Maybe you can now understand that there is more to investing than just making money. It is an ongoing journey and transition process of acquiring new skills and improving them.
Sure, you could say that the same applies to golf, gardening or stamp collection but few other environments provide the magnified pressure cauldron such as the markets in which to execute learned mental skills under the pressure of losing money. The pressure is self induced by magnifying the perceived importance of money. Perceived or not, when you mix people and money the pressure is on.
One of the most satisfying outcomes of providing trading methodologies to and coaching active investors for many years is the feedback that has been provided by many that have successfully transitioned their active investing paradigm. Just about every person that comes to the markets does so to make more money, their primary motivation is growing their money.
However, when I have long discussions with customers that have become and then remained mechanical active investors for many years the most important things to them in hindsight is not the making of money through outperforming the market indices, the important things to them are:
• overcoming fear through trust (in an edge),
• creating investment processes and then surrendering to those processes,
• accepting and being at peace with outcomes of individual trades through focussing on the process,
• having no expectations for individual trades,
• believing in probabilities and thereby overcoming the uncertainty of individual trades,
• overcoming their biases that are harmful to investing in the markets, instilled through many years of living in society,
• overcoming the “noise” that surrounds the markets propagated through newspapers, newsletters, TV shows, radio shows, advertising, spruiking and many other sources.
These investors have learnt that you cannot trust and fear at the same time. If you are fearing you are not trusting and if you are trusting you are not fearing.
There is more to it than just money. The benefits of transitioning how you think, feel, say and do go way beyond just making money.