The truth was that Jones’s trading profits came from agile short-term moves, not from understanding multidecade supercycles whose existence was dubious. Like the traders at Commodities Corporation, Jones was adept at riding market waves; he would get up on his surfboard when a swell seemed to be coming, ready to jump off quickly if the market turned against him. “When you take an initial position, you have no idea if you are right,” he once confessed, undermining the notion that any long-range analysis could explain his success. Rather, as he explained in his more candid moments, his method
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