My Sunday with Euclid

""THIS IS THE BEST BOOK EVER WRITTEN BY A HUMAN. I'm not kidding and I'm not exaggerating; there is no way to express the joy of reading Euclid without sounding like a lunatic. There are very few books which reach their umpteenth thousandth edition without promising a posthumous infinity of bliss. The bliss of 'The Elements' is admittedly finite, but it delivers right away. This is an electrifying piece of work which has produced a chorus of rapture and inspiration lasting two millennia.""wrote a reviewer on Amazon.

I passed my morning today re-reading (10th time?) the geometry-dedicated 6 first books of Euclid's Elements. I have the chance to read them in the original : greek never sounded so elegant and precise. I felt the same joy and enthusiasm as the reader cited above. This edition is the best translation in english and comprises all the 13 books in one volume.

What is the relation of this material with trading, you may ask. In my humble opinion, trading is pure geometry. It is the skill to think visually, in the two dimensions of a chart, as the chess player thinks in the 64 squares and 2 dimensions. Euclid's geometry is the best exercise i ever found for training your mind to think visually.

During my studies back in the 80's, I got a "passion" for some other geometries too. Among them, the now out-of-fashion projective geometry. Twenty years later, when I started reading trading books, I was really surpised to discover that all this stuff was the inspiration for the trading patterns of the first serious, pioneering book on Technical Analysis by Edwards and Magee, the famous Technical Analysis of Stock Trends, written in the 40's. Human knowledge transplanted on an other domain!..

 To trade properly, you need just two things : geometry and table tennis. The first, explained above. Table tennis makes you fast. More on this on an other post!