Profit Making Mind

"How to Arouse Your Profit-Making Senses"

by Frank J. Sherosky

Stock trading strategies are as rampant these days, as they were during the Great Bull Market. Yet, can you truly master the stock market like so many investing books propose?

When you can’t even trust the financial reports of analysts, though, and the company bean counters that feed them with data, how can you? What's needed are robust, stock trading strategies; the type that enables you to think above the crowd, but not apart from them! The kind of strategies in touch with your speculator mind response!

Witness the Enron fiasco. It is a classic case of corporate character gone sour. The accounting firm that assigned to do the books also got paid to advise. Even the board members failed in their fiduciary responsibilities to guard and plead the cause of the stock holders. Result: The crowd got lied to and cheated!

That’s what causes many to follow technical analysis whereby the fundamentals are considered reflected in the market action, and leads the investors to never have to trust anything beyond the tape itself. So, what if you developed a dynamite system that would track such reflections? Would that be sufficient?

I personally do not believe it would for one, very simple reason: There is no mastery of indeterminate arenas like markets; and they most certainly qualify as being indeterminate. At best, in my opinion, you may merely flow with them.

There is, however, a form of mastery that you can learn. It is the mastery of the self, whereby you can become a student of your own attitudes and behavior as much as a student of market behavior. Relative to conditions with potential uncertain outcomes as in the markets, this is probably the most underestimated of all trading methods.

With all due respect to your intelligence and financial background, that is a lot more difficult to achieve than you might now imagine. First, simply arousing your market senses is not a simple task. Pre-existing mindsets, supported by memories and emotions, often hinder the process. It truly takes an awakening that a new method of thinking far beyond what your formal education has groomed you to think thus far may be necessary.

Second, that awakening further requires an act of acceptance that is sufficient to instill the discipline to change. The initiating belief for all of this, in my judgment, is accepting the stark reality of cause and effect; that speculative markets are not the true cause of you making or losing money. You are! And many market psychologists teach their clients that.

After all, the markets exist merely as trading arenas with fixed rules of engagement, and neutral ones at that. They may appear at times to operate like living, breathing organisms, but they have no bias and no intimidating authority to issue you orders to personally lose or gain money.

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