the next ‘edge’ for traders?

It took Peter Borden a while to come around to modafinil. He never takes prescription drugs. He doesn’t drink to excess. He’s into acupuncture and alternative medicine. But he was working two jobs—by day, he does quantitative analysis and project management for a venture-capital-backed B2B start-up; by night, he’s developing a proprietary high-­frequency trading system for a Wall Street start-up of his own—and what he needed was more time to work.

So a few months ago, Borden ordered a three-week supply by mail. (“It was a piece of cake,” he says.) He popped his first pill—“the maximum suggested dose”—as soon as the package arrived, and within a few hours he started feeling a pleasant fuzziness. “Not fuzzy-headed,” he says, “but crisp. A crisp softness to it.” Soon he was experiencing a level of concentration he’d never imagined. “My senses sort of shifted to the visual, and my auditory sense went down. Sounds didn’t even register. It was like walking around on a winter day when it just snowed. It was very easy to stay visually focused.”

Next came a head rush. “I sensed it was blood actually moving to the optic nerve. Your eyes start to feel very sort of engorged, and your awareness comes to the front of your face, which is kind of a freaky sensation. I would describe it as being very much like Adderall, but without the speediness.”

Tasks that were usually soul-crushing now had his undivided attention. He spent hours fine-tuning ad campaigns for his new business, and his output wasn’t just faster and longer—it was better. “I didn’t take as many breaks; I didn’t get as frustrated; the stuff came out with fewer errors,” he says. “I never felt, Oh, let’s just get it done. I polished things.” As long as he kept taking the pill, his focus never wavered. “Time took on an entirely different sort of quality.” He was even happier. “There were some very potent anti-anxiety effects. Which was strange. I didn’t think I was an anxious person, but I guess I was.”

Modafinil, which is marketed as Provigil in the United States, was first approved by the FDA in 1998 for the treatment of narcolepsy, but since then it’s become better known as a nootropic, a “smart drug,” especially among entrepreneurs. More recently, it has attracted traders like Borden who don’t just need a pick-me-up to get through a deadline; they need to be on, without a break, for months, even years at a time.

And that’s modafinil’s reputation. It is rumored to be the model for the fictional pills in the movie Limitless that allowed Bradley Cooper’s character to use 100 percent of his brain. Timothy Ferriss, author of the best-selling The 4-Hour Work Week, recently dished about its effects with modafinil fan Joe Rogan, the former host of Fear Factor,on Rogan’s popular podcast. Probably its biggest booster is Dave Asprey, founder of the Bulletproof Executive web forum, where he blogged about the drug’s powers (headline: “Why You Are Suffering From a Modafinil Deficiency”). Last summer, ABC News did a segment on Asprey in which he compared taking it to the scene in The Wizard of Oz where everything blossoms from black-and-white to color.

Last month, modafinil’s penetration into the culture was confirmed by the American Medical Association’s journal Internal Medicine, which published a University of California, San Francisco, study reporting that U.S. prescriptions increased almost tenfold over the past decade. Far and away, most of those were for off-label use.

In New York, Borden is hearing more chatter about it among traders and hedge-funders, though they don’t tend to boast about it in the same way as the tech guys. “There’s something, I think, about guys who write code for a living that makes them very interested in hacking things—finding shortcuts, stuff like that,” he says. “Whereas with guys on Wall Street, it’s more testosterone-fueled; it’s more just power through it.” In a conversation on WallStreet­Oasis.com titled “Viagra for the Brain,” one commenter gushed, “This is not like ­caffeine or 5 Hour Energy. This is the big leagues.”

Unlike Ritalin or Adderall, modafinil isn’t an amphetamine and doesn’t flood the body with dopamine in the same way. For this reason, scientists originally believed it to be non-habit-forming, though some are beginning to doubt this claim. Users on message boards talk about how modafinil doesn’t so much speed them up as clear their minds. “Most of the drugs that people do in our society are things like alcohol that make you stupider instead of smarter,” mobile-software entrepreneur Jesse Law­ler said in a recent podcast about modafinil for his website SmartDrugSmarts.com.

The entrepreneur Daniel Tenner used modafinil to launch his first company while still working for the consulting firm Accenture. “Every day,” he wrote on swombat.com, a site for entrepreneurs, “I would sleep at 11 p.m. sharp. I would then wake up at 4 a.m., work until 7 a.m., then nap for an hour before going to work at my day job. I then also worked weekends.”

Of course, its ascendancy is also cause for some alarm. No scientist has conducted a study of its long-term effects on healthy brains yet. At the very least, doctors have warned that modafinil can bring about sleep deprivation (or, in the words of the Internal Medicinepaper, “hypersensitivity reactions and neuropsychiatric adverse effects”). The modafinil moment has even prompted a secondary conversation among sociologists and economists about the anxiety of staying ahead in today’s competitive economy, and microeconomic predictions about a future in which everyone sleeps less: fewer mattress sales, more dollars spent at bars and nightclubs, more sex, and more children.

For Borden, life on modafinil really did feel like a real-life (if somewhat toned-down)Limitless. Things get hairy for the character in the movie—there’s addiction and withdrawal and tragedy before the tidy Hollywood ending. The first downside Borden noticed was in line with the film: He couldn’t drink. “I went out for a drink, and then I had another drink. And because I was so energized and focused, I got drunk faster. It kind of freaked me out, because time would sort of fly by. I’d be here, and then I’d be here. Almost like mini-­blackouts. I very quickly cut out alcohol.”

Then he ran into an even bigger problem: Skip a dose, and there would be hell to pay. “I really would feel it. It was sort of like being thrust into dirty, messy reality, as opposed to a clean, neatly organized place. It was like crashing, and I actually found what would happen is the anxiety that got dialed down on the way in, when you were coming off it, all of a sudden you went through the reverse. So I got incredibly anxious. Eventually that concerned me.” He stopped after three weeks. He says he’s more comfortable trying to get the same effect through meditation and, of all things, getting a good night’s sleep. He remains a little in awe of the pill, though. “It’s a great hack.”

 

The 10 Commandments

 

1. Thou shall not go against the trend.
If it be down, let it be down. The market is bigger and stronger than you. 
Follow the market but be one step ahead of the crowd.

2. Thou shall not follow the herd instinct
Just because many people are buying a certain stock does not mean you should follow suit. If people want to buy rubbish stocks, that is their bad luck. Don’t make it yours.
3. Thou shall treat the market as a business, not a casino
The stock market is not meant to be a casino and you should not be there to gamble. 
4.Thou shall not buy high-debted and no-earnings stocks
All companies that folded are highly geared with negative earnings. Don’t buy rubbish shares; don’t buy somebody’s liabilities.
5. Thou shall only buy solvent companies with good-growth prospects
Present earnings are important, but future earnings are more important. That’s why we have companies selling at high PER (Price earnings ratios).
6. Thou shall not be overconfident
Overconfidence leads to overtrading. Once you overtrade, you may not be able to control your own emotion. Fear may set in when the market is not going the way you expect it. It may disrupt your plan, turning your profitable trade into a loss. 
7. Thou shall invest within the comfort zone
Don’t be too greedy; don’t play with borrowed money. Debt is a disease. It can cause you a lot of problem if you are not careful.
8. Thou shall be patient
The market is designed to transfer money from the impatient to the patient. You must have very good reasons before you switch counters. Very often, the shares you sell move up faster than the shares you buy.
9. Thou shall be disciplined
Don’t change your strategy at the eleventh hour. If you have placed a stop-loss in your chart, don’t remove it unless it is replaced with a trailing stop-loss.
10. Thou shall be knowledgable
Investment in knowledge pays the best dividend. No one is so skillful that he cannot better his best. Keep learning for knowledge is boundless