Chess strategies for investing: an interview with Doug Goldstein
by Michael Lerner in Global Economy
Advances in technology have made investing more accessible than ever, and now there are even commercial algorithms that claim to be able to anticipate stock market trends and deliver positive results. Yet the best advice for investing may very well come from a game thousands of years old — chess. Doug Goldstein, Director of Profile Investment Services, Ltd., teamed up with Hungarian chess Grandmaster Susan Polgar to co-author Rich As A King: How the Wisdom of Chess Can Make You a Grandmaster of Investing. He talked with Blouin News about this unusual strategy.
Blouin News: Do you need have a good knowledge of chess in order to really get the investment advice?
Doug Goldstein: Not at all. In the book, we explain each chess analogy clearly so that anyone who doesn’t understand chess will still grasp the underlying point that we are trying to make. In fact, all of the chess examples appear in “shout-out” boxes, so that if readers want to skip over them, they can.
BN: If you had to boil down the connection between chess and investing to its simplest form, what would it be? Something like “think strategically?”
DG: I would say: Just as a chess player has a goal (checkmating his opponent and winning the game), the investor also needs to have a goal. And in the same way, an investor, like a chess player, needs to think strategically and build a strategy with specific tactics to achieve his goals. All of this drills down to one short sentence which Susan Polgar regularly said to me whenever we played (and she won) a game of chess: “Look at the whole board.” Both investors and chess players often lose because they fail to look at all the moving parts, most of which are right in front of them.
Full interview here.
Reviews: https://chessdailynews.com/special-reviews-by-mr-cullman-im-silman-dr-herges-etc/