He believes all teachers should be able to tell a story "at a moment's notice to a class for the last quarter of an hour on a wet Friday afternoon". Not read it, he insists-tell it. "If you're reading out of a book all the time, nothing changes. But if you tell it face to face, you improvise a bit, you play around..."

He set about this task in a typically deliberate way. In the first term, he decided, he would do the births and deaths of the gods and goddesses, their natures and deeds; in the second term he would do the origins of the Trojan war, which would segue into "The Iliad"; and in the third term, he would do "The Odyssey". He prepared each week's story thoroughly so he could tell it without notes. He was teaching three separate classes, which meant telling each episode three times in a week. Again, the maths is impressive. "I must have told each story 36 times."

"My real life began", he says, "when I came home from the job and sat at my table and wrote three pages for the day."

The last reason trend-following isn’t more popular as an investing strategy has to do with its complexity relative to stocks and bonds.

What is a stock? A sliver of ownership in a company.

And bonds? Basically loans. Buy and hold em tight. Easy enough to understand right?

And how about trend-following / managed futures? An investment strategy that takes advantage of long, medium or short-term moves in various markets utilizing various techniques, calculations and time-frames while paying close attention to trade signals, current market price calculations, moving averages and channel breakouts to determine whether or not to go long or short.