Target Folly

One of the investment based accounts I follow on Twitter is that of @SJosephBurns, and his content is usually fairly innocent inspirational quotes with the occasional link to an interesting article or other account.

However, this post from last week was a little different and, in my opinion, flat out wrong:

I've covered this idea of targets, whether they be daily, weekly, monthly or whateverly, previously and they make no sense unless achieving the target means you'll never be returning to the fray again. 

For most of us, we should be making hay while the sun shines, not stopping on the 15th of July just because the sun has shone for two straight weeks. 

The shining sun in our case is that elusive edge, and depending on your market or markets of choice, it may be one that, on average, shows up once a day or once a month. The point is that we don't know when an opportunity will present itself. An edge that shows up on average 'once a day' isn't an edge that can only show up once a day. I replied as below:

I can't see a scenario where the advice proffered makes any sense unless you are gambling in the aforementioned casino, in which case walking away while ahead is good advice. Some days my systems have no qualifiers, while on other days as many as seven - most recently Feb 27th when the basic NHL System had that number of qualifiers. Six won, so stopping at a winner would have been costly, but even had the day been a losing one, the idea is to maximise your opportunities, not to minimise them. 

If you have an edge, invest. Another, more rational, Tweet from Steve Burns today says this: