Sorry to check facts : dbphoenix, have you by chance recently completed a 10 days www.dhamma.org or similar?
it's always the same, keep your losses short and let your profits run. Sometimes it's as easy as just using tight stops. Other times in violent choppy markets you just need to figure out a way to stay alive without getting stopped out. It can get really shitty and make you fearful you are just gambling your life savings away. If you have given up math and start reading books about "mindfulness" you should probably just get flat and experiment in your paper account. I get flat and experiment all the time in paper when I realize what I was doing was just a lucky close call. But it's always the same, control your losses and let your profits do their thing, and you won't need to be very "Mindful" or superstitious.
Repetition did the job for me. I set up a timer for each hour, then each half hour but even that was too far apart. Eventually I moved the timer on my phone to 5 min. Every 5 mins there would be a beep or a vibration. Every time phone beeped I would scan my Emotions and if there was anything there I would think about the Event that caused it and separate Meaning from Reality. A lot of time there wasn't much going on but I used things from past that had upset me and kept doing for weeks from morning till night. I may have short circuited the 'snap first' habit by scanning the mind and emotion often enough to put a routine in place (The Power of Habit). I saw the difference after about 300-400 scans of emotions and the process. That in reality with 5 min intervals was within a few days. I would say close to about 1000 scans it started becoming automatic and normal events wouldn't cause a reaction even without mechanically following the process. Basically the emotions started to not be there during conversations. I started going out of my way to look for adversity to test and train. As habit took hold the events causing the 'stir' kept getting reduced. There were and still are episodes of less than perfect emotional reaction but on the whole nothing too prolonged or extreme. My recovery is faster and at times it's as if I am looking at myself from a third person perspective. Thinking back maybe the timer was leading me to be MINDFUL every few minutes and this habit of paying attention to what the other is saying instead of interpreting it through my belief lense got ingrained. The timer was probably a bit extreme and as I got better the timer become more intrusive as it would jar me from my thoughts. Eventually I got rid of it, but do occasionally put it back on if I see the need. My emotional response to trading improved but didn't get eliminated. I literally tried to not exit a bad position to test if I won't have an emotional reaction but the stress did return albeit at a reduced level. Over time it's reduced significantly but 'going out of the plan' and doing something not 'cosher' with trading was evoking a response. Normal behavior within the confines of the plan wasn't. I haven't had enough time to think through the potential reasons for this discrepancy. One thing I noticed was that even happiness is not reality and did feel a reduction in the heights of happiness I would get. Because the negative emotions were the only one I primarily dissolved the positive were left as a result. Though I started to find positive emotions to be a bit overboard. Thinking and making decisions when one's happy isn't also very ideal. I have avoided eliminating meanings that give positive spin to events generally speaking. It's all a bit too early but both positive and negative thoughts seem to use the same mechanism. With very few negatives and more positives generally I am jollier but the jolliness isn't extreme. If I would think of negative and positive emotions as a sine wave, the lower (negative) part is minimized but the upper (positive) part is also reduced but not significantly. There are many things I am not sure about and haven't bothered to explore, but in time maybe I'll come around to it. It is a journey and at least I can breathe the fresh air for a change. Gringo
Never heard of it. Sorry. But I did read something long ago about developing a reliable bullshit detector which, as it turned out, I pretty much had anyway. Bullshit and the Art of Crap Detection
I was just asking to check facts. Regarding BS : google ( the company) executives are encouraged to do it. Interesting: http://www.wired.com/2013/06/meditation-mindfulness-silicon-valley/ Particularly: "Meditation here isn’t an opportunity to reflect upon the impermanence of existence but a tool to better oneself and improve productivity. "
Most of these psychological problems are always associated with those inferior and mediocre systems they are trading with. So they spend most of their energy and effort to fine tune/improve/discipline their psycho status, and after another 20-30 years of trading, they are still struggling with these psychological burdens, and they blame their loss/missing of profits on too greed, too fear, mis-management of their risks and so on and so forth, because these are the easier topics/tasks to deal with and they thought they can get quick and obvious answers.
And most of all, they refuse, shy away from anything that would sort these type of issues. The reason: because deep down they want to continue with the same issues.
Absolutely. And its funny the parrotbot likes this post when parrotbot is the prime example. Just read the posts When i traded options. We had a real edge, no one worried about psych issues and our best traders came from non trading iccupations or school hence no baggage from reading nonsense psych trading books.
Ray Dalio credits much of his success to daily meditation, which he has done for over 40 years. He practices about 40 minutes a day. His take in a 2-minute video: A slightly longer, ~12-minute version:
Waking up early has been the one activity that has allowed me to do the things early in the day that have made the most positive change in my life. I moved away from this practice but Robin Sharma, Hal Elrod who wrote "The Miracle Morning", and countless others have spoken about the power of waking up early. I have re-started this practice and follow this prescribed routine: SAVERS Silence - Meditation Affirmations Visualisation Exercise Reading Scribing (Writing a journal or thoughts) I wake up between 4:30 and 5:00 in the morning but will know by the end of the year whether the changes were substantial and worthwhile. The feeling though is positive and mind focused. Mindfulness in my opinion depends on one's ability to have focus. I have started to practice with memory and focus training to enhance this ability. My objective is to give myself 100 random 2 digit numbers (00 to 99) and remember them in order in one go. I'll be giving myself initially 5-6 seconds per number. So in 600 seconds I want to be able to remember and recall at least 50% accurately by the middle of June. Afterwards I'll keep increasing the speed and the amount. I want to see how focus helps with the mind and it with trading. Considering my negative emotions are already reducing fast I am hopeful the new routine will help me rise to another level as a human being. This is also a more practical and quantifiable way to see whether there is improvement. Gringo