48 THE INVESTOR
reports that Niednagel is a consultant to Phoenix Suns coach Danny
Ainge. When asked about a trade with Dallas that brought Jason
Kidd to the Suns, Niednagel gave Ainge the following advice, “He’s
an ISTP. They’re your ideal NBA point guard. They have great
peripheral awareness. They conserve their energy well. They’re great
thinkers. When they play under control and see the floor well, they
have the potential to make the whole team better. Michael Jordan’s
an ISTP.”
Well, there’s the clincher. You just can not argue against Air
Jordan.
In any event, Niednagel gets big bucks from managers to help
with draft selections, based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator of
the players. I fantasized: What if I could do the same thing with
MBA graduates for Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch? What if I
could put on my MBTI turban and predict which eager MBAs were
most likely to shine in the markets?
Perhaps there would be more than one ideal type. Maybe there
would be one for trading, one for analysis, one for risk arbitrage.
I was hopeful, so I dug in and read everything I could find about
the masters. But my hope faded as I read more about the person-
ality types of the masters and realized that they differed. I shifted
to a new hypothesis: These masters achieved greatness because they
understood their own personality type and used an investment
approach that was congruent with it.
Of course, that was it. Socrates and Shakespeare were right
after all: Know thyself and then to thine own self be true. One
investment writer, Derrick Niederman, has already written a book,
The Inner Game of Investing (Wiley 1999), that elaborates on this
theory. He does not base it on the MBTI, but instead describes
investment styles that he invented: The Bargain Hunter, The Vi-
sionary, The Contrarian, The Sentimentalist, and so on. It’s a fun
book, a good airplane read—but I wasn’t satisfied with Niederman’s
“to thine own self be true” theory either.
As I continued to study the masters, it became obvious that06 ware 48 1/19/01, 1:07 PM