The 2am Z Shot That Changed My Life
I was twenty-six years old, eleven months into my trading career, and down thirty-eight percent on a once-respectable account. It was a Tuesday in March. I had just closed another losing position (a short on a semiconductor stock that inexplicably ripped higher on no news I could find), and I could not sleep. I opened YouTube to find a distraction. The algorithm served me a grainy clip from a 1995 pool tournament.
A small, unassuming Filipino man in a polo shirt walked up to a table. He was snookered. Completely trapped. The cue ball sat behind a cluster of balls with no direct line to anything he was allowed to hit. The commentator said something like “he cannot even see it.” The Filipino man studied the table for maybe fifteen seconds, chalked his cue, and then hit the cue ball into a rail. It came off the first rail, kicked into a second rail, bounced off a third, traced a Z-shaped path across the green felt, and clipped the object ball with the precision of a sniper round. The object ball rolled slowly into a pocket. The crowd erupted. The commentator had no words.
The Filipino man was Efren “Bata” Reyes. The clip became known as the Z Shot. And somewhere between my fourth viewing of that video and sunrise, I realised something that no trading book had ever been able to teach me.
The next four years I spent studying Efren Reyes changed my trading career more than any course or mentor ever did. I have watched, by my own rough count, somewhere north of two thousand hours of him playing. I have read every interview he has given. I have talked to coaches who have played him. And at the end of all that, I can tell you that the single most important lesson a retail trader will ever learn is the lesson Efren Reyes figured out somewhere around 1972 in the back rooms of Manila: you cannot beat the great ones at their own table. What you can do is figure out what they want and get on their side.
This article is everything I learned.
Who Efren Reyes Is
If you do not follow pool, a brief catch-up. Efren Reyes is, by nearly universal agreement among professionals and historians of the game, the greatest pool player who has ever lived. He is Filipino. He is short, unassuming, and in photographs he looks more like a mechanic than a champion. He has won over one hundred major titles across eight-ball, nine-ball, rotation, and one-pocket. He was the first player to win world championships in both nine-ball and one-pocket. He is nicknamed “The Magician” because, quite literally, he produces shots that other champions describe as impossible.
What separates Efren from every other player alive is not his stroke (which is good but not the best) or his break (which is good but not legendary). What separates Efren is pattern recognition. He sees the table differently. When a normal professional looks at a rack and sees three or four options, Efren sees twelve. When they see a safety play, Efren sees a bank shot. When they see a shot that is ninety-percent makeable, Efren sees a shot that sets up the next three balls.
And here is the part that matters for our purposes: when Efren enters a tournament, the other professionals know. Immediately. Their preparation changes. Their strategy changes. Their willingness to play certain shots changes. Because no matter how good you are, if you are sitting across the table from Efren Reyes, you have to play a different game than you would play against anyone else.
The Warren Buffett Parallel
Warren Buffett is Efren Reyes.
I do not mean this loosely. I mean the parallels are so dense that I stopped being surprised by them after about year two of my study.
Both men are the unquestioned best at what they do, and yet both look like the least intimidating person in the room. Efren wears polo shirts and carries a small canvas case. Buffett wears rumpled suits and drives himself to the office in a twelve-year-old car. Neither looks like a killer. Both are.
Both play a game that is fundamentally about patience. Efren will play twenty safeties in a row waiting for the right opening. Buffett holds cash for years waiting for the right company at the right price. Both can do this because both have internalised that doing nothing is a legitimate move.
Both play shots nobody else sees. When Efren played the Z Shot, every other professional in the room could have identified the pocket that needed filling. None of them would have even considered the three-rail kick to get there. When Buffett bought Bank of America warrants in the middle of the 2011 financial crisis, every other value investor could see that the bank was cheap. None of them would have structured the deal the way he did, and none of them would have had the nerve to go in at that size when the market was convinced the bank was doomed.
Both read the whole table several moves ahead. Efren plays a shot not because the shot is easy, but because it positions him for the next three balls. Buffett buys a business not because its next quarter looks good, but because its competitive moat will compound for three decades.
Both have been underestimated their entire careers. Every generation of young pool professionals thinks they can beat the old Filipino man because he no longer has the stroke he had at thirty-five. Every generation of young hedge fund managers thinks they can beat the old man in Omaha because the market has evolved past his style. Both generations lose. Repeatedly.
If you understand Efren, you understand Buffett. And if you understand Buffett, you understand the hardest truth about the stock market: there is always someone at the table who is better than you.
The only question is whether you know they are there.
The Core Lesson: Not Every Tournament Has Efren
Here is the thing about Efren that changed my trading when I finally got it: not every tournament has him.
He cannot be at every event. He has bodily constraints. He has geographic constraints. He has preferences. There are small regional tournaments where the best player at the table is someone you have never heard of, and there are massive international tournaments where the field is so stacked that several world champions will not even make it to day two.
A smart pool player who wants to actually win money does not enter tournaments blindly. They check the field. They ask, “Who is playing?” If Efren is playing, and Francisco Bustamante is playing, and Shane Van Boening is playing, the prize pool for a tournament entry fee is almost certainly a losing bet for anyone not in that top tier. The expected value is negative before the first ball breaks.
The stock market is exactly this.
Every stock is a tournament. Every day, institutional players, hedge funds, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, high-frequency trading firms, and individual legends like Buffett are at various tables. They are not at every table. They cannot be. The capital and attention required to be meaningful at a table is significant, so they concentrate. Some stocks have Buffett sitting at the table. Some have Ray Dalio’s All Weather rebalancing. Some have Renaissance Technologies’ algorithms scalping micro-moves. Some have Paul Tudor Jones positioning for a macro event. Some have nobody significant at all, just a sea of retail traders and market makers trading against each other.
When you, as a retail trader, enter a trade, you are sitting down at a table. The question that separates profitable traders from unprofitable ones is simple: who else is at the table?
If you are buying a stock that Buffett’s Berkshire is actively accumulating, and your thesis is that the stock will go up, you have a tailwind most traders never even know exists. You are aligned with arguably the greatest investor of the last century. The market has to absorb billions of dollars of his buying. You are in good company.
If you are shorting a stock that Berkshire just bought, you are playing the wrong table. It does not matter how clean your technical analysis is. It does not matter how compelling your bearish narrative is. You are Efren’s opponent, and the expected value of the position is negative before you click submit.
The retail trader who loses money over years is almost always the trader who does not know which table they are sitting at. They think their skill, their chart reading, their system, is what determines the outcome of their trades. It is not. The composition of the table determines the outcome. Skill only matters after you have picked the right table.
How to Know if Efren Is at Your Table
Once I understood this, my research process changed. I stopped asking “is this stock going up or down” and started asking “who is at this table.”
Here are the tools I use. None of them are proprietary. All of them are free or cheap. The only cost is attention.
1. 13F filings. Every US institutional investment manager with over one hundred million dollars in assets has to file a 13F with the SEC every quarter disclosing their long equity positions. These filings come out forty-five days after quarter-end. Yes, there is a lag. Yes, by the time you see the filing the position may have changed. But if Berkshire shows up as a new buyer in a stock, that matters. If Scion Capital (Michael Burry) shows up shorting something, that matters. If Pershing Square loads up on a name, that matters. WhaleWisdom and Dataroma are the two tools I use to monitor this.
2. Unusual options activity. When an institution is quietly building a position, they often hedge in the options market. When that activity is disproportionate to the stock’s normal options flow, it is a signal. Tools like Unusual Whales and options flow scanners expose this. Not all unusual flow is institutional, but the pattern recognition, once you have watched it for a year or two, becomes extraordinary.
3. Volume and price divergence. This is the oldest tell in the book. When a stock is quietly accumulating volume without moving much, someone large is absorbing supply. Volume confirms the trend is the classic statement of this principle, and it applies here too. If the volume is rising and the price is not, someone is buying. Someone big.
4. Level 2 and iceberg orders. If you have access to level 2 data and you know how to read it, you can see the signature of large players. Iceberg orders, where an institution hides the true size of their order by showing only small amounts at a time, are Efren’s equivalent of a safety play. They do not want you to see what they are building. If you know what you are looking for, you can see it anyway.
5. Insider buying. Company executives buying their own stock with their own money is rare and meaningful. When a CEO and three board members all file Form 4 purchases within a two-week window, someone who knows the company intimately is saying “this is worth more than the market thinks.” I weight this heavily.
6. Form 13D filings. When an investor crosses the five percent ownership threshold in a company, they have to file a 13D within ten days. This is often the earliest public signal that an activist investor or a major fund has taken a real position.
These are not secrets. Every institutional trader uses some version of this research. The retail traders who do not use them are, whether they realise it or not, playing blindfolded at a table where their opponents can see every card.
Joining Efren’s Side
The counter-intuitive move, once you identify that Efren is at a table, is not to compete with him. It is to follow him.
“You increase your winning odds by ninety percent when you figure out what Efren wants and join that side.” That is the single sentence that has made me the most money in the stock market, and I cannot take credit for it because I only learned it by watching him play. The ninety percent figure is my own rough estimate from backtesting trades over four years, and I acknowledge it is a loose number, but the directional truth is not loose at all. Aligning with the genuinely great players in a given stock is the highest-leverage decision you can make, and it shifts your expected value dramatically.
How do you actually do this?
Buy when Buffett (or whoever your Efren is) buys, at prices near his cost basis. If Berkshire discloses a new position at an average cost of forty dollars and the stock is trading at forty-two, you are very close to his entry. If it is trading at ninety after a rally, you have missed most of the move, and your risk-reward is now much worse than his.
Buy on his dips, not on his tops. The great investors buy quality during panic. When a Berkshire holding drops twenty percent on a bad quarter, that is when Buffett often adds, not when he sells. If you own the same name, you should be doing the same. The compound math of long-term investing rewards buyers who accumulate through drawdowns.
Understand the thesis, not just the trade. When Berkshire buys Coca-Cola in 1988, the trade is not “buy a consumer staples stock.” The trade is “own a compounding global beverage monopoly for thirty years.” If you buy because Berkshire bought but you sell after eight months because the stock is flat, you took the wrong trade. You imitated the entry but not the exit. You have to think about what Efren is actually trying to accomplish, not just what shot he is playing.
Size appropriately. Even if you are aligned with the greats, the greats can be wrong on any specific position. Buffett bought airlines in 2016 and sold them in 2020 at a significant loss. He bought IBM in 2011 and sold years later at a loss. Alignment does not mean certainty. Position size like you are wrong twenty percent of the time, because on any individual trade, you are.
The Other Players at Other Tables
Buffett is not the only great player in the institutional game. Different stocks have different champions. Knowing which champion is at which table tells you what kind of trade to expect.
Earl Strickland and the Soros Type
Earl “The Pearl” Strickland is one of the most aggressive, technically brilliant, and emotionally volatile players in pool history. He has won multiple world championships. He is also famous for his outbursts, his willingness to attempt shots no one else would try, and his absolute refusal to back down from a fight. When Earl is at a table, the action is fast, intense, and unforgiving.
The trading equivalent is the macro trader. George Soros. Paul Tudor Jones. Stanley Druckenmiller in his prime. These are not patient compounders. They are tactical warriors. They identify a moment, they put massive capital to work, and they either win enormous or cut their losses fast. When a Soros-type is at a table (usually an index, a currency, or a macro-sensitive commodity), you should expect fast, violent moves. The game is different from the Buffett game. You cannot hold these trades for thirty years because the trader leading them does not hold them for thirty weeks.
Shane Van Boening and the Dalio Type
Shane Van Boening is the quiet American. He does not talk much. He does not flourish. He grinds. He is statistically arguably the most consistent player in modern pool. His fundamentals are impeccable. He never beats himself.
The trading equivalent is Ray Dalio and Bridgewater. Systematic. Rule-based. All Weather portfolio. Not exciting. Quietly devastating over long periods. When a Dalio-type is at a table (often treasuries, inflation-linked bonds, or broad diversified positions), the game is long-term risk parity, not short-term conviction. Following these players means accepting that nothing will happen for months and then mean-reverting in your favour.
Mika Immonen and the Renaissance Type
Mika Immonen is the Finnish precision player. Cold. Mathematical. Relentless. Mika does not take emotional shots. He does not celebrate. He grinds you down with accuracy and patience until you make the mistake he has been waiting for.
The trading equivalent is Jim Simons and Renaissance Technologies. Pure quant. Thousands of positions. Short holding periods. Algorithms that have beaten the market so consistently for so long that the academic world still cannot fully explain it. You cannot follow Renaissance directly (they are closed) but you can recognise when systematic quant flows are dominating a stock, and you can avoid competing with them on their turf, which is short-term statistical arbitrage.
Francisco Bustamante and the Druckenmiller Type
Francisco “Django” Bustamante is the other great Filipino. Almost as creative as Efren, slightly less consistent, probably the second greatest of his generation. When the right opportunity appears, Bustamante strikes. His game is concentrated brilliance.
The trading equivalent is Stanley Druckenmiller in his prime. Not as patient as Buffett. Not as volatile as Soros. Sees a specific opportunity and concentrates heavily. When this type is at a table, expect a sharp, defined move followed by a quick exit. Follow them carefully, and exit when they do.
Tournament Stages and Market Stages
Every pool tournament has a shape. The opening rounds are less stacked. The field thins as weaker players are eliminated. By the final bracket, only the great ones remain, and the quality of play is an entirely different game than it was in round one.
Stock markets have exactly this shape, compressed into months or years.
Round one: accumulation. Smart money is building positions quietly. The general market does not notice. Volume is rising but price is not. This is when a Buffett-type enters a stock. If you can identify a stock in accumulation, you are effectively entering the tournament early, before the serious players show their cards. The payoff for being right at this stage is enormous.
Quarter-finals: markup. The move begins. Price rises. Retail traders start to notice. Momentum strategies engage. The pros are still in, but they are no longer the only ones playing. Volume expands. This is when trend-following strategies perform best because the trend is real and the participation is broad.
Semi-finals: distribution. The smart money starts to exit. Retail is euphoric. The news is great. Every headline is bullish. Price action is choppy but bias is still up. This is the most dangerous stage for retail traders because everything feels good, and yet the professionals at the table are quietly walking away. If you recognise distribution, you exit with the professionals. If you do not, you become the exit liquidity.
Finals: markdown. Price drops. Retail panics. Media narratives flip to bearish. The pros who sold at the top are now watching, possibly preparing to re-accumulate at the bottom. The cycle restarts.
A retail trader who only knows how to trade markup has roughly a quarter of the year in which they can make money. A retail trader who understands all four stages, and who recognises which players are active in each, has a structural edge over their peers.
The Four-Year Lesson
When I started this project of studying Efren, I thought I was going to learn shot selection. I thought the lessons would be about timing, patience, technical execution. Those lessons are real. I did learn them.
But the biggest lesson, the one that took me the better part of four years to fully absorb, is that the game is not really about your own execution. It is about situational awareness. It is about knowing whose table you are sitting at. It is about recognising that the greatest players have not earned their stripes by beating weaker opponents, but by correctly identifying which battles are worth fighting in the first place.
In my first year of trading, I was a beginner trying to out-trade hedge funds on individual stocks. I lost. In my second year, I was a slightly better beginner trying to out-trade hedge funds on individual stocks with “better” charts. I still lost, slightly less. In my third year, I started to notice that the trades I was winning on were the trades where I had unknowingly been on the same side as smart money. In my fourth year, I finally made the move to explicitly and intentionally align my positions with the actions of the best players in the market.
My returns since that shift have not made me rich. I am not Buffett. I am not Efren. But I am profitable, and I no longer lie awake at 2am wondering why my account is bleeding despite my “edge.” I know the answer now. I did not have an edge. I was at the wrong table.
What This Looks Like in Practice
If you want to do what I am describing, here is the short version of my daily process:
- Check WhaleWisdom or Dataroma for new positions and major changes by the investors I track (Berkshire, Baupost, Scion, Pershing Square, a handful of others).
- Screen those names for current price vs. the disclosed cost basis. The closer to entry, the better my risk-reward.
- Check insider buying on those names. Confirmation from people inside the company matters.
- Look at the chart for signs of accumulation. Volume patterns, support holding, multi-month basing.
- Size the position based on my overall portfolio risk, not on my conviction. Even aligned with the greats, I can be wrong. I use stop losses on active trades and trailing stops on winners.
- Hold with the thesis, not the price. If Berkshire’s reason to own the name is still intact, I hold. If it changes (the moat erodes, management changes, the fundamental case breaks), I exit regardless of my P&L.
This is not a complex system. It is not proprietary. The entire edge is in having the patience to do it consistently when the broader retail world is chasing whatever is viral that week.
Common Mistakes in Applying This Framework
Mistake 1: Blindly copying 13F positions without understanding them. A position Berkshire holds is not necessarily a position Berkshire is still buying. Sometimes they are quietly exiting. Sometimes the position was put on years ago at a much lower cost. Copy the analysis, not just the ticker.
Mistake 2: Confusing direction with conviction. Buffett owning a stock does not make it a good short-term trade. He buys for decade-long holds. If you have a one-month horizon, his ownership is much less relevant than short-term flows.
Mistake 3: Ignoring the other great players. Berkshire buying a stock matters. But if Renaissance is systematically shorting it in the short term, your position might bleed for months before it pays off. Different players have different horizons. You need to know who else is at the table.
Mistake 4: Underestimating position sizing. Even aligned with Efren, you can be wrong. The best traders I know risk a small percentage per position. Focus on your sector, size small, and let the alignment with smart money compound over time.
Mistake 5: Giving up too soon. Smart-money trades often take months to work. If you sell after three weeks of no action, you will miss the move. The discipline required is closer to long-term investing than to day trading. If you cannot hold through a quiet period, the style is not for you.
For the Beginner Still Figuring Out if This Is Worth It
If you are new to all of this, here is the honest version: you are not going to master this in a weekend. I spent four years. That sounds long. It was. Most of the value came in the last eighteen months. The first two-plus years I was building mental models that did not yet pay off. Which is exactly how any serious skill works.
Before you try to think like Buffett, learn to trade at all. Open a brokerage account. Start with paper trading. Read the learn how to trade stocks curriculum and work through it seriously. Build the base. Then add the situational awareness layer.
The research on whether retail traders can actually make money is honest about the odds. Most do not. The ones who do are almost always the ones who stopped playing against Efren and started playing with him.
Key Takeaways
- Every stock is a tournament. Every day, different institutional players are at different tables. Your first job as a trader is to figure out who is at your table.
- Warren Buffett is the Efren Reyes of trading. Patient, unassuming, and lethal. If he is accumulating a stock, you do not short it. You figure out why he is buying.
- Aligning with great investors does not require matching their size or their horizon perfectly. It requires understanding their thesis and positioning accordingly.
- Different legendary traders are great at different kinds of tables. Soros and Earl Strickland for macro action. Dalio and Shane Van Boening for systematic long-term positioning. Renaissance and Mika Immonen for cold mathematical edge. Match your style to the table you are at.
- You cannot outplay the greats at their own game. But you can get on their side, and if you can do that consistently, you flip the odds from heavily against you to meaningfully for you.
After four years of studying the greatest pool player who ever lived, the lesson I took into the market was never about pool. It was about humility. The great ones won because they knew which fights were worth fighting. The rest of us lost because we never bothered to check who else was at the table.
Once I started checking, everything changed.
Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Past performance of any investor, including those mentioned here, does not guarantee future results. The names of specific investors and investment firms are used for illustrative purposes only and do not constitute endorsements or investment recommendations. Always consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.