I attended a lecture at my daughter's school. A police senior sergeant and a child counsellor took the time to give us a parents' guide to surviving teenagers. It's quite a skill.
They started with a hand-out about the brain and how it grows. Kids are not born with a fully developed brain. It takes time to grow and, unfortunately for parents and the law courts, it seems the lobe that controls ''judgment'' is one of the last to mature. Often it doesn't fully develop until late teens or early 20s.
It was a clever way of saying ''It's not their fault''. It was an even cleverer way of saying that our problem kids are not our fault either.
It became clear that teenagers are little more than large, biologically judgment-impaired organisms wandering around making decisions that are subjugated to the sexual lobe, the bugger-off lobe and the food-now lobe.
They have primal, not logical, drivers, that make them emotional, irrational, impetuous, fearless and impervious to consequences.
It is normal for them to reject advice, take risks, revel in uncertainty and do it all at 200 miles an hour with their hair on fire. All normal, they said.
I could have been in a lecture on behavioural finance or reading chapter one of The Idiot's Guide to Trading Shares. How similar teenagers are to many traders. Biologically judgment-impaired. Do go on, sergeant.
Having accepted that our teenagers start out with a brain that is not yet fully developed, the next step was to teach us how to deal with the judgment-impaired, fridge-emptying, towel-dropping, sibling-provoking, parent-blaming, hormone-laced, unappreciative know-it-all Facebooking morons.
Here are just a few of their pearls of advice. Traders take note:
For parents: Be careful to separate ''behaviour'' from ''the kid''. In other words, you have to say ''your behaviour is unacceptable'', not ''you're an idiot''. The kid is OK, the behaviour isn't. Tell a kid they are bad often enough and they'll eventually believe they are and behave that way. It's a big hole to dig them out of.
For traders: Be careful to separate your personality from your trading system. If you are losing money, it is probably your system that isn't working, not your personality. You are not doomed to success or failure by your personality.
For parents: Empower your kids with facts. Tell them the things they need to know. Like, never let a drunk pass out flat on their back. If someone picks a fight, they know they are going to win. Your best weapons are a smile and if you don't know, don't. In other words, despite the fact you know everything, there is a lot you don't know you don't know. Education can save your life.
For traders: Educate yourself.
For parents: Don't tell your kid, ask them. What is the worst thing that could happen? What would you do if a friend passed out? What would you do if you lost your phone and your friends and you didn't know where you were? How would you get home without money? It is basic risk-management and planning.
For traders: Half the trading game is handling uncertainty. To do that, you need a plan. Don't trade without one.
For parents: Dialling 000. A great bit of advice this one, the concept that dialling 000 invokes the ''amnesty rule''. Whatever you have done wrong, dialling 000 means you will be forgiven, with no consequences and no exceptions. Kids need an out when they are not sure, when things get dangerous, when things get scary. This is it.
For traders: When everything goes wrong, you need a mechanism to get you out of there. It's the stop loss.
It became clear that there was really very little difference between teenagers and stocks. All of them are an unpredictable pain in the arse in the short-term but if you keep plugging away, and keep the faith, then one day, if you're lucky, they'll blossom into wonderful long-term investments, which most of the time, although it may not seen like it now, they do.
Marcus Padley is a stockbroker with Patersons Securities and the author of the daily sharemarket newsletter Marcus Today. For a free trial, go to www.marcustoday.com.au.
