It takes no special energy and no strength to get through my day. I exert nothing. I merely observe and react. I spend the day choosing to be content and choosing to be satisfied. This is not difficult; I've mastered this.
I am not proud; I am not ashamed. I give credit to spontaneity, because it is the result of prior training, luck, and strength and courage; without those things it would not be this way.
The day, however, as I know it, is not without its quality. The day I enjoy today is the product of decisions made, efforts exerted, opportunity found. The day allows me to search. The things happening around me can happen without my input. The outputs, though, include more than I need. The outputs exceed what I want. Is this good/bad?
I use drugs for clarity; I withhold judgment for honor. I demonstrate strength through restraint, and my will is to have less. I sit here now, NOW, and I explore my desires. Nothing, nothing. A great unknown, uncharted, deep blue, vast emptiness. This, too, is an exploration.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
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You are getting exactly what you want.
ReplyDeleteA famous futures trader said that.
The market is a great place for discovery and learning. Here are some things Ed Seykota said:
Win or lose, everybody gets what they want out of the market. Some people seem to like to lose, so they win by losing money.
I think that if people look deeply enough into their trading patterns, they find that, on balance, including all their goals, they are really getting what they want, even though they may not understand it or want to admit it.
Our work is not so much to treat or to cure feelings, as to accept and celebrate them. This is a critical difference.
When a feeling dissolves, it ceases to be your enemy and begins to be one of your allies.
Feelings naturally appear during trading. The feelings we don’t like seem to have roots deep in our unresolved issues. Somehow they get stuck and do not finish passing through, and can cloud the judgment and interfere with trading. The feelings we do like seem to pass through quickly without much trace.
I suggest getting to know your feelings, by experiencing them, expressing them, letting them pass through and finding out they are pretty much all good ones.
Jet engines work best when they are open at both ends.
If running out of gas is a bad feeling, you might be tempted to put masking tape over your fuel gauge … and miss out on the positive intention of that information.
The turning point in the Process occurs when you become willing to feel a historically unpleasant feeling.
You might consider the positive intention of anger – hint: the positive intention of thirst is to make sure you have enough water in your body.
Thinking about emotions, trying to control emotions, talking about emotions … are all different from experiencing emotions.
I remember once watching this Swiss jew kid named Maxime trade. I stood over his shoulder looking at him work into a position. He got in alright, though I wasn't sure about the price or why he put it on there, but when he went to get it out of the position he made mistake after mistake.
ReplyDeleteI tried to stop him from working a leg of the spread at a certain price: "Max, you cant possibly get that price and get the other leg off for a profit. Max. Just stop that." It was nuts what he was trying to do. Even on my first day of live trading I wouldnt have tried that shit and he had been sitting in front of the screen for half a year.
But Max was convinced he could do it. I watched him turn a winner into a loser. Then I watched him do it all over again. After he puked out of the second position for a loss, chasing the bad leg of the spread as the market ran away from him, he stood up and began cursing, kicked his chair over, and stormed off the trading floor.
Some months later, just before they fired him, Max told me over a beer that trading was an impossible occupation. I was merely lucky. Nobody really succeeded at it. We were an office full of jokers who needed to get real jobs. He was going to pass the CFA he said.
People get exactly what they want.
The market is no different than your life.