[zdo]

“Know thyself”

For traders, what does that include?
What is the ‘state of the art’?

[JBWTrader]

A good question Zdo

State of Art is getting as many feedback loops as possible in your life. Outer objects acting as mirrors reflecting back at us who we really are is the only way to move forward....there are a few techniques to help with this

eg Analyse dreams, Analysis, Word association, honest friends, Performance appriasals at work , people who tell it like they see....eg spouse or girlfriend....conflict in our lives can also be a great vehicle to look within and question.....but the unconscious is really unconscious..it needs mirrors we can trust to reflect back our unconscious parts.

Trading is interesting in that one eventually finds a system with a true edge but can we trade it if it is a discretionary system ?...then good record keeping is neccessary to show the behaviours and skills we need to work on. Then if we still deny these aspects we start to have a real issue and thats when the self exploratory work can begin and is neccessary IMHO.

edge first
records/analysis second
Self third if neccessary

All the Best
John

[FXGirl]

"eg Analyse dreams, Analysis, Word association, honest friends, Performance appriasals at work , people who tell it like they see....eg spouse or girlfriend....conflict in our lives can also be a great vehicle to look within and question.....but the unconscious is really unconscious..it needs mirrors we can trust to reflect back our unconscious parts."

All good mirrors, JBW. Below (or beyond) Freud's scary concept of the unconscious is a place where the constraints, misunderstandings, and misconceptions of the personality cease to exist and the natural state of peace and joy emerges. Meditation is a wonderful gateway to this state, and this state is the ultimate "mirror".

As regards trading, the best advice is to speak your thoughts out loud when you are trading. What you hear is the raw data of your perspective and emotional state. An interesting experiment is to record a trading session when you do this (talk out loud) and listen to it later when you aren't looking at the charts. Now, that can be scary!

[BlowFish]

I was tempted to start a thread on Sekoytas quote "Every one gets what the want from the market". It is hard to know what you want from the market if you do not know yourself. The fact that many people do not make a profit would imply they are not really profit motivated? (if you buy into Ed's idea). I know with myself it was always a fight with the ego and every now and then still is. One of the good things that came from trading was a better awareness of myself, having said that too much navel gazing without specific purpose might well be counter productive. There is a great post by Anna-Maria in the long dormant "busy day tomorrow" thread that puts the counter point of view which is "just man up and do it". It's rather a long thread or I'd post the link.

[BlowFish]

Clearly going senile it was actually posted here http://www.traderslaboratory.com/for...html#post33723 in a thread that talks of similar things Actually the whole thread is good.

[JBWTrader]

Some very good points and tips FXGirl and as always Blowfish.


Just to add discussion also latest developments that are more tools of experts (like FXGirl) are

- imaginary fields seen/felt and described between patient and therapist
- fusional complex and the feeling state cycle of order to chaos and order again
- Paranoid Schizoid function in Child development

I do like the calling out technique FXGirl...very good I will try this out. Thanks for that.

Yeah Blowfish Ed's quote is a precursor to making one think more what does my conscious mind want versus the part that has really the most force/power ie the unconscious mind really want....going into that more ie the unconscious is often a lifetime journey and it is the hardest one of all...

Best
John

[FXGirl]

Dear BlowFish: Thanks for calling our attention to Anna-Maria's post - very interesting, and obviously it works well for her. We probably all have our own metaphor for trading the market. For me, it's surfing.

I spent hours in the waters off the southern California coast as teenager. When there is clear intent in the market (you see the wave coming), you time your entry, turn the board around and wait until you feel it (meets my trade criteria) - the water where you are sitting on your board begins to suck back into the the face of the oncoming wave (pullback). Then when you feel the power of the wave under you, you dig in and paddle (entry). The wave pulls you up into it and you take the ride. As the power of the wave ebbs, you kick out (take profit), and paddle back out for the next wave (next trade set up).

Yes, I know that there are guys out there trying to take my money, but I certainly am not in the market "... to bury the stiff who gets the wrong side of my next long-short pitch." No battle for me, just harmony with what is.

[james_gsx]

Originally Posted by BlowFish »

I was tempted to start a thread on Sekoytas quote "Every one gets what the want from the market". It is hard to know what you want from the market if you do not know yourself. The fact that many people do not make a profit would imply they are not really profit motivated? (if you buy into Ed's idea). I know with myself it was always a fight with the ego and every now and then still is. One of the good things that came from trading was a better awareness of myself, having said that too much navel gazing without specific purpose might well be counter productive. There is a great post by Anna-Maria in the long dormant "busy day tomorrow" thread that puts the counter point of view which is "just man up and do it". It's rather a long thread or I'd post the link.

Disclaimer: This is purely for sake of conversation, one can simply view my posts and see a decent amount of trading psychology posts.

But do you think this whole notion of understanding yourself, really applies to trading? Or is it simply coming to terms with why you gamble, taking risk, etc? More importantly, discretionary trading?

Let's say you have $10,000 that you worked hard to save up. It isn't natural to take the risk of gambling that away - so you need to come to terms with yourself, aka, get to know yourself. Specifically if you're using a discretionary strategy, you literally have to overcome the obstacle of, "Let me risk this perfectly good money in hopes that I make more."

But what if that's really just all in our head? What if we've heard so much of this "traders psychology" jargon and we force ourselves to pay attention to it - thus causing more problems. Could it really be as simple as walking up to it and saying, "I am here to make money, I will find my profitable niche and adapt when necessary." I understand some new research points to taking financial risk may be processed in the amygdala of the brain - in which case, those people simply shouldn't trade.

But also, if you really have an issue with psychology and trading, why do you even trade looking at charts? Something that can easily be interpreted in a thousand ways - obviously there's no correct way or we wouldn't be able to fill a library on all the techniques. Would it make more sense for the new trader to simply find an edge from data mining, and write a program to exploit it? Theres really no emotion there.

Those are just some brief thoughts, I haven't spent much time dwelling on any of them. Feel free to agree or disagree.