Gil Blake is a speculator

investor An investor is a person who allocates financial capital with the expectation of a future Return on capital, return (profit) or to gain an advantage (interest). Through this allocated capital most of the time the investor purchases some specie ...

and fund manager who devised an

investment strategy In finance, an investment strategy is a set of rules, behaviors or procedures, designed to guide an investor's selection of an investment portfolio. Individuals have different profit objectives, and their individual skills make different tactics an ...

known as

mutual fund A mutual fund is a professionally managed investment fund that pools money from many investors to purchase securities. The term is typically used in the United States, Canada, and India, while similar structures across the globe include the SICAV i ...

market timing Market timing is the strategy of making buying or selling decisions of financial assets (often stocks) by attempting to predict future market price movements. The prediction may be based on an outlook of market or economic conditions resulting from ...

. This method of investing is based on the historic pricing patterns of mutual funds.

Career

Blake has attributed his participation in trading to a friend of his, who had shown him some municipal bonds and inquired for Blake's opinion. Blake noticed a trend in the numbers his colleague had showed him, and investigated further. His investigation led to the discovery that persistent trends in municipal bonds were decidedly systematic. This served as the basis of his mutual fund timing strategies. According to

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, Blake placed second in the U.S. Trading Championships in 1988 and first in 1989-1993.. According to Andrew Selby's posting on www.donttalkaboutyourstocks.com/market-wizard-gil-blake/ on February 26, 2013, his top five quotes from Gil Blake listed in Jack Schwager's book Market Wizards (1992) were: Quote #1: "I'm not a big fan of diversification. If the odds are 70 percent in your favor and you make fifty trades, it's very difficult to have a down year." Quote #2: "Whenever I take a position, I like to imagine what it would be like under the worst-case scenario. In doing so, I minimize the confusion if that situation actually develops. In my view, losses are a very important part of trading. When a loss happens, I believe in embracing it." Quote #3: "The lesson for me was that if you break a discipline once, the next transgression becomes much easier. Breaking a diet provides an appropriate analogy – once you do it, it becomes much easier to make further exceptions." Quote #4: "Opportunities change, strategies change, but people and psychology do not change. If trend following systems don't work as well, something else will. There's always money being lost, so someone out there has to win." and Quote #5: "First of all, most traders don't have a winning strategy. Second, even among those traders who do, many don't follow their strategy. Trading puts pressure on weaker human traits and seems to seek out each individual's Achilles' heel."

Biography

Mr. Blake was born July 14, 1945, in

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Career

Biography

References

Sources

Further reading