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Probabilities vs. expectations

  
  Education
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I expect to wake up tomorrow morning and not die during the night.

I expect that I will be able to get out of bed and know how to walk to the kitchen.
I expect my car will start.
I expect the other person will stop at the red light.
I expect that I won’t get hit by lightning.
 
Seeing that expectations are what normal everyday life is founded on, is it natural to think that you can expect a stock to trade in a particular direction? Only if you want to become a loser.
The markets and stocks are not everyday life. They have the ability to do anything at any time. The only thing 100% certain is that they are 100% unpredictable.
If you have expectations, it means you have an emotional attachment or interest in an event outcome. Do you expect to make money, have a winning trade, make a right decision? When they happen are you giddy with excitement, gushing to all who will listen that you are so smart. What happens when you are wrong? How about wrong ten times in a row? If you live the highs you will be living the lows. Your expectations will destroy your confidence and thus your account. Your ego will take you back to childhood where you will throw tantrums and stomp your feet looking for a sympathetic ear. “The markets aren’t fair” you say. Well the markets don’t give a shit what your want or when you want it.
Now if instead you trade the probability of a outcome to an event, you can put a wall up between yourself as a person who is on autopilot accepting everyday expectations and you as a successful trader who is ruthless in the execution of your plan. Thinking, trusting and truly believing in probabilities will save the day for you. When you think that “based on my experience, seeing a very similiar situation before, odds are that the near future direction of this stock is this way. However since this event is unrelated in every way to my past memories, I must choose the point at which my decision will be proven wrong and set a protective stop here.”
When you think this way, it doesn’t matter whether you are right or wrong. You are simply carrying out your trading plan based on your experience/edge. Playing the averages. You don’t get hurt by losing trades. You don’t get happy over winning trades. Whatever happens, happens. Being cold and calculating brings you as a trader closer to the machines that are running the show these days. (more…)

26 Quotes for Trading & Life

  
  Education
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1. Don’t try making sense out of it. You’re in an insane asylum – things are not going to make sense, people will do things that don’t make sense, that they cannot adequately explain. People don’t know what makes them tick, only that they tick.

2. Happiness, of course…is all in your head. If you don’t know that, if you haven’t come to that realization, you will never be happy.

3. The Bull Market Syndrome. People, when they are met with success, take personal credit for it (bull markets breed geniuses), and when they are met with failure, blame luck.

4. Actually, luck is responsible for both! If you can only die by being struck by lightning, eventually, you will die by being struck by lightning! Conversely, if a man were to live forever, and bought a lottery ticket every week, eventually, he will win the lottery, with a probability that approaches certainty. Just stay the course, keep doing today what you must do today. As Woody Allen says, “Fifty percent of success is just showing up.”

Luck Trumps Brains. To get luck, keep showing up each day with your shoes on.

5. Creativity trumps money every time.

6. Fortunately in life, you don’t have to succeed at everything you do, only a few things. One success often justifies all prior attempts.

7. You can buy great a education – you can not buy brains.

8. The Oswald Principle: Usually, the best course of action in life, is to take no action (and usually, the best thing to say is nothing!). The guys in jail or there not because they didn’t do anything. Usually, you should just sleep in! If nothing really bad happens today, as my friend Oswald said to me in eighth grade, it’s been a good day!

9. You don’t have the problems you think you do. Actually, the only real problems are health and criminal problems. Everything else is just a frivolous, meaningless nuisance.

10. Never say never. Everyone, however righteous they may claim to be, however upstanding they say they are, will, under the right circumstances commit the crime. A cold morning, wet, hungry, tired, angry….they’ll do things they never dreamed they would! (more…)

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