It seems to me that intuition is the common link among truly great traders (or for that matter any skill). I think there are two kinds of intuition: 1) you just get so much experience that things start to get automatic or unconscious. 2) what some might call a psychic power to instantly know something you previously had no knowledge of. It's the second kind that intrigues me. If it were real, it would afford incredible power to the intuitor. If you'll indulge me, consider the following:
What if psychic powers (among them intuition) are really just additional senses. Perhaps not unlike sight, touch, hearing, etc. And what if the reason these senses are not available to us is merely our blindness to their existence? These are not my ideas but those of a wide number of highly specialized brain scientists and biochemical engineers.
Who among us hasn't tried something for the first time and did incredibly well; only to try again repeatedly and failed miserably. What was the difference. Only one thing, your conscious beliefs about the activity. You chalk up the first time to beginners luck. Was that all it was? There are some that beleive the universe is like a giant holograph and that all the intelligence that exists is contained within every single particle, down to subatomic. This would me that you, right now, have the capability to do literally anything you can imagine. Tantalizing?
Lets face it, weird shit happens. And "reasonable" people explain it away as luck, happenstance, etc. Unfortunately, charlatans have created a huge business out of this(witness miss cleo). If you're willing to dig a little deeper, look around. There is an incredible amount of scientific proof (from institutions as auspicious as MIT) that pyschic powers exist.
Quantum mechanics by mathematical definition allows for information to travel instantly across virtually infinite distances. A small community college with a $500 gadget has recently published an experiment (that has been repeated numerous times) where they transmitted information (in this case electrons) many times faster than the speed of light. The fact is, for all our great learning as a race, us humans know very little of anything significant.
Please excuse me for wasting bandwith on my "argument", but I wanted to preempt at least some of our group who think this sort of thing is hogwash. It's not. You might not be familiar with it. You might be scared of it. It might contradict strongly ingrained beliefs, but the proof is, these powers exist.
My trading plan specifically has a section for education and for daily rituals. I scan books, the net, and articles for specific ways to apply intuition, practice tuning in to it, learning how to understand what it's telling me better. It's a skill everyone of us possesses, all you have to do is choose to use it.
One practical tip that works well for me is the following. I do my normal analysis pre and post market as well as intraday. Interpreting charts, reading internals etc. When I find a setup that makes sense to me logically, I check it against my intuition and gut feeling.
Intuition and gut feel are different. They come from different places physically within the body. To do a "gut check", focus your awareness on the solar plexis. It's good to get a baseline awareness when you are relaxed and not trading. Intuition comes from an area directly above the corpus collosum (the top middle of your brain) sort of like a funnel expanding out of the top of your head collecting from Infinite Intelligence. Sorry about that, yes, I'm kind of a spiritual guy. I don't believe for a moment this is all by accident.
For those of you who would rather stick to trading and forget about sidetracking on such issues; I respectfully request that you consider the limitations that you're placing on yourself. Intuition is the ultimate edge and you can have it right now and it's free.
