A couple of weeks ago one of this Journal’s readers, Ray, provided this comment in response to the blog on mastering a skill.
“Gary. You take too long to get to the point. You are boring me and I don’t have the time to listen to all that hype in return for a snippet of truth. You are a good teacher but you need to get to the point a bit quicker.”
I take his point, wholeheartedly accept it and agree that I can be long winded in an attempt to explain concepts in detail.
This week’s blog will get straight to the punchy point.
For the last 19 years, since I started this business, so many active investors’ paths have crossed mine and I have been exposed at close quarters to how many of these investors have travelled on their respective journeys before and after our paths crossed.
So here is this week’s point, mined from these investors’ experiences and my personal experience.
Actively investing in the market is one of, if not, the toughest ventures that any human being will ever take on.
Here is one of the main reasons why: nothing else you do in life will give you as much emotionally charged negative feedback as trading the market. Hardly a day will go by without some form of negative feedback from the market and on some day’s large negative feedback, and human beings are just not wired to handle this constant stream of negative feedback.
The main challenge to overcome this mountain of negative feedback is not better analysis, or more knowledge, or access to more/better information, or who you know, or life experience, or a system with a better win rate, or a broker, or a mentor, or somebody to invest on your behalf. All this will help but not get you to a point of overcoming.
To overcome and to reach total acceptance, YOU have to totally shift your paradigm on how you perceive feedback from the market and that requires reprogramming your brain to think about the market in a totally different way.
Nothing you have done in any other venture in life will prepare you for trading the market; in fact, it will do the exact opposite and ill-prepare you for trading the market.
The fact is that human beings are programmed to magnify negative feedback and discount, or take for granted, positive feedback. Negative feedback lingers on in our minds for long periods of time. This is how it is supposed to work as these hard wired mechanisms in our brain teach us to avoid pain, physical and emotional, in the future. Meaning that, we are hardwired at the subconscious level to do our level best to avoid the emotional pain in the form of our perceived negative feedback that the markets send our way day after day.
Some readers of this week’s blog will think that this is a load of poppycock whilst others, particularly those that have been actively investing for many, many years, will agree and note to self to do some more work on their active investing mindset and paradigm.
I put to you that the degree to which you disagree with this blog, is the degree to which you need help. The more ardent your level of disagreement is, the more help you will need! If you are not making headway actively investing in the markets then doing what you have always done will get you to the same destination, nowhere.
You have to define a process to shift your paradigm and then step into that process of mindset change. That’s what we can help active investors do here at Share Wealth Systems.
