Tag: psychology 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 🙂

To again, continue my series on how I use integral theory to trade the stock market we now move onto levels of development on each of the lines I discussed.

This is the piece of Ken Wilber’s theory that he “borrowed” a lot from other traditions.  Personally, I think this is one of the coolest aspects of his theories.  The book Integral Psychology does a great job mapping out how all these different theories of development are talking about the same thing just at difference stages in life.  I highly recommend the book.

How do development lines work?  If you ever heard of Freud’s psychosexual stages of development that is a developmental line.  Another example is Piaget’s stages of cognitive development.  The most popular set of development stages within the integral framework tends to be spiral dynamics.  This is metaset, in my opinion, of development that can be applied to any line.  I’ll illustrate an example below.

The Line of development will be pattern recognition.  The development stages of pattern recognition could be interpreted as follows.

Beige – Instinctive / survivalist: Reading books on technical analyse & finding patterns that match exactly what you have read.

Purple – Magical / Animistic: Believing you see the patterns in everything.  The street lights form a double top and every time frame you look at hold exceptionally strong cup & handles, for example.  You find a “holy grail” of patterns

Red – Impulsive / Egocentric:   The patterns no longer work and you are angry. You find failing example after failing example.  The belief in the “holy grail” has died.

Blue – Purposeful / Authoritarian: You seek more education believing someone must have the “holy grail.”  You take this person or educational doctrine word for word.  You start to relive the “holy grail” experience that you originally had but it is now done with a stronger authority figure.

Orange – Achievist / strategic : Acting in your own self-interest.  “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about but I do.”  This is where you may begin to turn heavily towards statistics to validate your patterns and see how often they do work.  You will turn to more scientific methods.  [Side note: this orange phased is theorized to have only begun 300 years ago]

Green – Communitarian / Egalitarian:  Seek peace with self & others.  You now realize you know what you don’t know and don’t know that which you don’t know.  You have accepted the idea patterns work and patterns fail. That there is no holy grail.  You may even begin to share your knowledge with others.

A picture below should help bring these ideas together.  Remember moving on to the next level does NOT mean you are no longer part of the lower levels.  As you transcend the previous level you include you! You never disregard the previous levels.  Even though you may recognize patterns at a “Green” level of development, it doesn’t mean that “beige” is no longer a part of you.

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.

Nothing says failure like giving up.  This week, while optimizing and running walk-forward tests on upwards of 12 stocks with 5 tests each, I was confronted with this FAILED almost every morning I woke up.

To wake up every morning seeing the word FAILED in bold capital letters plastered across the screen can weaken your resolve that it’s even possible to make money in the market using automated strategies.  After a few days, I saw PASSED! I was ecstatic! 

I could feel the rush of dopamine flood my brain like a well trained rat pushing that level for a fix.  Of course, the moment was fleeting and further degraded as the next FAILED came up again and again.

I was soon reminded of Carel Dweck’s groundbreaking research in Mind Set.  Focus on the process, the growth, what you learned NOT the outcome.  I supposed that’s a beautiful element of being human: how quickly we can be overtaken by our ancestral brains.  I’m not a zen monk and I won’t pretend that seeing FAILED doesn’t bother me but refocusing on the process made the work less emotionally draining.

Focus on the process, not the outcome.

What was my process?  :

1. Find stocks that “look” like they trend
2. Run optimizations with at least 10k bars in each & 1 year worth of data
3. Run walk forward analysis
4. Log it
5. Live paper money test for PASSED

The process is productive, thinking about FAILED is not.  Keep persevering, focus on the process.