What good is money

Maybe because most of us have the Baby Elephant Syndrome.

 

what is that?

 

Baby Elephant Syndrome

An adult elephant can easily uproot huge trees with its trunk; it can knock down a house without much trouble. When an elephant living in captivity is still a baby, it is tied to a tree with a strong rope or a chain every night. Because it is the nature of elephants to roam free, the baby elephant instinctively tries with all its might to break the rope. But it isn't yet strong enough to do so.
Realizing its efforts are of no use, it finally gives up and stops struggling. After the baby elephant tries and fails many times, it will never try again for the rest of its life.
Later, when the elephant is fully grown, it can be tied to a small tree with a thin rope. It could then easily free itself by uprooting the tree or breaking the rope. But because its mind has been conditioned by its prior experiences, it doesn't make the slightest attempt to break free. The powerfully gigantic elephant has limited its present abilities based on the limitations of the past— Baby Elephant Syndrome.
Human being are exactly like the elephant except for one thing—we can choose not to accept the false boundaries and limitations of our past.


Source: http://truthfulgrace.blogspot.com/2009/01/baby-elephant-syndrome.html

 

Or maybe fear of failure gotten to us.

I think my next step is to come up with another way to fail, push my limit, and then learn from it.

PA

 

Unless you have patience of Thomas Edison and his luck ("I have not failed - I have just found 10,000 ways that don't work"), you are risking wasting a huge part of your life figuring out what works on your own. Not only that, most of us don't take well to losing. I was recently reading a book by Gary Kasparov where he talks about coaching and learning and chess in general. He said that, one of the keys to his success as a chess player is that he lost thousands upon thousands of chess games against strong opposition. He explains that most people aren't trained in how to take losing, and they get discouraged, especially children. This resonated with me 100%. I remember as a young man I couldn't stand losing. After losing a chess game, I could not sleep for days on some occassions, I refused to analyse the position with my oponent postmortem, and in some cases I would cry from the rage. If I had a coach, he would have put all of this in perspective, showing how in fact the best players are the ones the lose the most and don't get discoraged and use losing as a lesson. I would probably be a grandmaster today. But I get sidetracked.

I strongly recommend you read this article:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-success-breeds-success

Most traders are shown what works. Very very few of them figure it out on their own.

 

Thanks for the article.

Positive reinforcement does give us more motivation to do whatever it is that we are doing. However, that may not equal to how we normally defined as success.

Personally, I believe success is an “external” concept. Once we succeeded, we may not even realize it. There is no emotional feedback from it--especially when we are expected to succeed. On the other hand, failure is an “internal” concept where we can feel the emotional feedback our brains are giving us.

This explain why trading is so difficult. In order to find out how to trade, we have to do it on our own, and to do so, we have to test out various strategies.

When we first start, testing strategies was easy, because we were foolish and believed that we discovered the “Holy Grail”. It gave us the positive reinforcement/motivation that we needed to take action. As we mature, we discovered that there is no such thing as a “Holy Grail” (or we realized that whatever that was working was just a ticking time bomb), positive reinforcement is no longer there. All we get from testing these strategies is the feeling of failure, again and again. It takes a lot of discipline to continue our testing.

Regardless of how we feel, we need to understand success and failure goes hand in hand and that we must understand and analyze the lessons we gotten from our failures.

BTW: Please correct me if I am wrong, but I believe Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb on his own. He studied research papers done by other inventors, then test, and tweak the findings to finally invent a working light bulb.

PS: I don’t know what my outcome, as a trader, is going to be, but I will continue this path because of one thing--I am scared of being a failure.

PA

 

Now you talking. Any dick with the cash can buy cars, house, jet, but you have to be lucky, smart, and lucky to own a great horse.


Sam Riddle and Man O' War


This pic does the great Secretariat a bit more justice. I was at that Belmont he won by 31 Lengths.

 

Agreed.

Cool People must have been stunned by such a performance.

Big Red is a good looking horse. But as far as looks, I think Alysheba may have been the best looking horse I have ever seen:



Alas, on the racetrack, Secretariat would send all these horses home packing, with the exception of possibly Man 'O War.

 

ya it's mostly luck

 

Own a restaurant that serve high networth individuals.