Damien Soitout
Two short books sit on one shelf but answer different questions. The shorting guide explains a position. The time guide organizes hours. Mixing them produces confusion, not skill.
A row is not a single promise. Each book still has the job printed on it.
Two short books are available to buy, in more than one language. The common mistake is to treat them as a matched set that together form a single system. They do not. One introduces short selling. The other introduces how to use hours. I wrote both as brief introductions, close enough in time that a shelf makes them look related. Looking related is not the same as answering the same question. If you open the time book hoping it will make a short feel safer, you have mixed the jobs. If you open the shorting book hoping it will organize a disordered week, you have mixed them the other way. Either mix leaves a reader who feels prepared and is not.
As of 10 June 2024 the books that exist are those two volumes. The English shorting guide sits on the shelf as A Quick Guide: Shorting. Its Kindle edition appeared on 11 January and is listed on Amazon under B0CS82GYJV. The time book is the 8 February paperback, The Time Mastery Blueprint, ISBN 9798877044777, available on Amazon as Time Mastery. French and Spanish editions exist for both. What a reader can actually open in June 2024 is those two volumes. The photograph on this page shows a row of different books against one wall. The wall did not write the books. The fact that I wrote two of them in the same season does not either.
Vino Market, sold in April 2024, is a company transaction, not a chapter of either guide. A homepage and a pair of books can share a calendar year and remain different objects. June is a month when people like to bundle. They want one narrative that covers a sale, a newspaper note from February, and two paperbacks. The bundle is a speech. The useful action with a short book is smaller. You identify the question you have this week, open the volume written for that question, and leave the other volume closed until the question changes.
Its single job is to explain a position. You borrow a security, sell it, then buy it back and return what you borrowed. If the price falls, the difference between the sale and the later purchase, after borrow costs and fees, is the result of the position. If the price rises, you still owe the return, and nothing in the instrument caps the price you may have to pay. That is shorting. It is not a promise, not a capped mirror of an ordinary long purchase, and not a synonym for fraud. A short squeeze, the kind illustrated in the book with public cases, occurs when people who sold borrowed shares are forced to buy them back into a rising price. You can understand the mechanics and never place the trade. Understanding is the job of the book. Placing the trade is a separate life that involves a broker, local rules, and capital you can lose.
The public glossary remains the right companion: short sales on Investor.gov. Read it when you want the plain definition without chapters. Then return to the book for the risks, the distinction between a short and manipulation, and the fact that the rulebook changes when you change countries. What shorting is, and what it is not, stays inside that volume alone. Do not let a chapter about mornings complete it. A morning does not borrow a share. A borrowed share does not care that you woke early.
Self-awareness and emotional choice matter here only as a caution. The feeling of being the clever person in the room is not analysis. People mix the two guides because that feeling wants a system, and two books look like one. A claim that a well-run Tuesday reduces the risk of a short is comfort, not mechanism. The risk of a short lives in the price, the borrow cost, the size, and the length of time you can afford to be wrong. Your calendar can be orderly and all four of those can still hurt you. Trust the mechanism. Do not trust the comfort.
Its job is the hours themselves. The book tells you to stop planning from the pile on the desk. That pile is a to-do list ordered by whoever shouted last. The replacement is a MAP, a Massive Action Plan: objectives ranked, tasks under the one that matters most, a finish that unlocks the next objective. The Eisenhower matrix sorts the day into four boxes: urgent and important, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and neither. A block of roughly twenty-five minutes on one task, followed by a real break, is the Pomodoro rhythm the book supplies. Saying no protects the block. None of that predicts whether a price will fall. None of it pays a bill by itself. It stops you from spending the day on other people's haste, which is already a large enough job for one short book.
Stop making to-do lists and how to manage your time are the drills. Time Mastery is a field manual, not another to-do list; that remains the essay that travels with the February paperback. Use the drills on a real objective. Do not use them as a prelude to a trade, and do not treat a trade as a reward for a tidy morning. I have watched that bargain. It is superstition with a notebook. The notebook did not alter the position. The position did not tidy the notebook. They sit near each other on a shelf and remain strangers in use.
Our World in Data's literacy charts sit at the floor of both books. A guide you cannot read cannot do its job, and the ability to read is a condition, not a personality. If you can read, you can also misread, which is exactly what mixing the volumes is. Learn to read faster will not protect you from the mix. Speed helps you finish a chapter. It does not help you notice that you have asked the chapter to perform a job it refused. Slow down at the moment you want one book to cosign the other. That want is the signal to close one of them.
It appears as a sentence. “I will get serious about time, and then the short will make sense.” Or: “I understand markets, so my calendar can stay a mess.” Or the blended version that sounds like a sales pitch: a life in which discipline and a position are one product. I did not write that product. I wrote an introduction to a market tool and an introduction to the use of hours. A reader in any language can use one this month and ignore the other without failing a course. There is no course. There is a question. Match the book to the question.
Try a simple test. Write the question in one line, without the word “success” and without the word “winning.” If the line concerns a price, a borrow, or a loss that is not capped, you are in volume one. If the line concerns a day that disappears, an objective you will not rank, or a yes you should have refused, you are in volume two. If the line needs both books to make sense, it is still two questions wearing one coat. Split them. Answer one. The other can wait a month without harm. What cannot wait is the honesty to split them, because the blended question sends you to the wrong chapter and you will call the resulting confusion education.
Language does not change the jobs. A French reader of vente à découvert and of Maîtrise du temps faces the same split as an English reader and a Spanish reader of the same pair. The words on the cover change. The prohibition does not. Do not let the short-selling guide and the time guide answer each other. Give each book one job and stop. That is how any reader should use two short books, in any language, on any shelf that has started to look like a single promise because the spines are the same height.
This week, take one volume down. If it is the shorting guide, explain the position out loud in five sentences: borrow, sell, buy back, return, and the loss that is not capped. If you cannot, you are not finished with volume one, and volume two will not finish it for you. If it is the time guide, write three objectives in order and put a block of time on the first one tomorrow morning. If you spend that block reading about shorts, you have mixed them in the only hour that was supposed to be clean. I would rather see a clumsy MAP than a sophisticated blend. Clumsy and separate is usable. Sophisticated and mixed is a speech.
Two guides, two jobs. The row of books in the photograph can stay mixed on the wall. Your week cannot. Pick the question. Open the book that was written for it. Leave the other one where it is until you have a different question. A shelf is a piece of furniture. A job is what you do before lunch. Do not ask the furniture to do the job.
