I am starting this thread as an adjunct to the "Jack Hershey Trading" thread in Strategy. The primary topic covered in this thread will be the role of the mind in trading from a pragmatic point of view. The impact of this thread (with the help of our resident expert Jack - aka Grob109) will be improved trading through raised awareness, self appraisal and change. While it is helpful if you stay current on the Strategy thread it is not required. This thread is open to all. However - to maintain a certain standard of utility I ask that moderators and posters note the following guidelines for coduct in this thread. 1) NO cat-calling, tomato throwing, negative comments. This is not a place to vent your negative opinions for the sake of it. 2) Dissention or disagreement is welcome if presented in a civil manner and substantiated through an argument that is more sophisticated than pure personal opinion.
I'd like to start off the thread with an issue that is relevant for me today: environmental issues while trading. I live in a townhouse. There is an aparment complex across the street. A resident at the aparment complex has decided to set up a wood shop on his balcony. He probably has a compound miter saw and usually around 1100 PST he fires it up... the noise is intermittent. Because of the acoustics/geometry of the buildings in this area it is extremely loud... and for some reason particularly distracting and annoying. it is difficult to tune out. I can close the windows of my office and still hear it. I can wear ear plugs and I still hear it. It's a concentration breaker and the noise pisses me off which unbalances my emotions. I have some noise cancelling headphones as a last resort. Just thought I'd throw this out as fodder to get the ball rolling. How does environment fit in to the scheme of things?
Good thread idea, JT. IMO it has a lot to do with how high strung you are. My wife can breeze through the day with two TVs and three stereos blaring all different stuff, because she is so laid back that she needs the noise to stay awake to do her work. When I trade I require absolute silence except for the particular kind of soothing music I like, because the least little thing arrests my attention and sets my mind haring off. It may have to do with how many things you need to keep in your head simultaneously. My wife's work is pretty much serial, whereas trading IMO is parallel. Also IMO traders are hyperattentive, always looking for the tradeable anomaly or the new system idea, and need a calm pleasing environment to maintain that attention. Re your particular problem, most civilized communities have noise ordinances. Complain to the apartment manager, then to the police. If that doesn't work, it means your community isn't civilized. Shoot his dog. That's why you never complain directly to the miscreant. Keeps your options open.
Aren't there building codes that would prohibit one from starting a wood shop on a balcony of an apartment complex. Even operating heavy tools must be in violation of some complex rules. I'm surprised this activity is permitted to go on.
I will bring up in this post several people that you can picture as I scope and bound what I want to convey regarding traders realizing their potential. Teachers and coaches connect to their students and players by being on the same wavelength. for about two years I have been doing posts to get results for others who want to and do make money. The three wavelenghts that coaches and teachers use are related to auditory memory, visual memory and kinesthetic memory. Tex Winter knew John Paxton was an X and O player. He knew horace grant was primarily kinesthetic. Players can use more than one means. We all know who used all three. That is self evident. Acheiving elevated cognitive powers as Michael Jordan does results in extraordinary abilities. In the Rain Man we see an acutely active kinesthetic memory. This is a shortcut way to operate. For trading, I use all the possibilities to get across to people. One repetition gives a person a memory trace for the subject. If I do 5 reps or suggest you do 5 charts in hindsight, you get 20 memory traces. 5 gets you 20. Many people see or hear me trade. What they see is "skill memory". Athletes that are like Michael Jordan play in a mental zone. Hitting a 96 mph baseball is "skill memory" oriented, also. I listen to music. From Greenwich I would go to Lincoln Center and listen. I would, of course, check out the settings of the sound buffers, since I "memorized" them and their possible settings. Today the top mentally peforming current high school has a 25% music course load, The top private school in Connecticut for maths competition is owned, run, and taught by a Japanese staff. It used to be Rosemary Hall, now it is a day school for Japanese children of affuent Japenese employees in the metropolitan NY area. The school has never not won a competition. Excellence comes from using your potential well completely and wisely. Two things are created by the mind: intelletual excellence and emotional wisdom. To trade well you need to hit baseballs. We will use any means to understand and attain memory. Then with that memory we will make it redundant if necessary and be sure that one place of redundancy is outside of reflective neocortical thought and in the location where baseballs are batted and basketball is played. We will come to use the cerebellum for trading instead of the usual paths. Mostly we all have the trading information in our cerebrums, etc. We want to switch to the cerebellum as a time saver and be trading in the "zone". There are some other issues, biochemically speaking. Doing 5 repetitions gives you traces in parallel as well as the initial serial trace paths. Also the paths are "faster" and smoother. That is because we are doing depositions regarding neuro transmitters. So in learning, you work hard and all the work pays off with memory and the memory is "greased". There are times when you mess up the works. I will spell out the details in a while. I have written in ET about "fight or flee response". Here it will be called out as "the stress response". We are going to trade with excellence and be in the zone using "skill memory". Today you see it beginning with the YM Gaussians and channels and traverses as leading indicators of the ES. It is a B2R, B2R, R2R, R2B, R2B, B2B, etc. every letter causes an action these days and the transitions are "read" from the market; the market "speaks" to you or you "play" it. Any approach can be done by being in the zone. The "stress response" happens to be the common denominator of ET traders. we intentionally move away from the stress responce in many ways. All will be introduced and discussed. KISS is the way trading that works happens. Biochemically the stress response is a a "poisoning" process to the brain. Repeated stress response (think many times a day) is doing permenant cell anihilation damage. Traces do not work is the series is disrupted. The focal point of all of this is taking care of your body, and your brain. Traces are series of brain cells. They almost touch each other but they do not quite touch. The gaps are bridged biochemically and in many different ways. We have to keep the chemistry working well and to not let it damage anything. Here is the place where the ways to get the job done will be presented and discussed. The gaps are bridged by neurotransmitters. The hype created by the stress response, causes surpluses and derivatives of these biochemicals to do permenant damage if the stress response gets to be habitual. The classic example is edge trading with singular signal indicators for entry and then not knowing how to handle exits because of fear of losses. Data sweeping and then analysis and then deciding in the zone all individually and collectively keep your biochemistry in a trace building, reinforcing and streamlining (for increasing speed) mode. The languaging transitions of participants demonstrates their progress away from "the Stress response" having not started there as a modus. There are thousands of posts in ET on the topic of toxicity build up. There is no direct biochemical mention or even a consciousness but there is the instinctive demonstration of having to "flee" and stop incurring the poisoning process. So, in a nutshell, we will see how it works, how to optimize getting in the zone, and how to do all the preventive maintenance in support of raising the capability of the mind to operate at a Michael Jordan level.
There are so many disconnected thoughts in that rambling diatribe that one wonders where to start to rebut it. Perhaps the most factually based is the fallacy that SCT is not an "edge" system. Any combination of conditions on a chart which prompts a high expectation entry is an "edge". Any combination of conditions on a chart which prompts an exit completing the high expectation entry is an "edge". An FTT is an edge. Not exiting on the first trend change is an edge. Not trading in low volume is an edge (in a negative sense). Leaping on a consolidation in the first leg of a rocket is an edge. Reversing at channel extremes in an HVS is an edge. Trading premium anomalies is an edge. Not entering until synch is achieved is an edge (again of a negative sort). Bracketing a consolidation is an edge. Every single element of your various methods is an edge. Each system, taken as a whole, is an assemblage of edges, each of which (presumably) enhances the expectation over that of any one component edge.
To continue, if you are going to talk NLP surreptitiously, with your references to auditory, visual, and kinesthetic modes of thought, you had better bone up on the subject of "strategies", since to the best of my knowledge there are no purely A, V, or K approaches. You fall into the "All psychology is autobiography" trap of thinking that the way you do things is the only way, which is evident from the way you mentor. Exquisite flexibility is the soul of NLP. How you can achieve that nuance in a medium where you cannot see hear or touch your correspondent is beyond me. Worse, in this medium, you are probably reading correspondence in your own voice, fantasizing a visualization of the correspondent, and experiencing only your own kinesthetic reactions, as you cannot see how the correspondent is reacting physically, much less verify that by touch. You are looking in a mirror at your innermost self, not at the reality of the person you are addressing.
Finally, I take issue with your assertion that "zoning" is the proper mental state for everyone to trade in. Because it presumptively works for you doesn't mean that it is appropriate for every trader. A zonie is reacting intuitively. That is nice if your "system" is intuitive. Yours is not. It requires explicit and continual attention to a multitude of market parameters. A zonie is not attentive to anomalies which lead to trading opportunities. A zonie is not creating trading ideas on the fly for later analysis (you explicitly told a mentee not to invent). A zonie is a Jack Hershey clone, not his own man managing his own profitably idiosyncratic version of your general approach. And lastly, a zonie is a true believer who doesn't question the fact that no proof is offered to him in support of the validity of the system he is trying to learn.
Roanoke's arguing that various Jack Hershey strategy elements are in fact collectively an edge. Wrong thread. Moderator - feel free to delete this post.
This is speculation which is no different from an unfounded personal opinion. Please comment on what was said -- not your own conspiracy theories... unless you can substantiate them.