The thing is, I read articles like this with interest, but feel like a two-year old. I don't get it. My theory is that intelligence, math ability, etc. has nothing to do with it, your brain has to be wired in a certain way to understand the the varying grotesqueries of financial markets, to paraphrase the Architect.
The two biggest things you can learn from Soros, IMO:
George Soros is a genius. But he is not a genius for searching and finding the trades. He is not sitting around and doing calculations or running analyses with fancy algorithms.
Instead, he is amazing at risk management. He knows precisely when to 'go for the jugular' and bet really big.
It's a really instinctual type thing, he can gauge the psychology of the market really well and understand when bubbles are about to pop.
The other great thing about Soros is that he has a remarkably open mind. There is a story about how Soros went and played tennis with someone, at the time, he had a big trade betting on one direction of the market. The person he played tennis with was vehemently against that position and expressed his concern.
The next day the market turned opposite to Soros' trade and his tennis partner called, to see if he was doing okay, thinking that Soros must have lost a lot of money that day. But, he was greeted with a happy George Soros who reported that after the tennis match he totally changed the direction of his trade.
It is pretty rare to find people, especially in financial markets, who can quickly change directions and basically admit that they were originally wrong. Trading is a business that is dominated by people with huge egos, but you will notice that most of the best traders are ones that will switch direction without hesitation.
