Well,
I am pretty sure that I’m graduating at this point. Hurray for me. Grades are in and somehow my teachers passed me. This would have never happened in undergraduate school, where they grade you on your ability to perform. Engineering was fun. Everything made sense. Anyway, I went through my entire college career’s grades and adjusted them so that I could graph them to illustrate the disconnect that I’ve been feeling this last year. It came out as expected.
So, this first graphic is simply the Grade shift that I’ve applied to graduate school grades to adjust them to the type of grade I think I actually deserved (2nd column), compared to the (1st column) grade I got.
This next graphic shows my college career cumulative GPA and where things went fine and dandy and my GPA was putting me into Honors every semester and I was top of my class, until I started to disagree with some of the fundamentals.
Anyway, the bottom line here is that I actually think that my inability to learn things I disagree with in the long run is going to be incredibly advantageous. Unfortunately, institutions reward the ability to reproduce their methods with higher marks. This was great for me when I agreed with their methods. This was terrible for me when I started to disagree.
Thinking for yourself may hurt your GPA. Thinking for myself has paid for my entire college degree. It’s a trade off. Most of my teachers in the beginning praised me for being at the top and finishing number 1 in several of my engineering weed-out classes that had failure rates so high that the university was trying to crack down. But, near the end, my teachers were pulling me aside, advising counseling, questioning my job-prospects, and asking me what I was looking for or trying to do. Yes, I will admit that I was actually trading stocks during my final exams in some cases… or that I finished 4 hour finals in under an hour to escape to make trades or even strategically used the bathroom to keep tabs on stuff. I always figured things were more important than school if the net present value of the thing was greater than that year’s tuition.
I mean, what would you do in March 2009 when companies are trading at P/E’s of around 0.25 and growing at double digit rates? I went nuts. I offered to pay people 50% of any money that they gave me and I lost in the next 5 years. I did that in late February, in anticipation of the bottom, actually. But, I will admit that I am one lucky duck. Chance favors the prepared.
Would you sit and reproduce theories that emphasize targeting corporate leverage ratios and encourage companies to repurchase their stock as their stock multiples increase, effectively buying their own stock back at higher prices?
Would you price companies based on the volatility of similar companies in the same industry?
OR, would you quickly assemble a discounted cash flows and guess a reasonable discount rate, quickly finish the final exam, borderline pass, and earn a fortune?
What I do isn’t for everyone. That’s a given. It’s for the kind of people that when they see an opportunity or a change in how life is going to work, you are willing to change what you do. The glass is half-full, always. Question Everything, Wake up. I’m now convinced Peak Oil is going to happen by 2015. My dad thinks I’m just as crazy as when I was listening to Conseco conference calls and laughing hysterically as uninformed investors asked uninformed questions, and panic sold to me at around 30 cents. I don’t talk about opportunities from the sidelines. I don’t comment on what I could have done. I capitalize.
I seek to continuously improve my methods. Kaizen. I’ve been exposed to lots of great concepts that work and lots of things I disagree with. This is balance. I think the best way to talk about the concept of Peak Oil is to use the Socratic Method. It’s tough as nails to talk about something scary and make friends. This is why politicians don’t do it. They’ve learned to strategically avoid questions and make it sound like they answered them.
Dr. Doom got the housing bust right. He got the oil shock right. He’s been overly negative lately, but I think that his long term focus is correct, it’s just that economists aren’t so good at the short term most of the time. Peak Oil will increasingly become a fact, if it isn’t already. Everyone knows we have a limited supply of non-renewable resources, but nobody is willing to admit that our time is as close as it can be to the peak of the rate of production. I say we hit in 2004. We’ve been at plateau since then. Drop is likely to come by 2012, which is ironic because that’s the year that everyone who is crazy predicts the end of the world. It sucks that I have to agree with those crazy people. Their reasoning is wrong, but their idea of large problems ahead is accurate. Good news is that problems can be solved. It just takes time, and that, my friends, is the scarcest, most unappreciated resource in the world.