While I was in the eleventh grade, my english teacher Mrs. Boswell (devil incarnate) sternly told me that if I did not turn my quo-trek off and start paying attention to her lecture on Beowolf, she would "write me up". Knowing that I was over the detention limit, and would recieve a saturday school for being written up, and in-turn miss the Ohio State - Michagan game that a layed a bill on, I turned the quo-trek off immeditely and intently turned all of my focus to paying attention to what she had to say. No more than 3 minutes later when she called on me to repeat what she had just said, I was left dumbfounded and had absolutely no clue. Later I realized that I could not hear her voice over all the mental chatter in my head telling me to pay attention to what she was saying... PEACE and good-trading, Commisso
"POKER RULE#16: Stick to the best starter cards... Failing to play only good starter cards is like running a foot-race against the other players with a self-imposed handicap - like having a metal weight tie to your foot as the race begins. Play the best cards at the beginning of the hand, and the future will be a little less random, unpredicatable and murky." There is only one reason to be in the market - to make money. Naturally, waiting will become a big part of trading. We should play only the best setups under the right conditions. Get comfortable in missing marginal trades. It's like entering a revolving door in motion or step onto an escalator, we only go in when we are in sync... when it's safe otherwise we wait.
That's a nice image, thanks. Imagine enter- and exiting trades in the same thoughtless manner as we do these door/stair routines. Also, these doors and escalators can become quite dangerous once you hesitate and start thinking about when to enter Ursa..
Commisso! How goes it old man? Funny how clarity is relative. It tends to be based on what you know and how deeply you know it rather than any inherent complexity in the process being analyzed. One pair of eyes sees gibberish on the page; the other sees, hears (and maybe even feels) a symphony. I think perhaps the "thoughtless" manner you seek is actually clarity in terms of next action- like reaching for a glass of water when you are thirsty. The action is not "thoughtless" per se, but the action required of the situation is so obvious that there is no need to ponder it or doubt it. You simply do it. I bet George Soros had a similar mindset when he decided to short the pound in 1992. All the swirling complexity settling into a direct path, like a marked trail through the forest that, once seen, cannot be unseen. The key, though, as one of the rules pointed out, is that you don't get to this state through meditation and mental discipline alone. You have to truly see the situation at hand, which takes hard work + confidence in your work. A blind man cannot simply reach for the glass - he has to feel his way. If he is wary of an electric shock as he fumbles along, the task becomes that much harder. On another note, I wonder how many people develop a sense of clarity late in life simply by virtue of shallow desires and pointless concerns falling away- then wonder despairingly why they didn't lay hold of it sooner.
In order to get comfortable in missing marginal trades. One has to perform "wu-wei" or "action-less action" as described in Taoism. Trade without agenda and take what the market gives you. If one has some numbers in his or her head or some money one needs to get back... one will start to put his or her will onto the market. Consequently gets out of sync with the market. Why is trading hard? It is hard because we want to achieve something. Retire one's ambition. Do away the coercion. Trader trades the market and no more.
That may be part of it. But when it comes to the markets, a lot of it is like those pictures you're supposed to stare at fixedly in order to see something else within it. You either reach the Oh Yeah or you don't. And if you don't, it's most likely because you're not what Douglas terms "available". What I find interesting lately is what looks to be a trend away from indicators and toward price and volume (though many of the pledges cling to their Fib or their Bollingers . . . ), and ordinarily I'd get all excited about that. But it looks to me like more Flavor Of The Month stuff, something that's supposed to "work". They still don't understand the reality of the market, so PV isn't going to do it for them either. Also lots of beginner questions. Same questions. Different beginners. And the beat goes on . . .
Except you can't even be sure you're looking at the right picture, because you framed it yourself. It might hold a great insight, or it might hold nothing at all. Preconceived notions might rule out what you're trying to find. So do you stare harder at the picture if you're not getting the kool aid feeling, or do you question your frame? A scientist comes across an unexplained phenomena that challenges his current beliefs. Does he try to explain away the phenomena using known theorems, or does he branch out in a new direction and willingly threaten his body of assumptions? In most cases the accepted assumptions go unchallenged and the answer is assumed to be within their folds, until and unless the phenomena becomes too unsettling or too painful to ignore. Then the stage is set for creative destruction and paradigm shift, a new way of thinking that radically alters or even replaces what came before it. Not all advances in knowledge build on the prior structure. Some tear it down completely. A lot of these "flavor of the month" traders probably live in fear of seeing their sand castles demolished.
Fortunately, in the markets, one can avoid grappling with reality for only so long, i.e., until he goes broke. Though quite a few people apparently refund themselves and begin again. At some point, one begins to see why price moves the way it does. I can't say how many charts one has to look at (or how many tapes he has to follow) before this underlying structure shows itself, but I do know that the longer one focuses on interpretations of it, or commentaries on it, or reflections of it (as in a mirror), or third-party analyses of it, the longer it will take for him to see it, if he ever does. As for the frame, that too disappears, and the snapshot becomes a stream-of-consciousness documentary. Which is why people who try to make volume bars into indicators aren't going to be happy with the results.