A10, Stock Trader Dude

The stock market is not a business; it’s a marketing tool to shift capital from one set of pockets to another. It provides liquidity to business owners so they can get cash for their ownership stake. The stock market is not a business to investors, or rather, to the average investor. But then again, are you average? Time and ideas may be valuable currency, but something else needs to be mixed in order to provide an income. So, while investing in the stock market probably won’t make you rich, the point is that investing in ourselves is the better choice. If all the stock market represents to an investor is an average of 10% per year, aren’t there better ways, perhaps with less risk to achieve that? I guess that’s why business operators create wealth and investors invest; it represents different lines of thinking.

Avoid placing yourself on hold. Don’t wait to live a passionate life. The timing is never perfect and if you wait to have everything lined up neatly, you just won’t get started. If you are trading, that constant hesitation, born out of fear, will mean you won’t place the trade. Fear is wrong, conduct your trading in a manner that won’t cause you to be afraid all the time; it’s a signal that you haven’t effectively limited your risk. Life is composed of sleeping, working, avoiding work, eating, intercourse, and waiting on lines/searching for a parking spot. That’s about it for most of us. The best days give us that feeling that we can do anything. And we live for that in the trading marketplace. Most people are not working on something they are committed to because they don’t have work to do that they believe in and love. Well then, are you working on something that will lead toward or prepare you for the work you were meant to be doing?

Here’s the part about keeping score, all these authors/speakers bring up having a budget. Some people are accustomed to spending their money, not counting it. So, I won’t disagree when the gurus preach that spending money is a habit and that your debt is only a reflection of your habit and misguided thinking. Almost everything is a habit. Thought habits are everywhere. We do a lot of things simply because we are used to doing them. Often there is no analysis. There are excuses and rationalizations, but generally nothing relying on logical choices. But at the same time, we don’t want to think about every little thing, that’s why we have habits, and if habits can harm you, habits can serve you.

Be among people with a lot more money than you have. And if you are in business for yourself, work with people that have no difficulty paying in full, rather than dealing with people that say your fees are too high and that they’ll make a deal with you and give you more business later on. So the great upcoming financial rewards are never clear…except that they will be later, if at all. It’s certainly not favorable financially and if it doesn’t contribute to happiness, why should I negotiate fees downward on myself? If you are conducting official charity work, you work to serve the people, if you are claiming you are in business, and prefer it to stay that way, simply go where the money is.

Next in the guru handbook is to say we must put forth the output on our goals to bring home the zillions. I think it is better to emphasize sending out our ideas into the marketplace. Again, I don’t think it’s worth overly being tied to goals, sometimes you throw your line out expecting one kind of fish and you hook something more appealing. And if you are stuck on your goals, maybe you’ll throw it back instead of realizing there’s more value in what you unexpectedly caught. There are a lot of people that talk about going into business for themselves but they forget one key element, if you are in business for yourself, you have a sales job.

Choose the goals that make you… sick… rich? So-called success experts love to talk about goals… goals don’t motivate unless they are somehow anchored to your core, that place where you emotionally live. It doesn’t matter what you’re aiming at, if mother nature has the wind against you, your arrow is going to have a tough time making the target. You are the star of your own movie, and characters in movies have jobs so if there’s anything to focus on, it’s creating an enjoyable life while creating a living. Life is unscripted, so all kinds of good and not so good situations can arise at any particular time. If your whole life was scripted and you knew in advance what would occur, it would probably be even more boring. So when you tell the story of your life, it will only be as interesting as how you go about it.

The first step, and this is a biggie, is to stop doing all the things that contribute to that false sense of self because if you change your thoughts you change your future. The way we live tends to be more like some low-budget horror film rather than us scripting a blockbuster life. We are immersed in our habits of thought and habits of behavior that result in… the same old results. We’re transmitting our thought patterns by wearing our thinking the way we wear our clothes. Gurus will tell you to act joyful and successful and that affirmations lead to success… well, maybe for some people it kind of works because it interrupts the negative thought process but it isn’t a formula to an extended state of awareness. Awareness will cut through a lot of false starts and misguided thinking. If we can remain aware in the moment we can get a sense of liberation because our thoughts almost always seem to hold us back.

At first, greed, a love of the game of action but after over ten years in the game it became a test of providing for myself and more importantly, to overcome myself, all those accumulated shortcomings in the form of excuses, faulty thinking, greed, fear, hope, despair and attitude. Nothing hits you harder than a financial punch… from yourself.

If we search for anything outside ourselves to provide the answer we diminish ourselves in some way. The market is a collective of flowing consciousness, not something to battle with, our greatest opponent has been ourselves, and so, we all have experienced attempting to outwit ourselves. The market cannot see us… so let us restore ourselves to unimportance so we can focus on riding these commercial waves.

The thing is… you can’t learn trading from reading about it. It requires active involvement. Generally, the only kinds of books that interest me with regard to trading are books that discuss the trader’s decision-making process, the short-term results, the long-term effects of the decision and what the person learned. Techniques change, they don’t matter that much, the important thing is how a person goes about doing whatever they are doing in spite of all the information and market noise surrounding them. Good decision-making is more valuable than good information.