I was wondering if anyone has experience/suggestions for memorizing data, especially larger volumes of quantitative information.
For example, I’d like to take 50 stocks and be able to rattle off (or at least have a firm sense of) their most recent closing prices, 52 week highs/lows and moving averages. So that would be memorizing about 200 pieces of information right there.
I’ve tried flash cards but it’s time consuming and doesn’t seem to yield such good results.
Any ideas? Thanks in advance for your suggestions!
Unfortunately I don’t have any magic system, but I’d love to hear about one if it exists. My only advice would follow this question: How quickly do you hope to memorize this?
My strategy has usually been to just make small, but relentless, increases. Memorizing 1 or 2 things per day isn’t really that hard. If you have 200 things, it’ll take a couple months.
Admittedly, this works better for things like language vocab rather than stock info which is likely to change and make your memorized info meaningless.
The first item on their download page is an older free version, so it’s right in the middle of my price range. I read about it in Wired magazine last year and it’s supposed to have some science behind it. Basically, you follow a system where you refresh a peice of knowlege just about the time you are starting to forget it. Supposedly that’s the most effective way to cement facts into memory.
If you try it, let me know how it works out. I have some memorizing to do pretty soon and if it’s effective this could really help.
The next most effective way I know is flash cards, which really do work even if they are a pain in the ass.
I hope this doesn’t count as resurrecting a zombie thread, but since I have an update and it’s my own OP:
In the past month or so I’ve been having some success using a combination of the dominic system and the memory palace system. I’m currently about a quarter way through a list of 50 stocks for which I’m memorizing key ratios and a couple years worth of sales and net income figures.
The only potential pitfall I can see is the strange looks I might get if anyone sneaks a peek at my flash cards. “In the bedroom of my old apartment, in the chest of drawers, in the second drawer from the bottom, Albert Einstein is jumping out of a cake for Danny Glover”.