A matter of balance

Fear – Courage

Ignorance – Enlightenment

Confusion – Clarity

Control- Acceptance

The future – The Now

On one side fear, greed, ignorance, confusion, the unknown. On the other side clarity, simplicity, probabilities, possibilities.

The first side won’t work for you if you desire to be a successful trader. The second side is only achieved by working hard on self mastery.

Discovering who are you, staying true to yourself and not trying to be something you’re not is one of the most important lessons in life and trading. We all have different strengths and weakness. How you maximize the former and minimize the latter can determine your success or failure. Any one person can change their lifes path IF they decide to and then actually follow through with action.

Trading is not about indicators, chat rooms, paid services or even charts. It’s about real human emotions as it relates to supply and demand, real or not. “Not about charts. Has FNG finally lost his mind”? No, charts are only an invention to plot historical prices of stocks. Sure, I use charts to define my edge and drive my trading plan but what everything actually stems from are the emotions of the masses behind them. I don’t proclaim to know what every individual trader is thinking but I do know from observing human behavior the likely outcome of various scenarios.

Now imagine the advantage traders would have when they could be the ones with laser like focus, an iron will and unshakable confidence in themselves when compared to traders who ride an emotional rollercoaster. Well I’ve just described a professional vs. an amateur. In this game of trading we get to play it 5 days a week for 6 or more hours. That’s more than almost any sporting event I can think of. That’s a lot of time to spend on learning what you need to know even if you don’t know what you need to know yet.

If you spend any amount of time doing this, I’m sure the smart people will begin to realize that success must come from within you as a function of self-mastery. All decisions flow from you and so to have those determined by random emotional outbursts is counter productive to your financial well being and if allowed to continue later your emotional well being. All responsibility is yours on every decision. Non-decisions are decisions as well.

Self-mastery incorporates your fine tuned abilities and utilizes them to achieve your desired outcome as best as you are able to do. Whether your best is good enough will be determined by how well you can exploit the market opportunities as defined by you.

This sounds pretty deep and so if you came here looking for hot stocks that will move tomorrow you’re out of luck.

You’re going to have to look inwards to yourself and develop your senses. Study human behaviour starting with yourself. Observe young kids as they let it all out and have not yet learned to hide emotions as society later teaches. This is raw and real.

Put yourself in uncomfortable situations and see how you react. Learn from it.

Stop procrastinating. If you have to do something, do it now, not tomorrow or next week. If you are a lazy ass, out of shape and unhealthy, put down the Big Mac, get off the sofa and stick with an exercise and healthy food program. Mind and body are not separate. Balance

Many more examples on a deeper level could be discussed but what I’m trying to convey is that life is all about a matter of balance. Your trading and life will be more complete when you start to achieve it.