Mind Shift: A Different View of Trading Psychology

One take on trading psychology says that we should control our emotional experience so that we stick to our processes and our discipline.

Another take on trading psychology says that we should become better at listening to the feelings that represent intuition and gut feel for markets.

This recent article, however, suggests a different approach altogether:  we become able to see and trade markets better when we can make mind shifts that allow us to experience markets differently.

Like a car, we can make a mind shift by changing gears, allowing us to approach the world with more torque, greater intensity.

Also like a car, we can achieve a mind shift by changing lanes, opening a new path.

The key idea of the article is that what we see and what we can act upon is a function, not only of the information we process, but also the state we're in.  When we achieve a mind shift, we not only can process new information, but become better at processing old information in new ways.

In short, emotional and physical creativity are paths to achieving fresh, creative trading ideas.  This opens the door to entirely new techniques for self-mastery in trading.

We see markets better when we shift from passive information processing to active:  actually playing and experimenting with the information.

We see markets better when we shift from active processing to interactive processing:  encountering information from multiple perspectives.

We see markets better when we shift from interactive processing to multi-active processing; processing multiple perspectives through multiple modalities. 

If we always stayed in one lane, in one gear, we'd be quite inefficient in our travels.  Trading psychology should not be about dampening your feelings or enshrining them.  The mind that can shift is one more likely to effectively reach its destination.

Further Reading:  Becoming More Creative 

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