I got 70 (150) in a home paper test (probably didn't do as well...

I got 70 (150) in a home paper test (probably didn't do as well in the recent pilot) and got rated by Mensa in England as having an IQ of 156 (The English have a different scale and types of question and that result is paradoxically not as good).

Is that boasting or hard to believe? Probably, but it is also a significant problem as the smartest people are often out of touch in many ways with most of their fellow humans (the ones make most of the market), try too hard to analyse details and spend too much energy trying to be "correct", which is only loosely related to actually making money.

To paraphrase Louise Bedford, to see whether a stock is trending up and is a "buy", offer a lolly pop to a young child and show them a chart. If they say it's pointing up ... sadly, it's often that simple and fundamentals etc in the short term often count for zip.

Peter Lynch, who ran the Magellan Fund in the U.S. a decade ago, maintained that the top 3% of the population in I.Q. terms didn't make good traders in his experience. In my journey to get better at this game, I've found some of the simple truths of Bedford and co. far more valuable than higher education and detailed analysis - so many of the old adages are true in other words. This might in part explain why so many of the better known analysts and economists get it wrong so often and most of the supposedly smartest brokers see most of their clients go broke ie. it's probably not just all about restrictive banking relationships and attempts to hoodwink the masses.