"I was thinking about what I would do while I kept losing" - a column now published on Toyo Keizai ONLINE
Good morning, I’m Matsushita.
I bought my first stock in February 2001,
and debuted in investing for a year and a half,
losing continuously.
During that time, I didn’t just sit idle;
I read dozens of books,
attended dozens of seminars,
yet my money kept decreasing.
While I was losing,
what I was thinking was
that
“I will surely win someday.”
That was all there was.
Even while not winning at all, I could hold onto this strong feeling
because the traders appearing in the book “Market Wizards”
told almost all of the same thing
to teach me.
“Study the market, manage your funds,
and by making and following rules, you can win.”
I believed what they all kept saying in unison, that there must be a way to win, and I pursued it.
I also had another thing I was thinking.
That is,
“I want to be able to judge price movement on my own.”
On Saturdays at that time,
I used to read free reports distributed by commodity companies
without fail, more than a dozen of them.
Each report had the analysts’ views for each commodity,
describing the current situation and future prospects.
I couldn’t understand at all why they analyzed and
looked ahead the way they did.
And I thought,
“This won’t do. I must learn to judge price movements myself,
or I’ll never be able to compete,
so I decided that someday I would be able to judge and read price movements on my own.”
So I studied the theories for analyzing price movements,
the theories for reading them.
Once I focused like this, the results came sooner than I expected
and began to materialize concretely.
Over the next about two years,
I became able to analyze price movements,
and I began writing my own reports.
It was about four years after I debuted in investing.
In this way, I learned to analyze price movements, read them,
conduct backtesting, construct rules,
and started making profits.
I distributed reports to tens of thousands of people,
wrote seven investment books,
and established a school that has sent out nearly a thousand students.
Among the students I taught,
there were students who achieved astonishing profits,
and some became in the same way, people who tell others about investing,
as I did.
All of these things were the origin and driving force of what I achieved,
from what I thought during the period of continual losses.
As you pursue a goal in investing now,
even if you haven’t yet achieved success,
you have a chance and hope.
Just like me who kept losing.
What matters is what you look at, what you think, and what you put into practice.
If what I thought and practiced during the period of losses can be of any help,
please let it influence your future actions.
Even now, while you are in failure or facing losses,
you can change that and seize success or profit.
You can turn things around and achieve success and profit even from a situation of failure.
