I was clicking through YouTube looking for a video to post this morning and I came across this TED Talk from Tom Sosnoff discussing the value of learning how to take risk.
I don’t know anything about Tom but I found his short talk entertaining, interesting, and thought-provoking. I’m not sure I agree with him which is one of the reasons I posted this video.
According to Wikipedia, Tom is an “entrepreneur, options trader, and co-founder of Thinkorswim and tastytrade, and founder of Dough, Inc. He was Senior Vice President of Trading and Strategic Initiatives at TD Ameritrade. Sosnoff promotes option trading as an important financial strategy for the individual investor. He has promoted this view by founding an online financial network, tastytrade, and by developing software products to support individual investor options trading.”
My guess is that Financial Slacker readers may take issue with Tom’s somewhat negative comments about passive investing. And he even admits that earlier in his life, he would have performed much better had he taken a passive investing approach rather than actively putting his money into different high-risk, potentially high-return investments.
But he looks back on those early investment losses not just as lost money but as learning opportunities that taught him how to profit from taking risk which led to even greater rewards down the road.
I wrote a post a while back and talked about looking at how my regrets can become opportunities. Tom’s talk about taking risk reminded me of that.
If you have any comments, agree, or disagree with Tom, let us know in the comments.
Thx for sharing this!
Tom is a great person. He runs Tastytrade, the financial network I love to follow.
I watch their show on a regular basis!
When I posted this, I did think about you ATL. I know you’ve been actively trading options for a while.
It’s a topic that I find intriguing. I’m going to tune it to Tom and Tastytrade a little more.
Thanks for the feedback.