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"How to Arouse Your Profit-Making Senses"
by Frank J. Sherosky
Markets cannot even force you to trade in any particular way any more than they can coerce you to interpret their conditions. Only you can do that through your own mental framework; and therein lays the enigma that haunts traders as they attempt to garner their share of the market’s riches.
Discrediting your mental framework with its emotional ties perhaps explains why outperforming any market on a consistent basis is such a difficult task, even for professional fund managers. It requires that profit-making senses become honed and kept razor sharp at all times; and that definitely requires full mental attention in league with self discipline.
After all, the nature of speculation centers on a collection of random events, and is by definition an uncertain environment at every moment. The very act of dealing with markets, especially on your own, exposes you to personal challenges not found in any other endeavor.
My own research and personal market experiences confirm this. So, I have defined at least four dominant drivers just to achieve some semblance of parity:
- Personal conditioning that provides mental clarity and emotional stamina;
- A process that supports goals through implementation of in-line strategies;
- Technology that accesses timely and useful information;
- Research that avails probabilities.
The greatest, in my opinion, is often the most neglected: Personal conditioning.
So, what is the status of your conditioning? Have you cultivated your own profit-making senses? Or has the market actually re-conditioned you to wonder and perhaps doubt your very own capabilities and market intuition?
What about the next wave of market changes? Are you truly prepared? Have you refined yourself into a dynamic, forward-thinking market edge, one that is fully capable of extracting and protecting profits from the market arena for years to come?
You see, some may interpret an edge as merely a system or a method of trading. I view it as the whole trader.
How about simply viewing yourself as an investing professional? If not, why not? After all, taking risks in any speculative arena is certainly not an amateur’s game. Each of us expects to get paid. The only difference is that the average investor is on a 100% pay-for-performance basis, not a salary or commission like brokers and fund managers.
Considering that the public has been groomed over many years to attribute the term “speculation” to gambling, few have ever defined themselves as speculators. Investing, it appears, has been and is now still considered more noble and worthy of honor than speculating or trading.
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