Summary of Justin Gregg's If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Mike is a day trader who was wrong about the stock market in 2009. He lost everything and had to quit trading full-time. He continued to dabble in stocks, betting on long-shot stocks that could potentially make him a millionaire, until he found GameStop.

#2 Mike was not prescient. He just got lucky. He was not prescient because he was not a professional. He was a day trader who had lost everything in 2009 and continued to dabble in stocks until he found GameStop in 2020, which he then bought options on and made $25 million. -> The story of Mike is not that it takes serious smarts and years of experience studying the stock market to correctly predict why and when stock prices will rise and fall. It just takes luck.

#3 The stock market is a crapshoot. Some people are lucky and make big profits, while others are not.

#4 Humans are the why specialist species. We have a burning desire to understand cause and effect, which distinguishes us from other animals. But this ability did not give us an edge when it came to stock price predictions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Sep 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9798350000481

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

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Insights on Justin Gregg's If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 5

Insights from Chapter 6

Insights from Chapter 7

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Mike McCaskill started trading penny stocks as a hobby, and when the store he worked at closed in 2007, he decided to turn to his hobby full-time. He sold his car for $10,000, and then stuck that cash into his trading account. Over the next two years, a volatile market and the subprime mortgage crisis saw the SP 500 lose half its value.

#2

Mike was not the only one who made money off of the short squeeze on GameStop. The company’s stock price increased from around $4 a share when Mike started buying it to a high of $347. 51 by January 27, which was when he cashed out.

#3

The story of Orlando and the fund managers proves that luck, not knowledge, seems to play a huge role when it comes to the stock market. When it comes to picking winning stocks, it’s all a big crapshoot.

#4

The need to understand why is what differentiates humans from other animals. However, this ability does not always give us a leg up. In fact, it was not used for the first quarter of a million years that humans walked the Earth.

#5

We can see movement on the ground all around us: two groups of humans and chimpanzees. The humans are making their way toward the tree line, while the chimpanzees are looking for some trees to build a nest and settle