Read it from the ground. Decide what you are prepared to lose. Then commit.
Every position in this book was taken the same way I take a route.
You read it from the ground, properly, for as long as it takes. You work out which holds will take weight and which ones only look like they will, and you are honest with yourself about the difference, because the rock does not care what you were hoping for.
Then you decide what you are prepared to lose. Not what you expect to lose. What you are prepared to lose.
And then you commit, and you do not renegotiate halfway up.
That is the whole of it. People pay a great deal of money for it to be more complicated than that.
There are no outside clients here. No committee, no mandate, no redemptions.
That is not modesty. It is the structure, and it is the only part that matters. A fund with investors has to answer the phone when the market moves against it. I do not have a phone to answer.
It means I can be right slowly, which is the only useful way to be right.
Every rule in this business has an edge, and the edge is where the work is.
I have spent a long time finding out precisely where those edges sit. I trade right up against them. I have never once been on the wrong side of one, and that is not luck, it is the reading.
Push the envelope. Do not tear it.
I have no patience at all for men who take enormous risks with other people's lives and are congratulated for their vision.
If you have arranged it so the fall lands on somebody else, you did not take a risk. You took a fee.
The rock does not know who your friends are.