Ayn Rand
From “Considering the Last Romantic, Ayn Rand, at 100″ by Edward Rothstein, New York Times, February 2, 2005:
“Rand divided her world - and her characters - in similarly stark fashion into what she wanted and what she didn’t want. Here is what she didn’t want: Ellsworth M. Toohey, “second-handers,” Wesley Mouch, looters, relativists, collectivists, altruists. Here is what she did want: Howard Roark, John Galt, individualism, selfishness, capitalism, creation.”
Man’s mind and his ability to develop his “self”, states John Galt, the protagonist of Atlas Shrugged, is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him but survival is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. In other words, to remain alive, he must think. Thinking is not an automatic process. A man can choose to think or to let his mind stagnate, or he can choose actively to turn against his intelligence, to evade his knowledge, to subvert his reason. If he refuses to think, he courts disaster: he cannot with impunity reject his means of perceiving reality.
The traits Rand wants her protagonists to demonstrate are also those of successful traders. Trading is a zero-sum game. It’s you against the world. It’s not you and your friend or you and your broker fighting together. You are left to objectively use your mind to determine the best course of action in order pull a profit from the other traders in the world who are competing with you at the game. You dig deep to develop a winning course of action. You don’t let fear overwhelm you. Pure fear is why the Nasdaq rose so far and plunged so low. And those who accepted their fear with confidence in their trading decision-making — made a killing.
