How to Become a Wall Street Celebrity in Six Easy Steps
Good trading skills are entirely not necessary.
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The stock market industry provides a very good living for many people. Most are hard-working and do a good job for their clients, but there is a small high-profile group of Wall Street players who receive a lot of attention in the media, but aren’t always very helpful. These Wall Street celebrities may have charisma, but they make many poor predictions.
One of the nice things about being a Wall Street celebrity is that you really don’t have to be a very good investor or trader. You can do a really lousy job of actually making money, and it won’t matter if you know how to attract media attention. It is helpful to be right now and then, but in the world of stock market punditry, success is measured by the eyeballs you attract and not the accuracy of your predictions.
The essential steps to being a high-profile Wall Street pundit (and I write this all tongue-in-cheek) are as follows:
Be dramatic. To attract attention, you have to make big, bold predictions. It doesn’t matter whether they are right or whether they are even actionable or helpful. Be loud and be absolutely certain. You have to find ways to gain interviews and exposure, and you do that by giving the folks in the news media something eye-catching that they can use in a headline. If you have to predict, then make lots of predictions about everything. You predict market action, what the Fed will do next, the price of oil, and what the yen is going to do.
Keep repeating your predictions. Go on at great length about why you are right and how it is just a matter of time before your calls will be proven to be correct. Don’t back down or change your mind. The folks in the media don’t like equivocation. They want certainty and conviction, because confidence, even when you are wildly wrong, is what sells.
Ignore entry points. One of the key elements of being a good Wall Street celebrity is that you make it impossible for anyone to track your actual performance. There is no way to be wrong if no one knows what your entry point is. In the case of a particularly bad call, you can claim to have taken a stop, and then you can reenter. The important thing is that you don’t admit to being wrong. You are just managing the trade, and that is sure to work very well. In reality, accurate timing makes investors and traders big money, but in the world of stock market punditry, timing is deadly, and you can’t afford to be too precise with predictions.
Declare victory loudly and often. When a trade moves in your direction, make sure you proclaim victory and explain your impeccable logic. It doesn’t matter that you may still be in a losing position from your initial call. Since no one can keep track of your entry points, you can still be a great success as long as there is some movement in the right direction. You may not actually make money, but that doesn’t mean you are wrong.
Create the impression you are always in the best stocks. One trick of many good gurus is to merely talk about stocks that have made large moves and create the impression that they own those stocks, without actually saying so. If someone points out that ABC is up 20%, the correct response is, ‘Yes, we saw that at $50, and it has been a great trade." Whether you actually ever owned it or made any money is irrelevant.
Pretend to be modest. It is important that you don’t come off as too arrogant. Even the most gullible won’t believe you never make mistakes, so every once in a while, you need to admit to some bad calls. The important thing to remember is that all losses are "minor" and that you are hedged, so you can’t possibly lose any money. The image you want to project is that “I’m not perfect, but I’m damn good."
The most important thing to remember about being a Wall Street celebrity is that it has little to do with being a good investor or trader. The skill sets can overlap, but investing is a form of entertainment for many people, so there are always going to be the need for celebrities to promote it.
At the time of publication, DePorre had no position in any security mentioned.
