What Soros Taught Druckenmiller About Big Winners, and Why CIEN Is the Point
One of the biggest misconceptions in trading is that you need to be right all the time.
You do not.
What you need is the ability to keep losses small when you are wrong and press your advantage when you are right.
That is one of the biggest lessons Stanley Druckenmiller described learning from George Soros in Jack Schwager’s The New Market Wizards.
Druckenmiller said Soros taught him that when conviction is high, “you have to go for the jugular.”
He also called Soros “the best loss taker I’ve ever seen.”
That combination is powerful:
Be aggressive when you are right.
Walk away quickly when you are wrong.
I have made plenty of wrong calls on individual stocks. I am wrong often.
But the goal is not to be right on every name.
The goal is to structure your trading so the small losses stay small, and the winners have enough room to pay for the losers and then some.
That is why a winner like CIEN, along with names like LITE and SNDK, matters so much in my trading strategy.
I mentioned CIEN earlier because it had the kind of relative strength, leadership, and constructive price action I look for.
Since then, it has continued to show why holding real leaders matters.
One real leader can make up for a lot of small losses.
But only if you do two things:
Cut the trades that are not working.
Hold the trades that are.
That is the hard part.
Most traders do the opposite.
They give losing trades too much room and cut winning trades too quickly.
The best traders understand the math is not about being right all the time.
It is about making sure that when you are right, it actually matters.
