Meditation is Value Neutral

Bloomberg Business Week ran a recent story about a Wall Street trader who uses meditation to make more money. It reports that hedge fund manager David Ford does 20 minutes of Transcendental Meditation each morning, a mantra repetition practice he's done daily for two years.

“I react to volatile markets much more calmly now,” Ford, 48, says. “I have more patience.”
He also has more money. Latigo Partners LP, his event-driven credit fund, climbed 24 percent last year. He almost beat the surging stock market with a bond fund. Ford is part of a growing number of Wall Street traders, including A-list hedge-fund managers Ray Dalio, Paul Tudor Jones and Michael Novogratz, who are fine-tuning their brains -- and upping their games -- with meditation. Billionaire investor Daniel Loeb, who once likened a chief executive officer to a drug addict during one of his frequent public rants, in February praised meditation while sharing a stage with the Dalai Lama in Washington, D.C.

 This has created some consternation in meditation circles, where it's believed that meditation will lead to a lessening of desire -- and less interest in hedge funds.

But meditation is a tool -- like exercise increases your strength, which can be used for different ends, meditation trains your mind. How you use that is your choice.

Bloomberg reports:

Most people misunderstand meditation, says Jay Michaelson, author of “Evolving Dharma: Meditation, Buddhism, and the Next Generation of Enlightenment.”
“Meditation used to have this reputation as a hippie thing for people who speak in a particularly soft tone of voice,” Michaelson says. Not so. “Samurai practiced meditation to become more effective killers,” he says. So too did kamikaze pilots. “It’s value neutral,” Michaelson says.