I have complained to the moderator. I saw no references, direct or indirect, to the avowed thread rubric of "improved trading through raised awareness, self appraisal and change" in Grob109's posts. What I saw was a rehash of material posted endlessly elsewhere, especially in the Strategy thread. This forum is not the proper venue for that. What we have come to expect here is excitingly original material inspired by startling ongoing events in the markets, not some tired old reruns of five year old ideas previously published elsewhere. I encourage others who hold this forum in the same high esteem that I do to complain as well, and to help me defend its standards.
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Managing Mind/Body
- Thread starter BA_Trader
- Start date
Roanoke's content below is focussed on Roanoke's concept of a person trading intuitively and he names that mental state "zoning". He connects the "zoning" to two separate matters: 1. a trading approach and 2. a way of thinking and using parts of the brain to do the business of the mind.
I am unfamiliar with what he is speaking about. It is not what I am bringing to this thread.
I do feel that people can excell using their personal approaches (often different than the assorted and different approaches I have described separately from time to time. A bunch of them.
His post is intended to describe an approach that is attributed to me and that the approach is faulty and is not proven in any manner. That is fine with me to see any description anyone wants to make. I cannot defend his description of what he asserts others do with what I suggest. There is no need to.
My goal here and in this thread is to present helpful information to anyone using any method to trade. The informational focus is on how the mind works, etc.
The details are not on the table as yet simply because I have just done one post on the topic and spent the rest of my effort in support of being responsive to the comments of roanoke.
If anyone else is in the situation roanoke finds himself, I am not going to be very helpful in any way it turns out. I am not prejudging roanoke, it is just that he has a lot of conclusions about what i haven't, as yet, spoken about. Obviously, he is a reader of posts in ET. Maybe he will tell us about his memory preferences. I find what he says he knows from what he has read that I posted to be unusual.
I am unfamiliar with what he is speaking about. It is not what I am bringing to this thread.
I do feel that people can excell using their personal approaches (often different than the assorted and different approaches I have described separately from time to time. A bunch of them.
His post is intended to describe an approach that is attributed to me and that the approach is faulty and is not proven in any manner. That is fine with me to see any description anyone wants to make. I cannot defend his description of what he asserts others do with what I suggest. There is no need to.
My goal here and in this thread is to present helpful information to anyone using any method to trade. The informational focus is on how the mind works, etc.
The details are not on the table as yet simply because I have just done one post on the topic and spent the rest of my effort in support of being responsive to the comments of roanoke.
If anyone else is in the situation roanoke finds himself, I am not going to be very helpful in any way it turns out. I am not prejudging roanoke, it is just that he has a lot of conclusions about what i haven't, as yet, spoken about. Obviously, he is a reader of posts in ET. Maybe he will tell us about his memory preferences. I find what he says he knows from what he has read that I posted to be unusual.
Quote from Roanoke:
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.
Well spoke, Jack. I personally look forward to reading new material from you on trader mental development, ideas different from those you have posted previously. Informed, one hopes, by your astonishing successes mentoring on the strategy thread. Ignore the puelling pygmy posters. I must confess that I too was confused about the generality to all trading of your ideas, as you only referred to your SCT terminology in your original post ("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. .... Data sweeping and then analysis.") Lead us on to trading greatness!
Quote from Roanoke:
To quote Jack's post:
"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."
"The three wavelenghts (sic) that coaches and teachers use are related to auditory memory, visual memory and kinesthetic memory."
I didn't see you complain that HIS post was OT. I merely responded to his gambits.
And don't mistake this forum for the Strategy forum. The smartest people on ET post here and we have zero tolerance for illogic and personal bombast. If you can't take care of yourself here with reason, wit, and style, no one will help you. This is a no whining zone.
Your two quotesof mine are no OT. In the first I am addressing the most common source of "fight or flee" which I am calling "the stress response". It is central to the discussion of the mind/body connection. Reflect for a while, you will make the connection.
The second quote is the basic and esential way in which the mind works to create memory for any process a person uses his brain for. try hard to understand that this is not OT either.
You use this forum for what you want. I do not know or care what that is. do your thing and keep your standards there.
I am not interested in doing strategy here. So I am not doing any strategy here.
I do not find what you do to have reason wit nor style. I do see a little whiny though. If your whining is successful as what you deem to be complaints you are making then go for it.
I thought about having all your posts dumped but it turns out they help others and myself see what's cooking in a given brain.
Jack, just one little admonition. Re "getting posts dumped", unless you are a Coinz, that just doesn't happen here because it's all fodder for the psych cannon, grist for the auto-analytic mill. I advise you to put all detractors on "ignore" so that everyone else can enjoy them but you won't be distracted. And do kindly look up the word "hubris."
Mr Doaks:Quote from Joe Doaks:
Jack, I find your fight or flee reference emotionally appealing, but I don't intellectually grasp its relevance to trading. If I flee, I don't trade. If I fight, well, we all know where that leads (Don't fight the tape, don't try to get even, etc.).
A fight or flee response gets triggered when
emotions are extremely
unbalanced. This is the limit of unbalancedness. It can become habitual
when a person develops a fear through experience.
...so your mind optimizes the path from balanced to unbalanced through
emotional learning when faced with sensory information (looking at
the chart) coupled with a negative emotion (losing trades).
It fits in with trading because you cannot be effective (at anything
except running fast) when you are in a fight or flee sort of mode.
Excuse me, sir, but you ARE in the Psych Forum. We are not idiots here, like you may be accustomed to elsewhere. Fight/flight is a polarity response. Read your Virginia Satir. It is a subset of the cool/hot polarity, namely on the hot side. Many people, most notably technical people like engineers, programmers, scientists, and accountants (Asperger's Syndrome sufferers, in the main) are able to engage a cool side response to threat. ("I wanna go! Go cool! I wanna bust! Bust cool") They get analytical, become stalkers, invoke the killer instinct (the majority are in fact gun nuts). When they are stressed, they neither fight no flee: they become coolly obsessed with psyching out the opponent, outwaiting him, outwitting him, and finally, attacking him from the dark, killing him. These are the traders who know when the smart money is net long in a down market, and where, and needs to get short, and knows how. Another interesting polarity is sadism/masochism. Look for a current example in the strategy thread.
Quote from Roanoke:
I merely referred to various manifestations of zoning and not zoning. As to trading becoming as intuitive as hitting a baseball, what beginning hitter ever "swept":
the ball's current velocity is X
the ball's current spin is Y
the ball's current altitude is Z
the ball's acceleration/deceleration in four dimensions is alpha, beta, gamma, and delta.
You swing at the damned thing! It's visual and kinesthetic. There is absolutely NO kinesthetic element in trading except for your body's responses to your own emotional reactions.
This is a good starting point for you to begin with. Messy and not very accurate but adequate to use a a base from which to learn about how things operate in your mind and other people's minds.
For others:
The example of hitting a ball is called "muscle memory". For top hitters, bodily responses do not go throught the nornmal chain of events in the cerebrum (neocortex, et al) but instead the cerebellum is used.
This means the hitter's body and cerebellum work together on automatic to repeat precisely what is in the cerebellum that is known to work. It is a kinesthetic memory function. No "working memory" is used,even. The slow learning process to hit a baseball does go through the usual learning process. Then later their is a "duplication" that takes this learning memory and duplicates it in the cerebellum.
A second familiar example is learning to ride a bike. At some poiint you jump on a bike and ride. You use your kinesthetic memory to ride a bike from a certain point on.
As amazing as it sounds, you are seeing words from posters in the strategy thread that express they are traing channels using kinethetic memory.
What makes the switch possible is the channel religious experience. we slog along working on channel drawing and extending. doing trverses to form them. Getting points 1,2,3 down (cold). At some point they are in our minds. At some points we see enough price bars hit and bounce off channels. we see the channels are "inside' and other spaces are "outside"
At a point, in a moment, we have what we had when Kennedy was shot, An indellibly stamped memory of experiencing.... "Channels work!!!!!".... "Those F**king things really work"... "Kennedy is dead!!!!"
None of this goes through your cerebrum processes. It is there for sure as part of learning and, NOW, it is also traced out in your cerebellum. There you operate like riding a bike and nkowing kenedy is dead and you were at such and such a place at that time and the weather was. I went and stood there last summer for a moment in Greenwich.
I will in this thread explain, at some point, how "handling' is done. Roanoke is a person who has something on his mind. We will find out how he gets this way.
Watch the open tennis. Listen to music daily for a while. do some repetitions on charts and TD's and your journals.
See where and how you get sensory inputs to your mind. This will be vey fun and rewarding except for roanoke's type stuff.
I will throw in some small but nice helpful mental exercises. I have been "chunking" everyone for about two years here. SCT is a chunk and so is B2R. "Gaussian" is a chunk. If you are filling in the TD notations from memory that is a good thing. If you read the print in one pass and then record it all on the TD that is good too. As we get to name more and more complex collections of links and nodes, you will hit a lot of homers from the cerebellum.
Music is somthing that gives you whole mind a work out. try savoring it. Listening to the same stuff twice is a good idea; see what happens.
I use at least 10,000 units of vitimen C a day.
After trading I try to work in heavy physical activity for four hours or so. Mixing 600 pounds of concrete and placing it is not unusual.
Loose the word intuition.
Quote from Roanoke:
Don't think of the poster, think of the logic of the poster. Kings kept court jesters for a reason. I have yet to see much of a reasoned rebuttal to my challenges. Besides, if you didn't have me for an audience, who else would pay attention to you? All I see here is the faithful. And who appointed BA Jack's protector? Let Jack answer for himself!
To cite your self-imposed rules:
"Dissention or disagreement is welcome if presented in a civil
manner and substantiated through an argument that is more
sophisticated than pure personal opinion."
My comments are civil and I presented the best logical arguments I am capable of given the mushiness and intellectual muddiness of the topic.
Don't worry, we will handle the situation to everyone's satisfaction.