Worse than keeping stuff in your house/car/office/etc; you tend to keep old thinkings in your head, thus being difficult for pack rats to concentrate, or even accept change. Specially true for the stock market, which is constantly changing. Thus pack rats tend to be permabulls or permabears and react late. They tend to hold trades too long, profitable trades may turn into losses, and small losses may turn into cathastrophic losses.
I throw everything away. When I said everything I mean everything: If you come to a party in my house and drunk you fall asleep in the floor, you may awake in the garbage truck.
Good point. I really try to limit what I read which mirrors my view point. It's old news, I've already establihed my opinion. The challenges to thought come from dissecting the counter point, sometimes this becomes futile also, so the next step is to add a layer of new information and build a larger base of knowledge to apply. As far as the material things we buy, I'm working on the approach "What will it take for me to throw this away" before I buy -because we will grow tired of it.
I pretty much just religiously follow stock_trad3r's advice... when he says the bullishness is done, Ill consider liquiditating my longs, otherwise I'll keep holding and dip buying.
Throwing everything away is a zen-like way to free your mind. I recall Robert De Niro saying in Heat, "A man told me once: you want to make moves? Don't keep anything in your life you're not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner."
The score is even vs pack rats and those who throw things away. I have been in literally thousands of peoples houses, all ages, races and incomes, city, rural and everything in between. People do not throw stuff away. Some here aren't being honest with themselves.
We just had a relative die but fefore that we tried to help him make his house livable enough so a nurse could come in there... He was a pack rat, there were few places to sit and the living room had no entry way at all... the guy could not change his thinking, that seems true. We spent time trying to clean the place up for him when he was alive and the idiot would go shopping and bring back all sorts of stuff, he had a pickup truck... he had a house full of plastic shit from Kmart and had some real antiques stored outdoors!! I had a hobby workshop that was a mess, after seeing his house for the zillionth time I went home one day and just started cleaning that thing up, no more pack ratting for me, I've seen people deteriorate and die somewhat because of the stuff, one old lady could never decide what to do with all the junk, and that affected her decision where to live and that caused her to wind up with noboby to talk to for months on end and then she got so senile she couldn't function. Read up on Feng Shui, clutter is horrifically bad for energy... My wife uses clutter to take over the house though... I had to stop and figure out what the hell was going on, I was squeezed out of everywhere, then I just started piling up stuff in one room I wanted to use for trading, it has furniture on top of furniture, papers in piles, books, boxes, electronic junk, just enough mess and mostly stuff she can't place a value on so she is afraid to come in and afraid to toss anything, and not so much I can't function....
i am shredding 10 minutes a day...while my wife has records from before we were married and she wont let me shred them...she keeps everything while i really have nothing to throw away...