Ringmaster Howard Lindzon on stage at Village Theatre.  Photo Credit:  eCoronado.com

“Ready for some charts, buddy?”

“Hell yeah, I’m ready for some charts!”

And so began my weekend at a conference called Stocktoberfest: Investing for Profit and Joy.

Like many trade writers, I go to a lot of conferences. And like many conference attendees, I go for the networking, not the content. Anyone who’s sat through enough tech-related panels, interviews, and “fireside chats,” knows they eventually start to run together, creating a halo of uselessness over one’s day.

So you can imagine my attitude going into a conference called Stocktoberfest: Investing for Profit and Joy. Investing has contributed approximately zero joy and negligible profit to my life. I was a little confused as to why Sarah even sent me, but also wasn’t about to turn down a few days in Coronado.

To my surprise, I found myself fascinated by much of the content that was, on the surface, meant for the trader audience. Speakers discussed things from macro-trends in foreign exchange markets to complex trading and investment strategies. Part of what I found compelling was how scientific playing the stock market is. It makes venture capital look like random, arbitrary picking. VCs invest because they “like” a company, or because they like the entrepreneur. Traders do it based on cold data, and they do it at scale. They’d look at a big exciting $500,000 seed funding deal as a rounding error.

Read the entire article at PandoDaily.

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Photos of the event courtesy of eCoronado.com: