Archives of “curiosity” tag

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Loss Aversion

  
  Education
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There’s a short Danny Kahneman interview at the Daily Beast here.  He notes why your best friends may not be your best advisors:

 Friends are sometimes a big help when they share your feelings. In the context of decisions, the friends who will serve you best are those who understand your feelings but are not overly impressed by them. 

 That’s the Kahneman I love to read, profound and interesting. But then he follows with this sentence:

For example, one important source of bad decisions is loss aversion, by which we put far more weight on what we may lose than on what we may gain.  (more…)

Self-esteem and Trading Acccount

  
  Education
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Does your self-esteem rise and fall with your account equity? If so, your probably in for some difficult times ahead with you’re trading. For some traders, a trade is more than a trade, it can represent how successful they are as a person, how much status they feel, etc.  When your self-concept is closely tied to your trading outcomes the result is a yo-yo effect in terms of your self-esteem and your internal state.  And our internal state has a lot to do with how well we trade.

Trading already involves a lot of uncertainty, and tying one’s sense of self-worth to the ups and downs of trading is unnecessarily adding emotional volatility to the picture and is usually not a good idea.

Most traders need to work on being more resilient in the face of disappointment. Trading will always involve disappointments, its part of the territory.  A delicate balance between being fully engaged in the trade with a ‘watchful curiosity’ and without being overly attached to the outcome, is how many successful traders describe their internal state.

Are You A Subjective or Objective Trader?

  
  Education
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Subjective: Based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.Proceeding from or taking place in a person’s mind rather than the external world.

Subjective traders they are intertwined with their trades.Their signals are generally entering out of greed and exiting based on their own internal fear. The believe in their opinions more than the actually price action. They base trades off of whether they are feeling good or bad about a particular trade. A subjective trade comes out of the imagination of the trader, from their own beliefs, opinions, and what “should” happen in their view. Many times reality is not even cross checked as a reference, and if it is the subjective traders sees what they want to see instead of what is really going on. Their compass is their emotions and they have internal goals other than making money.

Objective: (Of a person or their judgment) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts. Having actual existence or reality. (more…)

The Heart and Mind of Trading

  
  Education
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Your heart has a mind, and your mind has a heart. In trading we need to bring heart and mind together. We need to feel intelligently and think with informed emotion.  The mind has intellectual emotion and the heart has emotional intellect.

It has been proven through heart transplants that the heart really does have a mind. Heart transplant recipients take on many characteristics, connections, habits, and hobbies of their donors. One woman who had never cared about dancing began to take ballroom dance lessons six weeks after her transplant. She became fascinated with ballroom dancing and became quite good at it. It turned out the donor of her heart had been a ballroom dancer. One child who had received the heart of another child upon seeing the dead child’s mother cried out, “Mommy, I’ve missed you!” And there are many other such reported instances.

It could even be assumed for the sake of this column, that the entire body, cell structure, and so forth are informed by both mind and heart. This is a column about trading, so let’s look at how mind and heart impact trading. We can start with the metaphors of mind and heart.

What is the heart of your trading? Is it analysis? Is it intuition?  Is it thought corrected by feeling or feeling balanced by analysis? Is it an outside system created by you or someone else that you employ with emotional or thoughtful action?

Do you trade with heart?  Do you put your whole self into it? And does that work for you?

Do you trade with an intellectual detachment? And does that support your chosen results?

What would happen if you brought the two together? What if you traded committed to your heart’s desire but also retained an intellectual remove from immediate results?  What if you committed yourself to replicating a verified and trusted method in the market and retained an optimistic view of the final results even while you observed with curiosity the current unfolding of the market?

We need balance in life and in trading. By bringing heart and mind and even body into the trading, we can seek to bring all of ourselves into the equation. We can do it mindfully with heart and clear purpose.

Deception Theory

  
  Education
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Deception theory often refers to the eight basic emotions communicated through facial expressions: anger, fear, sadness, joy, disgust, curiosity, surprise, acceptance. Are these emotions manifested in markets? Are they predictive? Do they change? Is the theory of deception useful for studying, understanding and predicting markets?

The Victim vs The Conquerer (Loser Vs Successful Trader )

  
  Education
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The victim wonders why nothing ever goes their way.
The conquerer wonders how lucky they are.
The victim wishes things were different.
The conquerer makes things different.
The victim passes blame and points fingers.
The conquerer accepts blame and moves on.
The victim argues minutiae.
The conquerer understands what matters.
The victim accepts reality and waits for for someone to create their own utopia.
The conquerer rejects reality and chooses to create their own.
The victim whimpers.
The conquerer roars.
The victim complains of unchanging impossibility.
The conquerer relishes the challenge of the impossible. (more…)

INQUISITIVENESS & COMPREHENSION for Traders

  
  Education
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INQUISITIVENESS:  Just another word for curiosity and is the ever-present desire for information and understanding.  Unfortunately this characteristic can easily turn into  analysis paralysis, wherein the sheer quantity of information overwhelms the decision making process itself.  The solution is to remain focused on a very small segment of the market and is at the very heart of successful trading. There is just too much information out there to ever be able to make sense of it all.  Instead, the idea should be to direct your energy toward your trading methodology and not stray when tempted to.

  COMPREHENSION: This is the trader’s ability to attend to the smallest details of his or her trading plan.  I believe a trader must have rules for entering and exiting a trade before the trade is made.  In the beginning these rules can be in the form of a checklist wherein before each trade all the details of your rules are checked and verified.  With time, the rules become such as a part of your psyche that the checklist is in your head and can be confirmed with quick precision.  The key is to never change the rules. When the rules stay the same your mind will not be able to play tricks on you.

Greed and Fear Are Two Sides of the Same Coin

  
  Education
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Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines greed as simply “… a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed.” Greed is often referenced as one of the main contributors to trading loss. Greed mangles the mind by distracting the trader from what matters most in the trade, which is quite frankly to protect your capital by prudent planning and following rules. It also distorts your judgment regarding high probability strategies and effective follow-through.  Additionally, it is the other side of the fear coin; that is, greed can arguably be thought of as a fear of not having “enough.”  Of course, having enough is a purely subjective notion, but for the reasonable person, someone who wants more, more, more as in getting every cent in a move, or wanting more than one’s share, is considered “greedy.”  Whether we’re talking about the fear of loss or the fear of not having enough, either way it is a very difficult emotional challenge to getting the trading results that you want.  Now, the question is what do you do about those bouts with fear/greed that takes your trading effectiveness south?  The important thing of course, is to manage your fear/greed one trade and one incident at a time.

Managing errant emotions is one of the most important trading skills that you can develop. Emotions are an inextricable part of being human and cannot be totally taken out of the trading equation.   However, you wouldn’t “want” to take emotions out of your trading even if you could. Yes, negative emotions throw a monkey wrench into your process; for instance, anxiety, fear, greed, guilt, self-doubt, impatience, apathy, to name a few are what mangle your thinking.  (more…)

Is Your Self-Esteem Tied To Your Account Equity?

  
  Education
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Does your self-esteem rise and fall with your account equity? If so, your probably in for some difficult times ahead with you’re trading. For some traders, a trade is more than a trade, it can represent how successful they are as a person, how much status they feel, etc.  When your self-concept is closely tied to your trading outcomes the result is a yo-yo effect in terms of your self-esteem and your internal state.  And our internal state has a lot to do with how well we trade.

Trading already involves a lot of uncertainty, and tying one’s sense of self-worth to the ups and downs of trading is unnecessarily adding emotional volatility to the picture and is usually not a good idea.

Most traders need to work on being more resilient in the face of disappointment. Trading will always involve disappointments, its part of the territory.  A delicate balance between being fully engaged in the trade with a ‘watchful curiosity’ and without being overly attached to the outcome, is how many successful traders describe their internal state.

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