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Get to the point

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.

14 Comments

  • Newton Hill says:

    Very true Gary. Mark Douglas would totally agree. Keep up the excellent advice and email coaching.

  • Paul says:

    You take as long as you damn well like to get to the point. You’ve earnt it. I like the journey to it.

    Life cant be that busy….

  • Rohan Halfpenny says:

    Gary,
    One may call you long winded, however many will say you are a person of integrity, honesty, goodwill and expert knowledge. These qualities are not common in the financial services industry. Keep up the good education brief.
    Thanks and Cheers,
    Rohan

  • Glen says:

    Gary,

    Bit of feedback from my perspective. I don’t have time to listen to all your online courses. I tend not to go the the live ones only because I can fast foward the recorded ones. I scan through them quickly until I think i see a slide your talking too that interests me and I stop and listen but find it takes a while to get the nugget of knowledge your trying to deliver. I think you could do them in 20-30 minutes leaving a few for questions if you tried 🙂

    I was disappointed with the NASDAQ one because early on you said the MOC “was a game changer and we’ll talk about why when we get to that slide”. Well you ran out of time it seemed and when you got to the slide – no explanation for the “game changer” statement 🙁

  • Seahound says:

    Bravo Gary.

    I feel sure your critic Ray will still say you were a bit verbose, but the snippet provided is a corker. (But he gave you a great attention grabbing lead).

    Even Ray has to embrace suffering to achieve success in the market.

    As long as your articles have clarity and wisdom, bring ’em on.

    Keep up the good work. I for one am a sucker for a good sermon.

    Thanks for your efforts.

    Seahound

  • mike says:

    I agree whole heartedly having traded for over ten years I have gained an education from all the mistakes I have made. I now see that the psychology side of things is critical. Read a book called “the hour between dog and wolf-risk taking gut feelings and the biology of boom and bust”by John Coates which was extremely helpful.

  • mike says:

    Also for the record i did not find your posts to be long winded. Repetition is the mother of memory. keep up the good work.

  • Lewes says:

    Thanks Gary – couldn’t agree more with your post.

    Everyone is entitled to their opinion but personally I don’t think your posts are long winded and I do read them all.

  • STEVEN says:

    Gary, take all the time you want to get to the point, it gives an old f**t like me time to understand and adsorb the concept in detail.

  • Ray says:

    Well said Gary that is correct and it’s a good article. We are not wired up to trade. When I said that you were a good teacher I was not kidding. You are and over the years I have learned a lot from what you have sent me. Thank you.

  • Max says:

    There’s a saying:
    Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.

  • Peter Berketa says:

    Gary, keep up your great posts and webinars. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to please everyone all the time. Some want all the detail, others just want you to get to the point (Ray), some want to feel you care about them and others want only the ‘facts’. Furthermore, you have those people who are visual, others that are auditory and yet another large group that are kinaesthetic. There are ways to language your presentation to include most of your audience but there’ll still be a few you miss. You have to look at what you are achieving, hear the feedback and I think you’ll get the strong feeling that you’re successful with the large majority of your clients. So don’t change your approach because most who are traders want to background, detail and all the other fantstic insights you’re providing. If you change your approach and cater for those like Ray (high D), then you may just lose many others who like you presentation style. Don’t react to external criticism until you’ve done some back testing to see if you have a real problem. Given the number of positive posts here, it doesn’t seem that you do. Keep on doing what you’re doing.

  • Louise says:

    Hi Gary,

    Always enjoy reading your posts! Thanks for all your hard work.

    Another spot on post about trading mind set and psychology of the market.

    I’ve been in the share market for over 30 years, and I have learned it is absolutely vital not to take losses AND wins personally!

    Yes, learn from the mistakes, but never take it personally!

    Please keep writing about mind set and market psychology – it’s the most important aspect of trading and getting good results, no doubt about it.

  • Gary Stone says:

    Comment received from Tamas via email and posted with his permission.

    “Hello Gary,

    2.5 years ago I have been at a trade show. I met a couple of very interesting people there, and 1 hotshot guy.

    After meeting we start to talk about trading. He explain to me, how he tripled his money in the last trading year.

    I ask him, how long he has been trading, how much risk he is taking on 1 position, etc….

    After couple of minutes, I told him he has had a good run, but I believe my friend, you are taking too big a risk, almost 5-7 times more than you really can afford in the long run.

    He explained to me that he had calculated his risk on his largest losing streak, which was 5 in the row.

    I told him, I have been trading for over 10 years up to that time, and I had had 18 losing trades in the row and I that am not worried about it that much, but tried to explain to him, after a losing run, that nobody guarantees that the next 10 or 100 trades are more profitable trades than the losing run before.

    He smiled and he told me that he’s not me, and he is never going to have 18 losing trades in the row.

    You know what’s interesting, he was right, actually he didn’t experience 18 losing trades in the row, just 12 and after a couple of winning positions another 8 and 5 losing trades in a row.

    He’s not trading any more 9 months after our first conversation. Trading is not for him anymore.

    One of my favourite phrases: “One thing to know the path and another to walk on it!”

    Have a great weekend!

    Tamas”

    Tamas, thank you for taking the time to provide this story.

    Regards
    Gary

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