Several times in my writing and perhaps on this board, I have referred to the market as a demanding mistress. There are correlates between trading and falling in love.
According to the following recent report from the L.A. Times, falling in intense love is often based on potent threat, fear, worry or shared anxiety.
While people can and do fall in love for a variety of reasons, the spark that ignites powerful, tempestuous love can often occur as a direct result of shared danger, threat or perceived fear. The body ‘translates’ the anxiety felt in the perilous place and “gloms†onto the nearest love object in the vicinity at the time of the anxiety.
http://www.latimes.com/features/heal...adlines-health
Examples are obvious. People who experienced the anguish of searching for relatives following 9/11 sometimes connected passionately when they would never have looked at the other in balmier circumstances. Ex-pats often hook up when they are living in strenuously difficult new surroundings. Victims of disasters often bond. Holocaust survivors met and married in record time, brought together by inconceivable sorrow and grief, and bound by the urgency of living into tomorrow.
In my personal life, I experienced something similar in the mid-70’s. At that time I was traveling the world for a multinational pharmaceutical company ( ARRGH!! – nonetheless, it was a nine year gig that took me around the world way too many times for a total of some 1.5 million miles). On an approach to the Rome airport, something happened to the plane. I am not sure exactly what it was, but we thought that perhaps the tail of the plane had been damaged. There were people praying and chanting as we thought it was a crash and everyone was going to die. I looked at the man next to me who was a Finnish scientist of some kind. I had never seen him before we boarded that plane. We put our arms around each other and professed our love for each other. We held each other very tightly and I was in love with this man at the time I knew I was crashing to my death. How silly I felt afterward( as did he), but I will never forget his face, the way he held me and how much I loved him during those frightening moments, which seemed an eternity.
In these situations, the body pours out a variety neurochemicals and neurohormones ( dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, phenylethylamine and others) that bond people to each other in certain ways.
If what the researchers have found to be true, men faced with attractive women in the middle of a rickety bridge will much more likely fall in love than those who meet those same attractive females on a ‘safe’ bridge without the ostensible threat of falling to their deaths.
The Market Mistress has the nasty habit of putting traders and investors into states of mini-panic---the threat of considerable loss, the anxiety of seeing the a position go against them, and the rush of seeing profits from buying or selling at the time when others are losing.
There is an ever-increasing body of evidence that the same biological substrates for falling in love ( or at the extreme, addictive love) are in play for those dancing on the bridge with stocks, options, futures, currencies, bonds, etc. The primitive brain areas ( rat brain, limbic brain) take over completely, leaving the newer cortical areas shaking their heads and powerless to do anything. The electrical and chemical impulses from the limbic rat brain overpower the new brain completely. Please re-read my article : This Is Your Brain On Trading to get a basic overview of how the brain responds to visual stimuli.
That inability to eat or sleep, the obsession with the beloved trades( especially those with high beta), the strange feeling of ennui which creeps in when the markets are not open, the search for excitement and something to do, going a little bit nutso or doing something wild and crazy just for “kicks†second, sneaking a peak at the markets while working at another job, trading in the car at lunch hour, constant preoccupation with the markets and trading to the exclusion of family and friends, etc. might be more than just normal curiosity about the beloved.
Are we having an affair with the market mistress? Is this true love? Is it addiction? Are we being seduced, teased, abandoned embraced? Are we in a large neurohormonal sink where dopamine begets more dopamine and the chemistry of love turns to the chemistry of addiction?
What do you think? How do you relate to this from your personal experiences? What effects has this had on your mind, body, family, friends, money and spirit?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0U5J...elated&search=
Thanks!
Doctor Janice
Linear Mode
