So following up from the episodes from Monday and Tuesday of this week, you can look at, I think it was Tuesday. When you look at all the feelings that you have throughout the day, and then how those feelings repeat themselves, you can really learn a lot about your own behavior. Then when you could tie it to your productivity, you might be able to make some conclusions. And some of those conclusions might be that you’re spending a lot of time on things that feel good, but don’t necessarily make you money.
So this is where you might want to take a pause and kind of say, am I really cut out for this? Because a lot of the work is difficult. And a lot of the feelings that you want to feel are on the other side of feelings that you might not want to feel like taking risk home overnight, taking risk home over the weekend, or managing the risk and what we call “managing the trade.”
You might really enjoy the analysis and the charting and drawing the lines and all that kind of stuff. But you might be particularly weak on execution. Why is that? Why can’t you find, if you want to be a trader, why can’t you do the one thing that you need to do, which is know how to add and remove risk. So this way, look, being a trader isn’t a higher form of life. It’s just, it is what it is. I don’t personally think that it’s appropriate for most folks because they don’t have what it takes. And I don’t mean they don’t have the will, but it takes a certain and special type of emotional makeup to be able to do that. Especially since there’s so much failure. There’s the frequency of loss. Then there’s the drawdown and then the recovery and that takes a toll on people.
So it’s not to say that the people are losers. It just takes a very different mindset to be able to do that over and over and over again where other jobs can be much more rewarding and don’t have that much failure. So that’s kind of why I have you do those exercises because if it’s not a good fit for you, whether it’s trading at large or whether it’s trading a certain style, or whether it’s looking at certain timeframes or certain asset classes, then you keep time on your side because you’re able to fail fast.
People use that as a slogan, well, “fail and fail fast” and then get yourself back up and pivot. Well, you need to know the data. And so if you see like over the course of a month, that you’ve done a lot of things that have really felt good, because they’re on the periphery of trading, but you haven’t been able to pull the trigger. You haven’t been able to overcome feelings of fear or indecision. You need to investigate that and go to the root of it. Where does that come from? Because it doesn’t typically go away on its own and it absolutely does not go away by further intellectual study. You can’t read book after book after book and think that that’s going to cure your insecurities.
Doesn’t work that way. The best thing you could do if it’s appropriate and you think you’ve spoken to your financial advisors and the folks and your spouses or your partners. And you know, what you can afford to lose is to go buy one tiny micro contract or buy one share of something and see how it feels. Because the goal is to find out the feelings and then calibrate that with what you know how to do and then converge those two.
So knowing how you are built and taking inventory of all your activity, because behavior predicts where you end up. So this is actually a great exercise to do, because it has very, it has predictive value if you’re great at the study and you’re great at the knowledge part and you’re great at the mentoring, that’s awesome. You won’t make any money as a trader, but you could certainly help other people.
And that makes you feel good. There’s nothing wrong with that. And so I think that there’s a lot of that on the internet is try to make people feel good. They certainly market their solutions to you. But most of the solutions that you need have nothing to do with the “how to…” part that’s not going to cure your insecurities or whatever. Whatever’s holding you back from succeeding, it’s typically not an intellectual part of the business. So you can see, in conclusion, if you look at that over the course of a week or a month, it could be very fascinating because then you could kind of see, okay, what am I doing every day? That’s chronic. That feels good, but isn’t yielding any results. How can I pivot and change that? And then I get in, I can see for sure what my emotional model model is.
Maybe you shy away from the harder decisions again so that you could work with somebody on your insecurities. Maybe you don’t have clear goals. And so you don’t know what action steps to take. And that’s all a good thing because the sooner you come into that, that knowledge and that wisdom on yourself, the sooner you can work on it. So that’s a good thing. It’s not necessarily negative. You know, you read about all of mine. I wrote a book about it, so don’t tell me – I lived it out loud, so it’s all good. It’s not negative, but you can be your own best teacher by just doing a little bit of work on that.
This is a computer generated transcript.
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