Zen & The Art of Trading

I’ve been listening to a lot of Allan Watts lately.   He is largely accredited for bringing eastern philosophy into to western society in a highly digestible way.  What I want to focus on is knowing without knowing.

As a trader we spend hours scanning charts, searching for the setups we know best, that we know have a high probability of reward.  Though if it was that simple we would just automate what we do and sit at the beach all day.  There is something more I believe.

There is a feeling that occurs, a knowing.  You look at the chart and you know what it will do.  As if you have some sort of pre-cognition.  What is this? As if the stars have aligned and you somehow intuitively know.  When your brain kicks in you may second guess yourself, change your mind, look for evidence to verify this feeling but you know what you know.

The mind, however wants to make up a story about why you feel this way.  It is pointless.  Just as fire does not burn itself, nor does a knife cut itself.  You will not know what you know by logic, thought, or evidence.  You just know…

How often do you feel this as a trader?  What do you do when you have this feeling?  Do you journal it? Do you always take the trade?  Keeping track of these moments is critical in my success because there is a high order knowing I believe that I do not have access too directly.  Perhaps over time with enough sample, I can begin to understand what I do know or at least plug it into a deep learning model 🙂

Daily Trading Goal: Choose Your Thoughts

Today’s Daily Trading Goal focuses on how to choose your thoughts.  Thoughts effect your biology and your biology greatly effects your ability to trade through hormones.   Which thoughts you choose to pay attention to is critical.  Listen & choose to think good thoughts.

Daily Trading Goal – Caught in Your Own Thinking

Today’s daily trading goal is to stop getting caught up in your thinking.  In psychology,  one aspect of this is the confirmation bias.  Where view almost all information as confirming our original thoughts.  Stop this by wearing aware it exists.  Be mindful of your thoughts.

Daily Trading Goal – Control Negative Thinking

Today’s trading goal is to Control Negative thinking.  It can be very easy for the snowball effect to take hold after 1 bad trade.  Monitor your thoughts & feelings, being aware of them is more than half the battle.

Daily Trading Goal – Focus on the Challenging Tasks

Focus on the challenging tasks.  There is only so much time in a day and while completing small easy tasks is great short term reward focusing on the more difficult tasks while you have the most energy will yield an even better reward.

Daily Trading Goal – Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

Today’s trading goal is: Don’t Sweat The Small stuff.  If you let the small stuff go (getting filled a few cents below or above your limit. Let it go.  The energy spent on being frustrated can be focused on creativity and development as a trader.