Natural trader ..

[eves_banished_children]

.. thus when I said what is commonly meant by feeling vs intellect .. because otherwise why are we even debating the point if the words mean nothing.

I could sit here and argue that there's no difference between the sky and the ground because they're both technically made up of elements created inside of a star .. but where would that get anybody.

 

[Cswim63]

Once I started to pick up the emotional cues the market was giving me, it became a different market. My favorite trades are based on panic, on traders being trapped. Beliefs being overturned. Sometimes they are my own. The intellectual part of me just tries to analyze the backdrop so I know what the prevailing logic is and where the flaws might be. There are always flaws in any system. That's my belief. The key is they can exist simultaneously with the trend without affecting the trend. Sometimes for a long long time. Then one day you wake up and stuff is blowing up. Now it's just degree.

 

[Simples]

.. thus when I said what is commonly meant by feeling vs intellect .. because otherwise why are we even debating the point if the words mean nothing.

I could sit here and argue that there's no difference between the sky and the ground because they're both technically made up of elements created inside of a star .. but where would that get anybody.

Our definitions for feeling, emotion and thinking are really half-assed though, so defintions and clarity might be part of the problem. When brain works, it both works locally, and also across different areas. We can see the different parts "light up". We know we don't know for sure how it all works yet, though it's fairly likely a vastly interconnected system, but also with self-healing properties we also don't know very much about.

 

[eves_banished_children]

So ... it's okay then if we just get rid of the words feelings and intellect, intuition, etc .. cause they obviously all mean the same thing. We'll just call it all "brain stuff" from now on.

Why are you crying ?
Cause you hurt my brain stuff!

It's a really brain stuff argument you're making, but he reacted to it with brain stuff.

I have a brain stuff strategy, but my brain stuff keeps getting in the way of my trades.

LOL ...

 

[Cswim63]

You can look at a bull market and see that what people say and what they do are two different things. During a long bull run there will be lots of negative news, lots of reasons not to buy stocks. Yet stocks seem to keep slowly going up. This was my first awakening to the difference between market emotion(pessimism) and action. The key is to feel the same pessimism that everyone else is feeling, but not necessarily act upon it the same way. If you say you're not affected by other peoples emotions, that's fine. Somebody is, lots of somebody's.

 

[Cswim63]

FOMO is a common theme in the markets. If you want to tell me you never have that feeling, better to not have that feeling, I say isn't it better to recognize the feeling when it inevitably occurs, so you're less likely to act out on it?

 

[Simples]

So ... it's okay then if we just get rid of the words feelings and intellect, intuition, etc .. cause they obviously all mean the same thing. We'll just call it all "brain stuff" from now on.

Why are you crying ?
Cause you hurt my brain stuff!

It's a really brain stuff argument you're making, but he reacted to it with brain stuff.

I have a brain stuff strategy, but my brain stuff keeps getting in the way of my trades.

LOL ...

It doesn't have to be perfect, but all definitions and concepts have boundaries where they cease to provide good enough meaning or context. This applies to domain definitions, but also everyday knowledge. So at certain thresholds, yes, words and sentences may lose meaning or be untranslatable. Beauty dwells in the depth, out of reach of intellect.

The world can continue existing mostly undisturbed without all our definitions and inventions, but humans make it more interesting in both good and bad ways, mostly for ourselves and our relatives.

 

[Cswim63]

I mean, you're dealing with constant uncertainty, then saying people(traders) shouldn't get emotional about it. A simple set of questions might be, okay, what am feeling now, what's my risk, is the trade still valid? Usually it's the latter two. Too much risk or the market has changed.

 

[Cswim63]

That's a good point and an important distinction.

Still, I think it's good to think of it in terms of .. say, a military conflict. It does a soldier on the battlefield absolutely no good to "experience their emotions". What soldiers need in the midst of combat is what they call "coolness under fire", generally, the less emotions the better, more critical thinking, using intellect and intuition, being able to act w/o regard to how you feel about that action, etc. It does no good to feel emotions when trying to make decisions like that. That's why I like algorithms, they take "me" out of it (for the most part), because it really shouldn't matter how I feel, because my feelings about the market are irrelevant.

I think they studied some of the guns after the American civil war. They found that some of the guns had been loaded five or six times without being fired. I think it's a myth that soldiers are cool under pressure. It's what we want to believe. Some are, some arent. That's ok with me. There's rational behavior, the kind you read about in textbooks and see in movies, then there's what really happened.

 

[eves_banished_children]

I think they studied some of the guns after the American civil war. They found that some of the guns had been loaded five or six times without being fired. I think it's a myth that soldiers are cool under pressure. It's what we want to believe. Some are, some arent. That's ok with me. There's rational behavior, the kind you read about in textbooks and see in movies, then there's what really happened.

Your conflating a political argument with a military reality.

The political argument, used to support a variety of leftist causes, is that soldiers aren't natural killers, and as evidence they give the fact that many soldiers in World War 1, World War 2, etc, refused to shoot at other people, and that the military found that soldiers would often intentionally miss even when they were shooting at people, because they didn't want to kill.

The military trains for that, but that has nothing to do with "coolness under fire", which they also train for.

Here's what coolness under fire looks like ... mixed in with a healthy dose of bravado ...

(Note that the camera man was also very cool, or completely clueless ...)

Coolness under fire has nothing to do with killer instinct, it's about retaining your calm during stress, thinking clearly despite circumstances, etc. The military trains for this in a variety of ways .. by subjecting soldiers to a variety of stimuli to desensitize them, by forcing them to think and make decisions while tired, under stress, hungry, while subjecting them to the sounds of explosions, etc.