Jung’s Seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra – ed. James L. Jarret
How We Trade Options – Jon & Pete Najarian
Tales of Dune – Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson
I’ve been watching a lot of CNBC lately. Although I harbor some moral reservations about aspects of Wall Street, like high-frequency trading, rampant speculation, and day trading, it’s a requirement to build wealth in today’s world. (Are you really “creating” wealth when you briefly invest in a stock, pump up its value, and sell it two weeks later?You don’t create wealth or value for anybody but yourself.)
Options trading is a low-cost way to benefit from stock price moves. You can protect positions and cash in on gains. A “call” gives you the option to buy a stock at a certain price if you think its price will rise. A “put” allows you to sell stock at a select price, no matter how far it falls. All you have to pay up front is the premium, which is a minuscule price compared to actually owning the stock.
Most option contracts are traded before they are sold–if the stock continues to rise, your call option increases in value.
The really interesting aspect of this book are all the option strategies one can utilize. With these, you can minimize risk and maximize gains, knowing what you will lose at the beginning. For example, if one thinks a stock will be volatile but don’t know which way it will move, buy a put and call for the same strike price. As long as it makes big moves up or down (to cover the premium cost), you win.
“Tales of Dune” collects a couple of short stories from each epoch in the Dune universe: The Butlerian Jihad, Paul Atreides and Dune, and the Honored Matres invasion. The stories aren’t great. They feel like scenes that were cut out of the novels.
“Jung’s Seminar” transcribes a series of lectures Jung gave on Zarathustra in the 30s. It’s academic and presupposes an intimate knowledge of Jung’s theories, so it took me all of May to slog thru. This is the type of book I would never read were I not in prison, but Jung makes many keen observations and ventures out on intriguing tangents during his exegesis. Like:
“So you slowly come to the conclusion that many things which you formerly said were wrong and which some devil had arranged for you, were really just what you had sought and prepared and put there for your own use, for a purpose, and that your former idea that some enemy had worked the trick was a superstition…But now you are able to say, ‘In so many cases I have seen that I was my so-called enemy, that I was the wise fellow who prepared such a fix for myself…”
That is, we unconsciously create our own fates.
Ostensibly, his lectures are about the text of Zarathustra, and while that’s partly true, Jung uses the text to psychoanalyse Nietzsche the man. He lauds Nietzsche’s ability to correctly diagnose the psychology and pathologies of individuals and society, but blasts him for his blindness regarding his own foibles.
As Jung astutely points put, Nietzsche is famous for conjuring the Superman, a godlike figure that’s the next step for human evolution, an Ubermensch who invents his own values, “a blond beast.” But Nietzsche himself was a half-blind invalid suffering from syphillitic madness who was cared for by his sister and a Christian neighbor.
I’ve read Zarathustra before. At this point in my life, Jung’s philosophical digressions feel more relevant. During one lecture, he mentions the power of intuitives. When an intuitive person (which Nietzsche is) has an intution, we all feel its truth, because the intuition comes from the unconscious, and we are all connected to the collective unconscious.
Jung regularly has these powerful insights, which is why he is one of the 20th century’s intellectual heavyweights.
Easy Trouble 