Con-tango

Imagine… yourself

I learned about positive thinking years back… But I found Joe Vitale’s argument quite illuminating: you also have to feel it; not only visualize it. If you’d like to have a house on the beach, go shop for them, walk them through, feel the softness of the carpet under your feet, the subdued colors, the warm temperature, the freedom of larger spaces, the tranquility of success, and the coolness of zipping a glass of white wine by the deck, in a bright and breezy afternoon, with the family surrounding you and the sea in the horizon… And, by the way, take that Porsche Carrera with the smelling like new leather seats, smooth small wooden steering wheel, and let it nail your back to the seat as it accelerates… on a test drive to get you there.

Listen to the importance of persistence… If you give up on your dreams too soon, how are you going to ever know that achieving them was just around the corner..?

Curl your toes… to relax while trading

Happy feet

…yes, you’ve got to curl back your toes to relax.

Stress is inextricably intertwined with trading.

Worth a pretty coin: assess your emotions while trading; then, jot down what would happen to your account if you trade a fade of your emotions…
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Implicit learning

I wanted to share with you guys Brett N. Steenbarger’s article Learning to Trade: The Psychology of Expertise, —it’s definitely a must read.

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40 second Boyd

Colonel Boyd of the Air Force was a fighter pilot known for his challenge to fellow airmen. He allowed himself to be placed in a position of tactical disadvantage in an air fight and promised that, within 40 seconds, he would be on his adversary’s tail, ready for the kill. Col. Boyd was never known to have lost this bet, earning him the nickname “Forty Second” Boyd.

During his career, Col. Boyd developed his approach to airborne combat into a comprehensive philosophy of military strategy.  He described combat decision-making as a function of Observing, Orienting , Deciding, and Acting (OODA). 

These processes form loops, with new actions providing fresh observations and requiring renewed efforts at orienting and responding.  The goal of military training, Boyd stressed, is to accelerate OODA loops, becoming more efficient than the enemy.

Its been a while that I’ve come to regard trading as a sports activity. It’s not enough to know what to do, which is hard enough in itself; but, one has to perform impeccably in a very competitive and stressful environment.

And, how can we achieve that?

In a nutshell, submitting ourselves to a harsher and more rigorous drilling of our own trading setups than we would encounter in everyday market situations to build our speed in the OODA process, and to build our confidence too.

A while back, Linda Raschke, Brett Steenbarger and Brace Barber combined their trading, psychology and military training backgrounds to setup a trading workshop based on the grueling military Ranger School.

An interesting article on this subject is found in this article from Brett.

I lost $10,000 today!

My God, I can’t believe it;

I’ve lost 10 gees today!

What happened? I just couldn’t believe it. I’d been frozen, I literally
couldn’t move, less pickup the phone and call my broker… Impossible to
recognize the loss myself – less to another person the hole I’d dug myself
into; admit the loss, never…

Tomorrow will be a better day, it’ll come back…

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