previously in life i had an experience such as this and now i am touching on it again in the understanding of fear and the direct affect it has on ones trading about 5 years ago i lost everything that i had built myself up on... everything that validated my existence, car, place to live, friends, g/f... everything and actually spent some time in jail. this was in incredible experience for me as i realized after being stripped of all my possessions i was able to actually focus on myself and what was really important. there isn't much left to fear when you're worse fears become your reality. have any of you 'lost it all' and totally broke down to realize that all you had built your life on was meaningless? and if so how did it affect your perception of loss and your performance as a trader?
If you haven't plagiarized "The Disciplined Trader" by Mark Douglas then it is the book you need to read.
funny, because i am reading it and that is actually what inspired me to write this thread. i am not plagiarizing the book. i am talking about a real life incident that i went through and how it affected me and am curious to hear the stories of others who have gone through similar and how it's affected them and their trading.
There is a thing called 'family'. If this was meaningless before you went to jail then may be it was meaningless when you were in jail and afterwards. I have taken the trouble to build bonds with my children. You have to give the attention and time and make repeated efforts. You get a close family as a result. But the fact is every person only has himself or herself, alone, in the first place. People often may just not know that. The only meaningfulness in an earthly existence is 'to do' or 'to give'. This gives you sufficient meaning. All the other stuff is fun - status, power, pile of money, houses, cars, high social fraternising, trophy girlfiends, etc - but its not a necessity.
i dont have any children but the family i do have i am close with and appreciate greatly. i was speaking more of my personal psychological experience and not the relationship with my family
Publish your life experience story into a paperback book that you can immediately sell to all major banking and hedge fund executives. :eek:
I would say for a young single man losing everything is just very stressful. But for a guy with a young family to support it is more traumatic . Some people can handle major setbacks better than others. But after a stressful or traumatic event such as losing everything you own there is big risk of long term psycholoical damage and even physical chemical imbalances (depression etc) in your brain. Jesse Livermore had a few wipeouts too many...
I've been homeless before, living hand to mouth, hour by hour, day by day. All I learned from it is that most people could care less.... I'm a real sucker for people asking for a handout though even though I know that 9 out of 10 are just doing it as a way of life... I never had much desire after being down and out to have a lot of things, in fact I moved recently and I left most of the stuff I had acquired behind, gave it to a homeless guy actually, he will get it all when he gets situated better. I just never wanted to associate with wealthy or even upper middle class people after my homeless time... it was decades ago... recently I was working and doing quite well but I still hung around a Burger place with a guy that has a plate in his head and writes blues music that he hears all the time in his head, another black guy that rambles about his horrific car accident and how he cured himself of paralysis with prayer, yet another guy that gets some gimp money once a month and gets payday loans so he can buy books on UFO's and time travel... there was one guy there that is a braniac, a walking encyclopedia and we have similar interests... he made it worthwhile. I was telling him about trading and what an interesting little math problem it is to take a data series and try to make it cough up money, he was interested in an academic way but I think he is so far left that he just could not get interested in actually taking any money out of a market, he said as much, the guy is poor as hell.... I don't know, maybe I'm still a homeless guy at heart... I had a career but never any ambition, it's like you are homeless and it just hits you real hard that you are a throwaway and you sever ties with the people that threw you away... I live in an upper middle class neighborhood currently but I associate with the guys that run the donut shop, the guys that rent rooms, etc... the owners seem like a bunch of goody goody liberals which is what half of them are...
geezus talk about elitetrader being a crowd of misfits and losers of society. you are who you hang out with. i on the other hand don't hang out with any misfits, only rich, and successful people, they give me the mentality of continue strive for success, unlike the blues music player who gives people the mentality of "boo hoo, my life sucks, everybody hates me, let me play a song to wallow in my despairs"
<i>"have any of you 'lost it all' and totally broke down to realize that all you had built your life on was meaningless? and if so how did it affect your perception of loss and your performance as a trader?"</i> Something like that happened when I went thru divorce. It does change perception on what's important, replacable and otherwise. Performance as a trader doesn't change except for very short-term blips. A skilled trader with his(her) head screwed on half straight will make money, period. An unskilled trader can recite "Trading In The Zone" chapter & verse, but will still lose money hand over fist. At this stage of my career, everything I own could be stripped away tomorrow and I'd replace it all in a lot less time than it was accumulated in the first place. Wouldn't really care that much about any material goods. That's the power of being a skilled trader, regardless how much time and broken glass crawled across it took to get there. Relationships are a different story. I would not want to lose the people close to me now, they are irreplacable. And it is true that the older you get, the less tolerant of "losing it all" men become. We realize the time & effort it takes to build lasting relationships... time that continually wanes as the clock ticks on. But material goods? Anything we've accumulated before can be accomplished ten-fold. Unless all world financial ~ commodity markets cease to operate from Monday forward. Then we're in real trouble! :eek: