Quote from Hooti:
Is the opposite of fear.... intuition?
Or 'intuitive - ish'?
Have to think about that one. I do know that I have a different 'story' running thru my head as I trade. One more aware of behaviors than my prior stories focused on setups and rules.
When traders who are in trouble (which sometimes seems to be nearly everybody) post to forums like this one seeking help, the most common though not the only reply, depending on how many vendors are lurking, is that the supplicant must learn to "control his emotions". Very rarely, VERY rarely does anyone bother to ask whether or not the seeker has a trading plan, much less what it is (and, no, "buy if it looks like it's going to go up" is not a trading plan). Trading psychologists *gag* love this stuff because they can counsel clients into the next millenium without ever attacking the real issue, which is that the trader-in-trouble has no idea what he's looking at, much less what to do with it.
Therefore, any discussion of fear has to begin with whether or not the fearful trader has a trading plan and, if so, what it is. If he does, and it's something he created and developed himself (as opposed to buying a software package from 4X R Us or copying something from somebody who claimed that his method/approach/system was the key to unimaginable wealth), and if he's tested it thoroughly enough to have confidence in it, fear becomes a non-issue. This is why newcomers find trading so much easier than those who have been failing for two or three or five or fifteen years: they have not yet learned to be afraid. And if they're lucky enough to find somebody who will show them how to create a trading plan instead of sell them something, it's entirely possible that they will never know fear. Otherwise they will assume these learned fear behaviors in a matter of months, perhaps weeks. And from there it's generally downhill.
So the opposite of fear is I suppose a state of calm assuredness. If one has created and developed his own trading plan and knows that it is consistently profitable, what is there to be afraid of? He develops the sort of disinterestedness that enables him to observe and evaluate what's happening in front of him without getting all twisted in knots about what to do about it, much like the sports fan who's watching a contest between two teams whom he knows nothing about and who couldn't care less who wins.
It's difficult for me to drum up much sympathy for the failed trader since he always brings it on himself. Rarely does the failed trader care anything about how markets work or even about trading. He's interested in making money, so, ironically, he does exactly those things that will prevent him from doing so. He drifts from vendor to vendor, room to room, guru to guru, then whines because nobody will show him what to do (we won't mention any names here). The idea of sitting down in front of a screen with a box of pencils and a stack of legal pads and doing his own research and testing is so alien to him that it may as well be expressed in Swahili (unless he knows Swahili, but you get the point). It's so much easier to buy from somebody or copy from somebody, then blame them for unsatisfactory results. *sigh*
I seem to be rant-prone today.
