I have often thought of Golf as a metaphor for tradng. "Each hole is a new fresh start" "Play within yourself." "You can tell alot about a person by the way they play golf". "Don't look at the leaderboard". etc etc Substitute the word TRADE where necessary and you can see the parallels.
Trading is the unique combination of capitalism, financial freedom and obesity in one's pajamas (or even naked, weather permitting)...
May your longs stay up and your shorts go down (If I recall correctly, this was in a holiday greeting card from Alexander Elder's company.)
Ecosystems, definitely. In my earlier days, I used to perceive the markets as a battlefield - Sun Tzu´s "The Art Of War" left a lasting impression. But one day, after reading an interesing trading-related article, I understood that sitting in front of my screens and unconsciously having the mindset of kill or be killed wasn´t very helpful. So I further developed some thoughts that started to blossom after I read a pretty interesting article ( http://www.hardrightedge.com/wizard/ss1.htm ). Aren´t the markets indeed just like a, let´s say, forest? You´ve got the ants, playing the big numbers game (= statistical arbitrage), you´ve got the many grass eating mammals which tend to live and move in herds (= benchmark oriented mutual funds) as well as the eagle flying high above all and striking only when all odds are in his favor (= daily pattern oriented trader) or, of course, the larger predators, who are hiding and following their prey as long as it takes and when opportunity comes, hit it without mercy (= certain Hedge Fund strategies)
great article....i think alot of new traders gravitate towards the 1 and 2 min timeframes for the thrill of it, only to eventually discover these painful truths
Words are limited : they are just proxies for thoughts. Words should be put aside when one really want to go deep into some concepts or just for getting a better intuition of some abstraction. Then images analogies or metaphores can be good instruments for substituing to words because they are richer vehicules for imagination. Nevertheless some people will be extreme and take these metaphores for truths and this then becomes mysticism. So metaphores must stay metaphores and not more.