Fear is a misunderstood emotion, and one that gets a pretty bad rap these days. We owe our survival as a species to the hard-wired fear that kept us safe from physical threats for hundreds of thousands of years.
But what about the litanies of fears that plague traders every day? Fear of losing, of watching profits disappear, of making mistakes, of missing out?
Perhaps the larger question is this: If almost every trader feels fear, why do millions of people continue to trade? The answer lies in the way that fear is perceived.
For many, fear is a predator that’s constantly lurking, sneaking up on them, ready to attack at any moment. In this mindset, they’re always running away from fear, crouching in a corner, or looking for a safe place to hide. Fear blinds them to opportunity.
For others, fear is the prey. They move steadily and with discipline in the direction of the fear — always keeping it in front of them. As they approach the fear, they see it for what it really is.
F.E.A.R.: False Evidence Appearing Real. They see fear as something to go through in order to get what they desire — better trades and more profits. (more…)
Archives of “illusion” tag
rssDoes Failure Motivate you ?
I’ve been reading a wondeful book by Jerry Stocking titled Laighing with God.In that book the following dilemma is broght up ,and I’m going to rewrite the conversation a little to make it pertinent to trading/investing.
God :Do you want to win without losing ?
Trader :Of course.
God :If you win ,you must lose as well.But you weren’t honest with me.Your saud that you’d like to just win.If that were the case ,you’d win much more often.
The possibility of failure motivates you much more than the possibility of success.your whole society thrices on failure or at least the fear of lossing.If there were not the possibility of losing you could not take any credit for success.Making money in the markets would seen meaningless for you. (more…)
Illusion
Trading can be an expression of self esteem; it cannot substitute for a self. To change yourself is noble, but only shattered dreams come from efforts to change your self. You will succeed by becoming more of the person you are at your best, not by overreaching in vain hopes of transformation.
Irrational and Odd Behaviors of Traders
Anchoring: our habit of focusing on one salient point and ignoring all others, such as the price at which we buy a stock.
Bias Blind Spot: we agree that everyone else is biased, but not ourselves.
Confirmation Bias: we interpret evidence to support our prior beliefs and, if all else fails, we ignore evidence that contradicts it.
Disposition Effect: we prefer to sell shares whose value has increased and keep those whose value’s dropped.
Framing: the way a question or situation is framed can determine your response.
Fundamental Attribution Error: we attribute success to our own skill and failure to everyone else’s lack of it.
Herding: we tend to flock together, especially under conditions of uncertainty.
Illusion of Control: we do things that make us feel in control, even if we’re not.
Loss Aversion: we do stupid things to avoid realizing a loss.
Overconfidence: we’re way too confident in our abilities, which seems to be an in-built bias that we’re unable to overcome without excessive effort.
Trading Psychology Quotes
- Assumption 1: We have not learned everything there is to know.
- Assumption 2: What we have learned, unwittingly or by choice, may not be very useful with respect to fulfilling ourselves in some satisfying manner.
- Assumption 3: What we have learned that is useful and works to our satisfaction is still subject to change because of changing environmental conditions.
“If you operate out of the foregoing assumptions, you will begin to recognize how every moment becomes a perfect indication of your state of development and what you need to do to improve yourself.
“When we refuse to acknowledge or accept the perfection of each moment in our lives, we deny ourselves access to the infomation that we need to expand ourselves. Any skill that we need to learn to express ourselves more effectively has a true starting point. To find that true starting point requires our acceptance of each outcome as a reflection of the sum total of who we are so that we can first indentify what skill needs to be learned and how we might go about the task of learning it. Without this true starting point, we will operate from a base of illusion.
Revolutionary Trading Psychology
Everyone thinks the market is a game of numbers. We use complex models, umpteen oscillators or retracement calculations and even a fundamental analysis of supply and demand – all based in numbers and about numbers.
But in reality, the numbers of the market are but an illusion.
Markets are only the vacillating prices that other human beings, using the same mathematically based tools, are willing to pay. For example, what can be expensive one day can be very cheap the next if a trend has ensued.
It is only a matter of perspective. And perspective is a matter of the judgments you make.
Judgments on the other hand will be influenced by both impulsive feelings and by intuitive feelings – or pattern recognition. The trick is to have all the data on the table so you can tell the difference.
In order to do this, us market participants need to do a couple of things – give up the notion of a iron-clad trading plan based purely on historical probabilities and replace it with a trading plan based on historical probabilities (yes you read that right) AND a systematic way to leverage your judgment under uncertainty. This way you can make a decision about factors that may now be in play for the future probabilities. I mean who thought the VIX could stay over 30 for 6 months? … I am just askin.
Now in order to do this successfully, you have got to learn to optimize your judgments – which means spending more time focused on deciphering and understanding them than you spend on deciphering and understanding the charts.
This is revolutionary trading psychology – and it works.
What Predictions Say About Us
An excerpt:
…predictions are a way of demonstrating knowledge. Of course, in most things, a successful demonstration involves being right. In golf, a good argument will suffice. Most compellingly, human beings are wired to predict. In ancient times predictions served as psychological counterweight to the extreme uncertainty of life. As we’ve gained more control over daily existence, predictions help encourage the illusion that we are in charge of our own destiny. The more that is unknown, the greater the urge to predict. As the recently departed futurist author Ray Bradbury once said, “Mysteries abound where most we seek for answers.”
If you can find yourself comfortable not trying to predict daily life (and trading) there is a nice reward for you.
Madame Market
If you have the feeling that the market has a split personality, one day out to shower you with peace and blessings and the other to punish mercilessly, it can only mean that on some level you are still taking it personally.
Think of it this way – there are too many players with too many conflicting ideas about market direction for it to ever form one cohesive personality. The only exception I have witnessed to this rule is when fear clearly dominates the scene, and ironically these are times that are the easiest to trade.
The highest attainment for a traders developing psychology is to achieve what has been called “intellectual purity” – that is the state free from emotional reactiveness to market behavior; the ability to accept both reward and punishment with equanimity and understanding.
That said, we know that big players perform ‘market sweeps’ to take out stops at sitting duck levels, so we can at least attempt to protect against that. The main point though is to struggle against any dimly forming impression of the market being a single entity with a personality.
That is an illusion.
HOW TO LOSE MONEY IN THE STOCK MARKET
There are so many ways to lose money in the stock market but whether it is from blindly trusting what turns out to be a Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme to refusing to take a loss on a “sure thing”, the root cause of losses is our inability to objectively perceive market action without the many and varied biases associated with “money on the line”.
According to Mark Douglas…
In any particular trade you never really know how far prices will travel from any given point. If you never really know where the market may stop, it is very easy to believe there are no limits to how much you can make on any given trade. From a psychological perspective this characteristic will allow you to indulge yourself in the illusion that each trade has the potential of fulfilling your wildest dream of financial independence. Based on the consistency of market participants and their potential to act as a force great enough to move prices in your direction, the possibility of having your dreams fulfilled may not even remotely exist. However, if you believe it does, then you will have the tendency to gather only the kind of market information that will confirm and reinforce your belief, all the while denying vital information that may be telling you the best opportunity may be in the opposite direction. (more…)
AN 1873 LETTER ON LUCK VERSUS SKILL
We often confuse luck with skill, especially in the stock market. In fact, Michael J. Mauboussin has written a worthy read on separating the two in his newest book The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing. But long before the contemporary discussions of luck versus skill, ancient speculators were enthralled by luck’s deceptive ways of making mere mortals feel godlike. However, that sense of omniscience, just like a string of luck, is fleeting and continues to lure modern speculators into a trap today just like it did Saxon-les-Bains, a man of culture, almost 150 years ago. In a 1873 letter to The Spectator entitled “A Study in the Psychology of Gambling” Saxon-les-Bains describes his gambling experience in Monte Carlo.
And what was my experience? This chiefly, that I was distinctly conscious of partially attributing to some defect of stupidity in my own mind, every venture on an issue that proved a failure; that I groped about within me something in me like an anticipation or warning (which of course was not to be found) of what the next event was to be, and generally hit upon some vague impulse in my own mind which determined me: that when I succeeded I raked up my gains, with a half impression that I had been a clever fellow, and had made a judicious stake, just as if I had really moved skillfully as in chess; and that when I failed, I thought to myself, ‘Ah, I knew all the time I was going wrong in selecting that number, and yet I was fool enough to stick to it,’ which was, of course, a pure illusion, for all that I did know the chance was even, or much more than even, against me. But this illusion followed me throughout. I had a sense ofdeserving success when I succeeded, or of having failed through my own willfulness, or wrong-headed caprice, when I failed. When, as not infrequently happened, I put a coin on the corner between four numbers, receiving eight times my stake, if any of the four numbers turned up, I was conscious of an honest glow of self-applause… (more…)