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Favourites This is about ownership - or if you prefer self-identity of traders. Hopefully it will inspire you to realise your potential. Many traders have pet methods and pet markets and pet trading instruments and ... After a while, it is human nature to identify with what we do - I am a builder, an engineer, a trader... Some go as far as to identify themselves with particular aspects of their trading or service, using a specific trader related email name as the tradersCALM coaches initially do. When this becomes a problem is when instead of the trader owning the method, markets and instruments ... , these things begin, in a way, to own the trader. The authors experience is relevant here - as an Elliott waver, trading FTSE-100 futures. When the method gave an entry signal, when the FTSE market moved, I was enhanced when the futures made profits and diminished when they made losses. My opportunities were restricted by the Elliott signals and the single style of trend-following, by my focus on one market and my single instrument of choice. While so attached, I was limiting myself. At this point the self-identity is in some way attached to the method, the market, the instrument ... This shows up as touchiness when one correspondent dares to mention in passing or directly that there is another method, market, instrument ... that might be as good or better or easier or calls into question some belief ... Such personalisation of the impersonal is a sign of feeling attacked, of insecurity, and this is often associated with a feeling of ones self-identity being called into question. The trader is then owned, to some degree, by his trading and the reaction reinforces the ownership of the trader. Sad really, because it becomes difficult to change, develop, grow other than by digging a deeper hole. The classic for traders is spending a large proportion of the trading time watering one part of the trading hole - or what is sometimes negatively termed curve-fitting - and by so doing carefully avoiding watering the trader himself. Another classic is spending an inordinate amount of time or investing a high value in a trading journal. A 'traders log' as the name suggests is owned by the trader, often a 'trading journal' is where the trader is owned by the journal. A traders log helps you get out of any hole, a trading journal can be used to dig the hole deeper, often using emotions. Still, there is always a chance to identify your identification with: • one trading method or style, • one market or class of markets, • one instrument type, • ... and to release yourself from such ownership. Some of the more successful tradersCALM clients trade multiple trading systems/trading styles on multiple markets using many different instruments ... Their identification is to change, ever improving their reward to risk ratios and learning. Lessons Learnt You can be more than your temporary self-identification if you can break free of your self-imposed chains. It is good to be free, if only to re-chain and re-free. It is even better to be free to grow without self-imposed constraints - comfort zones and artificial identification and attachments. Your identification can be to change, ever improving your reward to risk ratios and having a spirit of joyful learning. Your self-identity can be to continual remaking of your self-identity. Your self-identity can accept that change, like the markets, requires retracements, and taking a step back is part of taking two forward. So to inspire yourself, in part you need to free yourself of self-imposed identification - releasing attachments and getting past denial of change and petty taking of impersonal things personally. TradersCALM home page |