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Notes -
One of my casual past time is reading the biographies of famous / wealthy traders and hedge funders. The two major themes I've discovered are first, a lot of these guys (and, as of now, it's only men) are entrepreneurs, meaning that they did something fundamentally different than anyone else. Second is that, failing actual entrepreneurship, they took a massive contrarian position, went all in, and it paid off. You could call the latter group "gamblers" but I don't think that's fair. Warren Buffett - he of the "kindly old man who likes coke" public image - has explicitly said that when you are really convinced of an idea, you should go all in and even borrow money.
It's important to remember that Soros originally wanted to be a philosopher and actually studied under Karl Popper in England. He used a lot of Popper inspired thinking on falsification and applied it to the market. Now, I should point out that this is almost always a stupid idea - trying to transplant an integrated way of thinking from one wholly independent domain to another. But, unfortunately, it sometimes days work incredibly well. Soros' MegaTrade was when he "Broke the Bank of England" in what is now seen as a blindingly obvious opportunity. The Bank of England publicly announced they would buoy the currency vis-a-vis the Deutschmark. What do you do when a sovereign entity announced unlimited support for an asset? You short the shit out of it. That's what Old George did and made about one billion dollars in single day.
I'd argue that, like Buffett, the rest of Soros' success largely came from the fact that he was seen as successful. In public markets, this is especially potent. The Buffett Bounce is a real thing. Also, when you have that much (i.e. billion(s)) of float capital, you have options that other players don't. People don't understand that a "normal" hedge fund cannot simply hold capital out of the market. In a lot of cases, if they don't deploy their capital within a certain timeframe, LPs can take legal action. Soros, Buffet, and a couple others can spend a lot of time hanging out on the sidelines and then bet on the game when its 42-0 in the 4th with 10 seconds left.
On Soros' politics - this is just his billionaire's fantasy. Some rich dudes buy an NFL team because they always wanted to play ball but we're 5'8 and 160 lbs. Soros wanted to be this great philo-political mind, but wasn't, and is now investing in all of the political things! to, in my opinion, brute force his way into that role.
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